These are not very nice people

For anyone who thinks that the end of George Bush means an end to Republican smears and dirty tricks, or who believes the spin about him being a moderate, here's one of John McCain's 'jokes' from ten years ago which McCain told to Republican cronies. It's about Chelsea Clinton, and the punchline is, ta da, that Hilary Clinton is a lesbian and that's why her (18 year old) daughter is so ugly. Pretty classy, no?

And if you didn't realise, either, that Hilary Clinton is a fascist, then you need to read the best selling book called 'Liberal Fascism', or its hilarious accompanying blog.

But now it looks like Barack Obama will be the Democrat nominee instead of Clinton. So the Republicans are getting ready to fight a clean, high minded campaign based on the issues and their record in gov-, oh wait.

They started with the rumours about how Obama is a Muslim who was indoctrinated by radical Islamists in Indonesia. Then a bit of not very coded racism, like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly explaining that 'he wasn't going to join the Obama lynch mob'. The latest, though, takes the whole thing to an extraordinary new level. You can imagine the crazy right-wing thought processes - what's worse than being a black Muslim? Um, what if he was Jewish as well? Or, wait, what if he was a Communist? Or if he was linked to those blacks who steal our white women? Why hasn't the media reported on this? Of course, because of political correctness! Put it all together and you get...

"for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics...Political correctness was invented precisely to prevent the mainstream liberal media from persuing the questions which might arise about how Senator Obama's mother, from Kansas, came to marry an African graduate student. Love? Sure, why not? But what else was going on around them that made it feasible? Before readers level cheap accusations of racism — let's recall that the very question of interracial marriage only became a big issue later in the 1960s. The notion of a large group of mixed race Americans became an issue during and after the Vietnam War. Even the civil-rights movement kept this culturally explosive matter at arm's distance."

As one revolted reader put it:

"The truly beautiful thing about this is that it incoherently wavers between two poles of repulsive slander: is it Communist Negroes having sex with our white women? Or are Communist Jewesses subverting black Americans who, patriotic though modestly ill-treated, would have been able to resist had the party not offered them the tempting fruits of miscegenation?"