From The New York Times, 11/12/06:

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/opinion/12rich.html?pagewanted=print

2006: The Year of the 'Macaca'

By FRANK RICH

OF course, the "thumpin'" was all about Iraq.

But let us not forget Katrina.

It was the collision of the twin White House calamities in August 2005
that foretold the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush.

Back then, the full measure of the man finally snapped into focus for
most Americans, sending his poll numbers into the 30s for the first
time.

The country saw that the president who had spurned a grieving wartime
mother camping out in the sweltering heat of Crawford was the same guy
who had been unable to recognize the depth of the suffering in New
Orleans's fetid Superdome.

This brand of leadership was not the "compassionate conservatism" that
had been sold in all those photo ops with African-American
schoolchildren.

This was callous conservatism, if not just plain mean.

It's the kind of conservatism that remains silent when Rush Limbaugh
does a mocking impersonation of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's
symptoms to score partisan points.

It's the kind of conservatism that talks of humane immigration reform
but looks the other way when candidates demonize foreigners as
predatory animals.

It's the kind of conservatism that pays lip service to "tolerance"
but stalls for days before taking down a campaign ad caricaturing an
African-American candidate as a sexual magnet for white women.

This kind of politics is now officially out of fashion.

Harold Ford did lose his race in Tennessee, but by less than three
points in a region that has not sent a black man to the Senate since
Reconstruction.

Only 36 years old and hugely talented, he will rise again even as the
last vestiges of Jim Crow tactics continue to fade and Willie Horton
ads countenanced by a national political party join the Bush dynasty in
history's dustbin.

Elsewhere, the 2006 returns more often than not confirmed that
Americans, Republicans and Democrats alike, are far better people than
this cynical White House takes them for.

This election was not a rebuke merely of the reckless fiasco in Iraq
but also of the divisive ideology that had come to define the
Bush-Rove-DeLay era.

This was the year that Americans said a decisive no to the politics of
"macaca" just as firmly as they did to pre-emptive war and
Congressional corruption.

For all of Mr. Limbaugh's supposed clout, his nasty efforts did not
defeat the ballot measure supporting stem-cell research in his native
state, Missouri.

The measure squeaked through, helping the Democratic senatorial
candidate knock out the Republican incumbent.

(The other stem-cell advocates endorsed by Mr. Fox in campaign ads, in
Maryland and Wisconsin, also won.)

Arizona voters, despite their proximity to the Mexican border, defeated
two of the crudest immigrant-bashing demagogues running for Congress,
including one who ran an ad depicting immigrants menacing a JonBenet
Ramsey look-alike.

(Reasserting its Goldwater conservative roots, Arizona also appears to
be the first state to reject an amendment banning same-sex marriage.)

Nationwide, the Republican share of the Hispanic vote fell from 44
percent in 2004 to 29 percent this year.

Hispanics aren't buying Mr. Bush's broken-Spanish shtick anymore;

they saw that the president, despite his nuanced take on immigration,
never stood up forcefully to the nativists in his own camp when it
counted most, in an election year.

But for those who've been sickened by the Bush-Rove brand of
politics, surely the happiest result of 2006 was saved for last:

Jim Webb's ousting of Senator George Allen in Virginia.

It is all too fitting that this race would be the one that put the
Democrats over the top in the Senate.

Mr. Allen was the slickest form of Bush-Rove conservative, complete
with a strategist who'd helped orchestrate the Swift Boating of John
Kerry.

Mr. Allen was on a fast track to carry that banner into the White House
once Mr. Bush was gone.

His demise was so sudden and so unlikely that it seems like a fairy
tale come true.

As recently as April 2005, hard as it is to believe now, Mr. Allen was
chosen in a National Journal survey of Beltway insiders as the most
likely Republican presidential nominee in 2008.

Political pros saw him as a cross between Ronald Reagan and George W.
Bush whose "affable" conservatism and (contrived) good-old-boy persona
were catnip to voters.

His Senate campaign this year was a mere formality; he began with a
double-digit lead.

That all ended famously on Aug. 11, when Mr. Allen, appearing before a
crowd of white supporters in rural Virginia, insulted a 20-year-old
Webb campaign worker of Indian descent who was tracking him with a
video camera.

After belittling the dark-skinned man as "macaca, or whatever his name
is," Mr. Allen added, "Welcome to America and the real world of
Virginia."

The moment became a signature cultural event of the political year
because the Webb campaign posted the video clip on YouTube.com, the
wildly popular site that most politicians, to their peril, had not yet
heard about from their children.

Unlike unedited bloggorhea, which can take longer to slog through than
Old Media print, YouTube is all video snippets all the time;

the one-minute macaca clip spread through the national body politic
like a rabid virus.

Nonetheless it took more than a week for Mr. Allen to recognize the
magnitude of the problem and apologize to the object of his ridicule.

Then he compounded the damage by making a fool of himself on camera
once more, this time angrily denying what proved to be accurate
speculation that his mother was a closeted Jew.

It was a Mel Gibson meltdown that couldn't be blamed on the bottle.

Mr. Allen has a history of racial insensitivity.

He used to display a Confederate flag in his living room and, bizarrely
enough, a noose in his office for sentimental reasons that he could
never satisfactorily explain.

His defense in the macaca incident was that he had no idea that the
word, the term for a genus of monkey, had any racial connotation.

But even if he were telling the truth -- even if Mr. Allen were not a
racist -- his non-macaca words were just as damning.

"Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia" was unmistakably
meant to demean the young man as an unwashed immigrant, whatever his
race.

It was a typical example of the us-versus-them stridency that has
defined the truculent Bush-Rove fearmongering:

you're either with us or you're a traitor, possibly with the
terrorists.

As it happened, the "macaca" who provoked the senator's
self-destruction, S. R. Sidarth, was not an immigrant but the son of
immigrants.

He was born in Washington's Virginia suburbs to well-off parents (his
father is a mortgage broker) and is the high-achieving graduate of a
magnet high school, a tournament chess player, a former intern for Joe
Lieberman, a devoted member of his faith (Hindu) and, currently, a
senior at the University of Virginia.

He is even a football jock like Mr. Allen.

In other words, he is an exemplary young American who didn't need to
be "welcomed" to his native country by anyone.

The Sidarths are typical of the families who have abetted the rapid
growth of northern Virginia in recent years, much as immigrants have
always built and renewed our nation.

They, not Mr. Allen with his nostalgia for the Confederate "heritage,"
are America's future.

It is indeed just such northern Virginians who have been tinting the
once reliably red commonwealth purple.

Though the senator's behavior was toxic, the Bush-Rove establishment
rewarded it.

Its auxiliaries from talk radio, the blogosphere and the Wall Street
Journal opinion page echoed the Allen campaign's complaint that the
incident was inflated by the news media, especially The Washington
Post.

Once it became clear that Mr. Allen was in serious trouble,
conservative pundits mainly faulted him for running an "awful
campaign," not for being an awful person.

The macaca incident had resonance beyond Virginia not just because it
was a hit on YouTube.

It came to stand for 2006 as a whole because it was synergistic with a
national Republican campaign that made a fetish of warning that a
Congress run by Democrats would have committeechairmen who are black
(Charles Rangel) or gay (Barney Frank), and a middle-aged woman not in
the Stepford mold of Laura Bush as speaker.

In this context, Mr. Allen's defeat was poetic justice:

the perfect epitaph for an era in which Mr. Rove systematically
exploited the narrowest prejudices of the Republican base, pitting
Americans of differing identities in cockfights for power and profit,
all in the name of "faith."

Perhaps the most interesting finding in the exit polls Tuesday was that
the base did turn out for Mr. Rove:

white evangelicals voted in roughly the same numbers as in 2004, and 71
percent of them voted Republican, hardly a mass desertion from the 78
percent of last time.

But his party was routed anyway.

It was the end of the road for the boy genius and his can't-miss
strategy that Washington sycophants predicted could lead to a permanent
Republican majority.

What a week this was!

Here's to the voters of both parties who drove a stake into the heart
of our political darkness.

If you'll forgive me for paraphrasing George Allen:

Welcome back, everyone, to the world of real America.

______________________________________________________


Let's hope it stays that way for the foreseeable future.


Harry
(see all of Harry Hope's excellent posts as they break, put this link
in your browser, use it, this is a search on google groups, on the
author Harry Hope sorted by date... nothing fancy):
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=&start=0&scoring=d&enc_author=-nIhFBQAAACtBOUGAhN9cSve8yYdFJBuOPANdqfI6prRsqjc7uCt1A&


With history moving so fast these days you might also want to sort
Harry Hope's posts by "relevance" particulary if the lies and
misdirection that we are all being sujected to by the extensive Bush
Crime Family Propagand machine are confusing you. Using the "sort by
relevance" option has a way of letting you take in the big picture.
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=&start=0&enc_author=-nIhFBQAAACtBOUGAhN9cSve8yYdFJBuOPANdqfI6prRsqjc7uCt1A&