http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-1230edit2dec30,0,3342271.story
Poof goes the GOP
December 30, 2008Just how stupid are Republican Party leaders? We're about to find out.
Chip Saltsman, a candidate for chairman of the Republican National Committee, sent a compact disc to committee members over the holidays. It includes a tune titled "Barack the Magic Negro," which first aired on Rush Limbaugh's radio show in 2007.
The song is a parody of "Puff the Magic Dragon" by conservative satirist Paul Shanklin, who does it in an impersonation of Rev. Al Sharpton. A sampling of the lyrics: "Barack the Magic Negro lives in D.C. . . . he makes guilty whites feel good. They'll vote for him, and not for me, 'cause he's not from the hood."
Saltsman, a veteran political operative who managed Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign, told a Capitol Hill newspaper that the song is just a lighthearted parody, a little joke. RNC Chairman Mike Duncan said he was "appalled" by the song, but some of Saltsman's competitors for Duncan's job have defended it.
Republicans have been rejected by American voters in the last two national elections. They've lost the House, the Senate and the White House. They have just about given up on the African-American vote. More Hispanics turned away from them this year.
Yet some of the people who want to run the national Republican Party think that a song mocking the race of the next president is all good, clean fun.
There's going to be a little more interest now in who wins the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee. If it's Saltsman and company, the party is going to be in the wilderness for a long time.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
