If she were one of the Seven Dwarfs, she'd be Dopey

You can always count on Sarah Palin to create a mountain out of a molehill, or to create a mountain where not even a molehill exists. This time, the target of her dumbness is White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. It seems that Emanuel, at a policy session a few months back on the health-care issue, used the term "f-ing retarded" to describe liberal activists who were thinking about running ads against some Democratic lawmakers. Well, old "death panel" Palin has gotten wind of this, and she's calling on President Obama to fire Emanuel because of his use of profanity and what she calls his "slur on all God's children with cognitive and developmental disabilities.” Emanuel has never denied the oft-told tales about his regular use of cuss words. But to suggest that he's taking a shot at handicapped people is just absurd. Webster defines retarded as "slow or limited in intellectual or emotional development or academic progress." That certainly does not apply only to people who are handicapped. It could well be applied to some of our politicians, of all parties and persuasions. It also might very well be applied to Palin, who required nearly a half-dozen colleges to obtain a single bachelor's degree. And anyone who saw her interview with Katie Couric can speak to Palin's intellectual shortcomings. This tempest in a teapot brings to mind a controversy about a decade ago, when an aide to then-Washington, D.C., Mayor Anthony Williams quit his post because of the furor over his use of the word "niggardly." A black co-worker apparently took that to be a racial slur when, in fact, the word means "miserly." It has no racial connotation whatsoever. Maybe people who don't know the meaning of words, or that words can have more than one acceptable meaning, should just keep their mouths shut. And if any of you want to take me to task for writing about Palin again, I'll offer a deal. If Palin agrees to stop doing and saying stupid things, and of going out of her way to draw attention to herself, I'll quit blogging about her. In other words, I'll be blogging about Palin for a long time.

Open mouth, insert foot

It's only Tuesday, but at the risk of being proven wrong, I'm going to go ahead and anoint South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer as jackass of the week. During a recent speech at a town hall meeting in rural South Carolina – where his message was no doubt warmly received – Bauer related a story allegedly told to him by his grandmother when he was but a small boy. Grandma, said Bauer, told him to stop feeding stray animals. "You know why?" asked Bauer. "Because they breed. You’re facilitating the problem if you give an animal or a human ample food supply." I don't think it's going too far out on a limb to interpret Bauer's remarks as meaning that he believes we should cut off the food supply to poor people before they have a chance to reproduce. Bauer later explained that he was trying to explain that government social programs have bred a "culture of dependency." Why he didn't just say that, instead of suggesting that hordes of lazy, worthless poor people are suckling at the public teat and then producing more and more poor people who will take those good Republican tax dollars, is beyond me. Maybe he's just an idiot. It doesn't take a whole lot of reading between the lines to hear Bauer telling a no-doubt heavily white audience that the black people are bleeding them dry. Even if Bauer is not a dope, he certainly comes off as someone who doesn't give a damn about the less fortunate in his state, which has one of the highest unemployment rates in the entire country. But, of course, Bauer, who is seeking the Republican nomination for governor, is more interested in attracting the votes of the rich and, let's go ahead and say it, rednecks who don't like black people, than he is in courting the downtrodden. Poor folks aren't his "base." But it might be interesting to see how many of South Carolina's large number of right-wing evangelical voters stand behind Bauer if there are more stories cropping up about his personal life. Prominent gay activists have outed the anti-gay-rights Bauer as being, himself, gay. For the record, Bauer is a 40-year-old bachelor who was once a varsity cheerleader at the University of South Carolina. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Oh, come on

Let me preface this by saying that I think Harry Reid is a dim-bulb political hack and a sad excuse for a leader of anything, let alone the U.S. Senate. But Republican calls for him to step down over remarks he made about the 2008 presidential race and the election of Barack Obama are just plain stupid. For those who didn't hear the story in recent days, there's a new book out called "Game Change" in which Reid is quoted as saying that Obama benefited by being light-skinned and having "no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one." Based on the trumped-up outrage of Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Senate GOP Whip Jon Kyl, you would have thought that Reid had said Obama should be picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta. Oh, wait, that was Trent Lott, the former senator to whom those Republicans are trying to compare Reid. I kid you not. Steele, who is an early betting favorite to win the "Political D-bag of the Year" award for 2010, said Reid should resign his leadership position, and he tried to link Reid's comments to those of Lott, who quit his Senate leadership post in 2002 after suggesting that the United States would have been a better place if blacks were still separate and unequal. Any rational, intelligent person can see that there's no comparison between what Reid and Lott said, but rational, intelligent people aren't the folks whom Steele, Cornyn and Kyl are pandering to. Fact is, Reid was talking about the reality of Obama's appeal to voters, particularly white voters, and while Reid has apologized for his wording, his comments are essentially true. When 25 percent of Democratic primary voters in West Virginia in 2008 said their decision was at least somewhat motivated by race, it's pretty easy to see that a candidate like Barack Obama would do better with some voters than a guy who looks and talks like Sonny Liston. And while it might not be politically correct to say so, there is a "black dialect" in our country. It's a pattern of speech that most of us hear every day if we watch television, and traces of it are detectable even among highly trained speakers such as TV newscasters. It's really no big deal. As a nation that includes people of many different cultural backgrounds, we shouldn't expect each and every person to sound like Rex Harrison in "My Fair Lady." Lott's remarks eight years ago were decidedly different. The senator, now a lobbyist, said at a birthday party for Sen. Strom Thurmond, who was once one of America's leading racists, that his home state of Mississippi was proud that it had supported Thurmond's bid for the presidency in 1948. Added Lott, "And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over these years, either." Nice. As for Reid, black leaders far and wide are rallying behind him, so this issue really is a tempest in a teapot. The Republicans should just move on.

Racism is alive and well

So much for that "City of Brotherly Love" thing. According to an AP story, a day camp director says her kids were tossed out of a private swim club recently in suburban Philadelphia after members allegedly questioned what black children were doing in the pool. Creative Steps day camp had paid fees to swim at the pool, but camp director Alethea Wright says three of her kids told her they heard members of The Valley Club ask what blacks were doing there. Several days later, Wright says the camp’s swimming fees were refunded, without explanation. The president of the club, John Duesler, told a Philly television station that several club members had lodged complaints because the black children "fundamentally changed the atmosphere" at the pool. He said the complaints didn't involve race. Noooooooo. Of course not. The members were probably concerned that the black kids would create safety hazards by getting fried chicken grease all over the diving board and spitting watermelon seeds everywhere. What's next at The Valley Club? Night swimming, softly lit by burning crosses?