When the hell is the MSM going to start calling Republicans on their blatantly racist rhetoric? It make me wonder if they just said what they're thinking, "nigger, nigger, nigger", if the MSM would even utter a timid peep about it. If anything, they'd probably just downplay it as not really racism.

That was still a pretty stupid, if innocent, analogy to make.

I don't think Roy is smart enough to slip that kind of innuendo into a speech.

President Carter didn't say "if you disagree with this president, it's somehow fundamentally racist in nature"

He said:

"When a radical fringe element of demonstrators and others begin to attack the president of the United States as an animal or as a reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or when they wave signs in the air that said we should have buried Obama with Kennedy, those kinds of things are beyond the bounds"

"I think people who are guilty of that kind of personal attack against Obama have been influenced to a major degree by a belief that he should not be president because he happens to be African American."

"It's a racist attitude, and my hope is and my expectation is that in the future both Democratic leaders and Republican leaders will take the initiative in condemning that kind of unprecedented attack on the president of the United States"

So, Rep. Roy Blunt is a goddamn liar.

Seriously. It is not very wise to use "monkey" in a parable against the 1st president that is bi-racial. Conservatives just never learn.

What are the odds that Blunt could have just randomly come up with this obscure little story featuring monkeys? Pretty goddamned low if you ask me. I mean this story is so obscure that I've never even heard it. But it's got monkeys! How many other, less obscure play-it-as-it-lays stories could Blunt have used to illustrate the same point? I don't know much about golf, other than it's got this gay little vocabulary all its own, but there's got to be dozens, right? But I bet none of them has monkeys!

... and we can give him a pass on it this time.

However, can we now safely dismiss all the Palinites who were screaming about Obama using the phrase "lipstick on a pig"?

and apropos to Blunt:

"Sometimes a banana is just a banana, Anna."

...please, of course he did it on purpose.

The GOP is playing the Southern Strategy race card one more time, hoping, hoping, hoping it'll work.

I hope it doesn't because if it doesn't, maybe the GOP will try something a little less repellent, and maybe our discourse will go up a notch or two. Unlikely, but worth hoping for.

I'm sure it was just satire. You know - like everyone said Rush Limbaugh is doing satire when he called for segregating buses. Except that is not how sature works but you know I'm sure it is purely innocent!

Freud would explain the Blunt excursion into old British golf and simian parables as follows:

You zee, Herr Blunt zuzpects dat he iss himzelf de Monkey in dat story - - vich casts verrry deep doubts upon hiss mental und pschological stability. It zeems dat since he acts like de monkey, dinks like de monkey und, vorse, he derefore DINKS dat he iss really a monkey.

UND VEE ALL AGREE vis dis analysis. Ya ?

And that being the case, why even run with it to try to impute racist connotations?

It' s arguably "racism concern trolling"- which does nothing to grapple with authentic concerns related to racism.

I need to note here that I'm not much of a Freudian either- precisely because in my observation, so many of Freud's self-confirmed "insights" have been picked up, vulgarly dumbed down, and pervasively insinuated into this society- to the point where someone can't bring up their own propensity for order and detail without referring to themselves as "anal"- which is actually sort of funny, but it's also sad. And no the least bit valid or edifying. A classic instance of a linkage of concepts that's been drawn far beyond even the original thought that prompted it, and asserted into the vernacular as the currency of popular speech and thought.

(note: considering my own state of chronic disorderliness, according to Freudian orthodoxy, I shouldn't even know that I have an asshole to shit with. If one explains the other, that would logiclly follow...not so, fortunately. As far as I'm concerned, orderliness is just discipline and entropy reversal; I wish I could do more of it. I'm always dismayed when I hear people explaining for the tendency, with a hint of apology in their tone.)

Similarly, consider"Freudian slips"- which do occur, but every spoonerism or typo isn't a betrayal of hidden motive; "compensation" and "sublimation", just-so stories that empower people to impute motives and judge people from outside about a seemingly endless list of human activities; and, of course, "the subconscious"- the notion that waking awareness is in actuality nothing more than a mask, a veneer run more or less robotically by deeper impulses.

Fundamentalist religion couldn't be more dogmatic.

Note that the Priest (the Therapist- or, for that matter, any outside observer conversant in Freudian concepts delivering the judgement) is always right; the subject of the judgement (or "the patient") is always wrong if they disagree; because if they protest, their resistance is simply more evidence of their denial of their problems.

After all, how is the subject in any position to have any awareness of their "subconscious", much less being able to govern it? Without the magnaminious judgements offered by the omniscient powers of the Priest, that is...

Psychoanalysis in the original Freudian therapy form is nearly extinct in clinical practice, of course. But the concepts behind it, vulgarized and simplified, live on, embedded as currency of the discourse of this society.

What the two practices of imputing Freud's sex&death motives to a panoply of human activities based on the merest and most tenuous linkage, and the obsession with combing over every utterance and symbol for possible racist content have in common, is how facile it is. It's so easy- certainly easier than either developing humility, wisdom, compassion, and a sense of tolerance for other people's foibles- or for doing the self-work required to be cross-culturally conversant, to "code-switch", the expansion of awareness that's so vital to doing things like getting along successfully in a multicultural and multiethnic society.