Ike, I think Long Island would make Nashville look like a latte sipp’n liberal bastion. Hell, I live in northern CA and our local paper had to wall off the comment sections due to all of the racist comments.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the black background on the comment box? That’s as racist as I get. Oh, that’s not true. I’ve got real long hair which I sport generally because it pisses people off and I’m not a real ‘people person’. That being said I get a lot of hard looks from black guys my age and older. This pisses me off because they weren’t what I had in mind to piss off. One of these days one of ‘em will send me over the edge and if they’re obviously ill or riding a walker or something like that I’m just gonna pop him in the jaw.

She should not have sent this from a work e-mail (I’m only assuming she did). But it would be conforming to the idea that racist jokes are only funny if you make them about your own race if I said that this woman couldn’t tell the joke, but my black democrat friend could.

If we’re going to criticize race-based jokes as applied to African-Americans, then whitey jokes and hispanic jokes (etc) should also be shamed on a public level. However, jokes between friends are just that: jokes.

As always, great post, Tommy.

Much love.

off topic, check out these famous friends.
http://shawnphillips.wordpress.com/famous-friends/

of course I’m a fan. With friends like that how could it be bad?

The left claims moral superiority on this issue, though they have their share of skeletons in the closet, and this kid of crap only strengthens that false perception.

I agree this is far more likely to stick to a GOP candidate, but it’s even stickier from a regional perspective.

More people are going to remember this as a “Tennessee” redneck thing, which is a shame. Things are not perfect here by any stretch, but this is not Bull Connor’s South anymore.

Too often, the rest of the country uses prejudicial imagery of the old South as a way to assuage guilt or even deny practices in their own backyards.

I had several discussions with Dr. Fred Shuttlesworth. I once asked him why he left Birmingham for Cincinnati in the early 1980s.

“They have bigger issues there,” he said.

As long as the Bensonhursts and Cincinnatis of the world continue to sneer at old Birmingham, we will never overcome this insidious closet racism that hides in every community. It’s an exercise in pointing the finger elsewhere, and avoiding painful self-examination.

(Have you signed the Birmingham Pledge? http://www.birminghampledge.org/ )