"Defund Obamacare" = "nigger, nigger"

The real story of the shutdown: 50 years of GOP race-baiting

A House minority from white districts want to destroy the first black president, and the GOP majority abets them

By Joan WalshWhen Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg studied the voters of Macomb County, a hotbed of so-called Reagan Democrats—the county gave two-thirds of its votes to John F. Kennedy in 1960, and the same proportion to Ronald Reagan in 1980—he found that they no longer saw Democrats as working-class champions. “Blacks constitute the explanation for their vulnerability and for almost everything that has gone wrong in their lives,” and they saw government “as a black domain where whites cannot expect reasonable treatment,” Greenberg wrote.

So for a lot of Democrat-turned-Republican voters, “government” was all about black people, Reagan knew. You didn’t have to be racist to thrill to Reagan’s declaration that “government is not the solution; government is the problem,” though it didn’t hurt. Republican strategist Lee Atwater explained exactly how it worked in a now-infamous 1981 interview that was secret for 30 years. Atwater explained how the GOP dialed down its racial rhetoric for fear of alienating white moderates who might buy the GOP’s anti-government crusade, but be uncomfortable with outright racism.

This is Atwater talking to an academic interviewer in 1981, Year One of the Reagan revolution:You start out in 1954 by saying, “N–ger, n–ger, n–ger.” By 1968 you can’t say “n–ger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites … “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “N–ger, n–ger.”And then you say “Defund Obamacare,” and everyone knows why.Walsh's response to the right-wing racists who don't like their racism made plain:

Angry right gets mad when you accuse it of race-baiting!

Comment:  I've said similar things many times, of course. The Republican Tea Party protests against Obama, Obamacare, welfare, immigration, gun control, gay marriage, etc., etc., are about maintaining white Christian control over the country. White Christians see their power slipping away as the country's demographics change, and they're trying to stop it.

Probably the best evidence that opposing Obamacare = racism is the Republicans' complete lack of concern about Romneycare, a similar program on the state level. Both programs have individual mandates, which are supposedly what will enslave us like Nazi Germany. If your concern is about government interference in the healthcare market, you must protest Romneycare or you're a hypocrite and a fraud.

For more on conservative racism, see Indians Are Inconvenient to Americans and Republicans Want Poor People to Die.