And since i’m a black comedy buff, I find this utterly hilarious.

Mr Moneybags has created a Frankenstein monster that is starting to turn on him, which is what the whole GOP establishment vs the “Republican base” conflict is really all about. The establishment has economic interests that conflict with those of the base, so in its search for allies, distractions had to be devised to obscure those conflicts or deflect them onto others.

This is nothing new, it started when the South went Republican back in the mid sixties, although its roots can be traced much further back, back to the adoption of the Democratic Party’s Civil Rights Plank in 1948. It was all about politically exploiting southern racism back then, but soon proved adaptable nationwide, to other issues, such as Vietnam, the Counterculture, Watergate, the Christian Fundamentalist anti-Renaissance, sex, in short, the whole culture wars constellation of red-meat push-button issues.

It is all convenient camouflage for the real interests of the establishment, the dismantling of unions, regulations, and taxes, and any social safety nets so that workers will be kept docile and desperately dependent on any low-paying job they can get.

Today it is fed by economic malaise brought about by fiscal mismanagement and political indifference to real needs and problems–from both parties. It used to be about working class middle-aged white guys afraid of blacks. Now its about working class middle-aged white guys afraid of losing their gasoline, their homes. their savings and their livlihoods. They blamed the Dems for one, now they’re blaming them for all the others.

But take it from me, its the same faces, the same slogans, the same psychology. This is what American politics has been all about for the last half-century. I have been watching it systematically unfold all my life.

My family were immigrants, and totally apolitical, but it gave us the outsider’s perspective and objectivity to see what was really happening; we remarked on the phenomenon all the time I was growing up in rural Florida, long before there was a name for it and pundits and sociologists started dissecting it.

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

-Kevin Phillips (1970)
Nixon Political Strategist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

Of course, in the official GOP histories, the ones they show to Joe the Plumber and Sam Sixpack, it was the Democrats who created the black voting bloc with welfare programs.

America is still paying a huge price for bringing in cheap labor to grow tobacco in Virginia.