Digby had a couple of interesting posts up over the weekend about the ugly, racist reaction to Obama’s win. The first was a piece about a couple in Arkansas that owns a hotel and has run up the Confederate flag where they used to have the American flag to protest the election of a black President. Of course, they deny that their intentions are racist—-it’s not that he’s black, he’s a bunch of dog whistles and code words to indicate that he’s black. There’s a difference, you know. He’s infected with The Socialism, which they probably think manifests itself by darkening your pigmentation. (Why not? As Digby points out, these people don’t really grasp what “socialism” means in any realistic way. It’s a provocative word that means whatever the person spitting it out wants it to mean, making it a perfect code word for racist slurs that they can’t use in public anymore.) To prove this point, Digby reminds everyone that similar terms were used precisely as a polished racial slurs by none other than Jesse Helms when he was giving his reasons for opposing the MLK holiday.
Asked before television cameras to say whether he considered King a “Marxist-Leninist,” as he had suggested earlier on the Senate floor, Helms at first demurred, then said, “But the old saying—if it has webbed feet, if it has feathers and it quacks, it’s a you-know-what.” Asked again later if he considered King a Marxist, Helms said, “I don’t think there is any question about that.”