Glenn addresses this point explicitly:

None of this is to suggest that there are no differences between the parties, etc. Plainly, there are, and -- as even Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich now seem to realize -- some of those differences are meaningful. Although one can only speculate, it seems highly unlikely, for instance, that a President Gore would have invaded Iraq or ushered in most of the repugnant abuses that have degraded every aspect of our country over the last 7 years. Even if those differences are piecemeal rather than fundamental, they still matter, and at times, they can matter a lot.

I really respect how well Glenn treads the line of coupling the sentiments "both parties have fundamental errors in thinking" with "but Republicans are an order of magnitude worse"

the assumption that anyone who capitalized the P in "the People" is a Marxist.

That was a major highlight.

But his last one there, a neo-con lecturing us on being a deluded minority that thinks they're in the majority was pretty special too. Yes, that Cheney/Wolfowitz world-view is really picking up steam now. Giuliani's fall to obscurity (he might lose to Ron Paul in NH) is a clear sign of neo-conservative ascendancy.

The bit about Bill O'Reilly was hilarious.

Proximity Warning's postings just show how effective the Republican fig-leaves are on racial matters. Decades of overt and subtle racism in policy and campaign tactics can be whisked away because of Powell and Rice. Cute. It doesn't convince any of us, but it's clearly enough for him and others like him to intellectually justify continuing to support the GOP.

That's all this stuff is meant to do. And if we point out that either Condi or Colin are just "tokens" to appease the whites that the GOP isn't racist, then we get mired in accusations of us being the racists for downplaying the achievements of these two well credentialed individuals as mere "uncle toms" or whatever.

It's a clever rhetorical trap. Just remember GOP black tokens aren't to get the black vote. If they do that, fine and dandy, the GOP has a long line of suckers voting against their own interests, and blacks are just as welcome as poor whites to join that line. But the real point is to keep the GOP voters from feeling like racists.

QUOTE

[Tom Blakely from Jamestown Associates] called me up and asked, "How do you guys find voice talent?"

"Well, I've got a whole catalog of different voices on CDs. I've got 'single Northeastern female,' I've got 'Southern belle' -- what are you looking for?"

"We're targeting Democrats of Eastern European descent using a surname select and geopolitical filter."

"Oh," I said, quickly doing the polarizing-voter math in my head. "How about 'angry black man'?"

"Yeah, that sounds good. What's his voice sound like?"

So I cued up one particular actor's CD on my computer and put the phone to the speaker. The track I played was one in which the actor was deliberately playing up a street gang character.

After listening for a few seconds, Blakely said, "That's the guy!"

So we had the actor record a spot over the telephone saying, "I'm calling as a Democrat, asking you to vote for the Democratic nominee. We need your vote for Holt."

I'm not saying that all Eastern European whites are racists, but, no matter where or when an election is held, there is a always a cultural divide that you can rely on. The message was "I'm ghetto black calling you, racist Ukrainian guy, and scaring the crap out of you because you probably think that if you don't vote for the Democrat I'm going to come to your house and take care of some business."

The calls were extremely highly targeted, household by household, no message ever left on an answering machine. We wanted the message heard only by people whose reaction would be "I'm not voting for Holt because he uses scary black men to call my house."

We made calls to Democratic union households supporting Zimmer, taped by actors putting on thick Spanish accents, figuring union workers were the voters who felt most threatened by immigration. The objective was to get them to throw up their hands and stay home on Election Day. We were just forcing those people to make a decision that was true to who they really were. If you want to question someone's character, look to the people who stayed home because of those calls.

Remember -- they were Democrats; they were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

Zimmer lost the election by 481 votes and the Green Party candidate picked up 2 percent in the polls.

ENDQUOTE

Note how this piece of shit puts the blame on the Democrats for being racist, rather than himself for blatantly exploiting nascent racism.