So Gavin over at Sadly, No! did his two-minute Townhall shtick today, which is always a treat, except for the part where I occasionally get curious and actually go over to Townhall and then need to bleach my eyes. So, I followed a link over there to one of the columns and I see an ad that says more funnies click here featuring a Muslim in camo with a machine gun sporting an Obama pin. In case the ad changes, the permanent one is here; scroll down to the 2/14/2007 cartoon. Of all the comics they chose to feature as an ad for their "funnies," why this one? Why not this one about Fox in the chicken house? That one I can understand, I can see the Republican humor in it. There are others that, you know, I don't find funny because I think they're lame, but I see that they have a point (Hillary is a liar, global warming doesn't exist, whatever, not points I agree with, but points). But the point of the one they choose to feature as representative of the comics on their site is that the black guy with the funny name is dangerous, be afraid of him because he's a black guy, and he has a name like we've never heard round these parts. This is Amurkan at its absolute worst. I'm so disgusted I can't even be snarky about it. It's appalling that this kind of racist trash is not only published over there but held up as some kind of standard of humor. I know there's a group of really hateful people in the right, there's got to be for the Ann Coulters and the Bob Gorrells to have an audience. But dehumanizing the other is always immoral and always dangerous. And, I believe, unAmerican, because the American ideal is a land of opportunity where all people are free and equal and your talent is more important than your parentage.
I react to things like this by trying to have an antidote. When people get stressed, I get calm. And so I want to react to this dehumanizing with rehumanizing. So I feel compelled to exempt the bulk of normal conservatives/Republicans from this kind of crap. As I was traveling around the blogiverse after the Ann Coulter CPAC thing, I saw plenty of comments from conservative blog readers (and some bloggers) expressing their distaste for her words, and I appreciated that. The more polarized things get, the more I like to find points of common ground, because it's at those points that both sides can recognize the other side's humanity.
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