Popular far-right demagogue Rush Limbaugh sees everything--EVERYTHING--in black and white, and I'm talking "race" here. A kid-fight can't take place on a schoolbus without the Rushbo seeing a racial angle in it. And you can't take presidential action on Haiti (if you happen to be a Black president, that is) without it being allegedly motivated by skin-colour.
To put it in this political barbarian's own terms, "They'll use this to burnish, shall we say, their credibility with the black community, both the light-skinned and dark-skinned black community in this country. It's made to order for him."
By "light-skinned," he presumably means "Halfrican-American."
Limbaugh, of course, has been racist to the core since his debut days in the early 1970s, when he told a Black caller to "Take that bone out of your nose and call me back." But the election of a Black president has sent his Oxycontin-and-Viagra-riddled body over the edge. As Think Progress documents, his Obama discourse is racialized to the hilt:
On his radio show in March, Limbaugh said Obama "has a chip on his shoulder, and his wife does too, and they are some angry people." Limbaugh has also chastised people for being afraid to "criticize the little black man-child", referred to Obama as "Barack the Magic Negro," complained that he “disowned his white half” and warned that Obama is of "Arab-African" descent. Nevertheless, Limbaugh says race is not an issue for him.
That's the wider context for his recent remarks about Obama's prompt and constructive reaction to the Haiti tragedy--as well as for his strong suggestion that charity for the Haitians be withheld. Why help out mud people? Not that he'd dare use a term like that publicly, of course--at least not yet.
If Limbaugh were just another tobacco-chewing bigot with a white hood twisting hemp in his hands in the back of a pick-up truck, he could be easily dismissed. But, as it happens, he has an army of literally millions of like-minded admirers who hang on his every word. They're making him fat and rich beyond the wildest imaginings of his distant predecessors in this game, Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith. And not all of his dittoheads, alas, live south of the border.
We know very well what might have been the response from these same knuckle-dragging yahoos had Obama flubbed the Haitian crisis as his predecessor did with the flooding of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But a Black president, in their sick and limited little minds, can, almost by definition, do no right.
Indeed, the lunatic Birther was quite open about his hope that the uppity Kenyan would fail. It is obviously galling him and his legions of yokels beyond endurance that Obama, for all his faults, is still standing. Indeed, the president is hanging in there, and at least from time to time rising to the occasion. So be prepared for ever more hysterical racist commentary from Limbaugh and his political co-religionists, and their Teabagger acolytes, as political discourse in the US continues to plumb new depths. And let's hope against hope that it can't happen here.