Today Mitt Romney said the following: “He doesn’t have a place in our party, he doesn’t have a place in polite company and certainly should not have a place in Congress”
But we need to be completely honest about what’s going on here, and the proof is in Romney’s own words and deeds.
Since Nixon and and through to today, the GOP has held white conservatives and evangelical Christians through the “southern strategy” best described by Lee Atwater in an interview this way: “Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.””
So long as Steve King, Pat Buchanan, Carlson, Coulter, Limbaugh and Trump keep using the “abstract” dog whistle language, then, to paraphrase Romney “there is a place for you in polite society and in the party.” Romney himself proves it by having supported Steve King for many years while King was using the prescribed more “abstract” terms for GOP racist policy.
So, really, the ONLY problem Romney or anyone else in the GOP have is that King has broken a GOP cardinal rule: speak and act with as much racism as is needed to stay in power, but don’t you dare do it in a way that our institutional racism is obvious. What, exactly, is Steve King’s unforgivable sin? Blowing the GOP’s cover. Making it harder for fine, upstanding people like Romney to say nearly half the population is “dependent, victims, entitled to have the other half provide them food and housing,” and then claim that they are not racist.
Steve King blew Romney’s and the GOP’s racist cover. And for that, he no longer has any place in the GOP.
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Patrick On Politics 