By Mario Carter
Elm Columnist
Since Sept 15, the media has been talking about the surprise come-behind victory of Christine O’Donnell. The Tea Party endorsed candidate managed to defeat the nine-term establishment-backed Congressman Michael Castle for Delaware’s U.S. Senate Republican nomination.
Since then, we have heard a stream of comments from her, each one getting more ridiculous than the last. But the most famous one is said in an MTV documentary in which she claimed, “The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery,” and “You can’t masturbate without lust.”
Yes, these are extreme comments, but do they matter? Her detractors have been seizing these comments as if to say, “You see, she shouldn’t be a senator because she thinks you’re being naughty when you touch yourself.”
Are her beliefs on repressing human sexuality supposed to cause voters in Delaware to have second thoughts about supporting her?
While the talking heads have been discussing some of her sillier comments, the actions of a far more insidious Tea Party endorsed candidate have gone almost unnoticed by most of the national press.
Who is this dangerous person? That would be New York’s Republican nominee for Governor, Carl Paladino. He’s been caught embarrassingly forwarding a number of provocative emails. Some of the images have depicted acts of bestiality and while I believe those pictures are wholly sophomoric, they like O’Donnell’s masturbation comments are trivial.
What is not trivial, however, is Paladino’s history of out and out racism. This is someone who wrote a letter to the Buffalo Teachers Federation President, in which Paladino criticized him for his association with several black female school board members, whom he referred to as, “the parasitic Black Sisterhood.”
And, along with his highly immature bestiality images, he forwarded images of a group of black men running from a plane with a caption that read, “Run N###### Run and another one that showed the Obamas dressed as a Pimp and whore.
And what was his response when questioned about this after initially lying about having never seen them? “I apologize if I offended anybody.” Not “I’m truly sorry for forwarding these hideously racist emails and this has been the wakeup call that I needed to start making amends for my years of remorseless bigotry,” but a tepid “I’m sorry that you can’t handle my racism,” non-apology.
The selection of Paladino as New York’s Republican gubernatorial nominee is no greater proof of what the GOP is; a party that embraces people like Newt Gingrich who thinks that Barack Obama believes in “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” A party that ignores when two of their members in Congress respectively claim the Obamas act “uppity” and calls Barack Obama “boy” but could not hold back from viciously attacking the President when he correctly said that the Cambridge Police Department acted, “stupidly” when they arrested Professor Henry Louis Gates for no other reason than having an attitude that the arresting officer did not like. A party that tells us to ignore our lying eyes as we see throngs of Tea Party activists holding up racist signs, waving Confederate flags and reviving calls for white supremacy but dismisses it by presenting a few black faces in a sea of whites at their rallies. The Republican Party is getting closer and closer to mirroring the Dixiecrat Party of yesteryear.
But what happens when this is rightly pointed out? They have to start pulling out the repetitive talking points. “Republicans supported civil rights for Freedman and the Democrats were strongly opposed!” (I’m aware. But am I supposed to act like an imbecile and pretend that the two parties have not changed in philosophy since the 19th century?)
Or they’re reduced to namedropping, “What about Michael Steele and Clarence Thomas! (Neither they nor the majority of black Republicans have even a whit of credibility among African Americans.)
My favorite one is, “There was a higher percentage of Republicans that voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats.”
While this is technically a true statement, I would be remiss if I did not mention how dishonest it is? (They fail to mention that the majority of non-Southern Democrats actually voted for the bill, while the minority of Southern conservative Democrats strenuously fought its passage).
They also fail to mention that in the same year, the Civil Rights Act was passed, their party nominated one of the law’s most militant opponents, Sen. Barry Goldwater who only managed to win his native state of Arizona and five Southern states.
The Republican Party attacks, mocks, denigrates and votes against anything that could possibly help black America, but then publicly complain about their miniscule level of support among African Americans. If all the Republicans did was rail about the evils of masturbation, I’d be more than satisfied.