Hannity reaching, Rush blubbering, a party floundering.
As I watched the Charming Sean Hannity on the Fox News Network try to get Newt Gingrich to blast Obama's Egypt speech I was caught off guard as Gingrich sorta didn't have much to say about it. As hard as Hannity tried, Newt just could not be coaxed into an attack on the President. Hannity even set him up with the great one liner of implied significance calling Obama's speech "The worst day in the history of American foreign policy." It was surprising to see Newt's complacency considering his recent attack on Superior Court Justice Nominee Sotomayor. In his attack on Sotomayor he took a phrase she uttered during a speech at UC Berkeley several years ago, blew it out of proportion and made a terrible analogy.
"I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn't lived that life." - Sonia Sotomayor
Leave it to two of the biggest blowhard white men we know, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh, to come charging in on this. They have called her a racist using the classically dumb argument, "what if it was a white man who said that?"
Well, for one thing there white boys, you would also have to flip cultures around to reflect the 300 year start white men have had in running the country. You'd also have to add in a healthy dose of racial stonewalling. Once we have a fictional world in which Mexicans and Puerto Ricans run the United States and white men are the janitorial newcomers we can then fully use the metaphor offered by the old white men club. To further that example, let us see how Bush handled the Muslims: You are either with us or against us. That was pretty much the message. But today we see in Obama's speech, a non-white man, the eloquence of a man who has seen the world through the eyes of the un-wealthy, un-pampered, disenfranchised average man. He laid down the groundwork to have the entire civilized world turn its collective back on extremism, forcing the radicals of all religions to rethink their plans. A historic shift.
Men like Hannity and Limbaugh are emblematic of a Republican Party deep in the dark forest of irrelevance. Their TV shows are like circus freakshows, people tune in only to watch the rare and hideous conservative blowhard spew its filth. The more they rant, the more they appear ridiculous. Obama is on the right path, but all of this that he is being blamed for is simply the unwinding of a knot left by the Bush administration.
