The Reconstruction Of The Fables, Now With Non-Union Labor!

DO read this piece on the end of the New Reconstruction from our blogging buddy Bill Hicks. For one thing, it makes a nice non-hallucinatory real world counterpoint to George Eff Will's latest pensée, "As GOP diversifies, South Carolina is rising."

No, really. He means it. GOP diversity. Because, you know, "Nikki" Haley and Tim Scott.

You toss in "Bobby" Jindal and the GOP is now 300% more diverse than the heady days of Senator Edward Brooke. Four-hundred if you count Michael Steele, which they don't. And it's 500% if you toss in John Boehner, which you might need to do since, as Will explains, Haley:

unlike [Jindal], does not look like someone from the subcontinent; her faintly olive complexion could be Mediterranean.

though I'm sure she's still a credit to her people, as well as Republican diversity recruiting. But how do we explain this remarkable groundswell of Republican Americans of Indian Though Variously Melaninated Descent? Will quotes Hoover Institute Fellow Tunku Varadarajan:

"Could it be that because Democrats put more of an emphasis on identity politics, an Indian American Democrat would have to contend with other ethnic constituencies that might think that it's 'their turn' first? And once you go down the 'identity' route, your success as a politician tends to rest more on the weight of numbers -- the size of your ethnic constituency, or your racial voting bloc -- than on the weight of your ideas."

Or--I'm just spitballin'--maybe more liberal Americans of the Subcontinental persuasion tend to resent having to change their birth names to something cuddly. (And, 'scuse me, guys. Fun's fun, and all that, but if the Republican party depends on Ideas not Numbers for its hold on the nation's power source, how is it still in existence?)

George Eff Will, mind you, is his party's leading intellectual and the inheritor of William Fuh Buckley's mantle, though we're not sure if that came with the hood still attached. It's enough, really, that he writes about the candidacies of an African-American religious wingnut and an olive-complected Kama Sutra enthusiast as though there were a tidal wave of GOP tolerance at the precise moment a few thousand of his retarded cousins do their whitest to co-opt the same Martin Luther King they reviled forty years ago (twenty, in Buckley's case). Leave us remember that it's going on ten years since the announcement of The Most Diverse Cabinet in United States History of Cabinets. Where're They Now?

Yeah, it's ludicrous, but how much more ludicrous is it that you get reduced to trying to make this argument in the first place? The Jab-it-in-your-Eye routine of "Liberals don't like Sarah Palin because she's a strong woman". The Great Black Teabagger Photo Scavenger Hunt. The History of the Civil Rights Movement, Rand Paul Remix. Th' fuck. How many seconds would a sane and conscious adult human entertain this sort of thing if it were, say, a pitch designed to sell him a piece of Florida property or the ingredients list of the soup du jour? Y'all chose a side fifty years ago, George, back when you were still in prep school. You were twenty-five years old when Barry Goldwater tossed the Coloreds out. You've lived with it since then, and without seeming to miss sleep, except maybe when it looked like it might cost you an election. You wanna renounce it now, then renounce it; you wanna deflect criticism you're gonna need a much bigger shield. Not to mention one that's less transparent.

And you wanna take an actual step or two, try giving Identity Politics back to the 1970s, and admit that White is still the most popular identity of the lot.