Baseball Great Hank Aaron Flooded With Racist Hate Mail After Defending Obama

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55. I was exaggerating only slightly

The dear departed Bartcop's rule of mistakes was that if someone makes a "mistake" that puts more money in his pocket, he'll probably keep making that same mistake over and over. It was in the context of the mortgage crisis, because all of those banks had somehow coincidentally kept making the same mistakes that resulted in all kinds of commissions and bonuses. Logic dictates that at some point, they weren't really making mistakes writing all those bad mortgages because it was so lucrative.

By the same token (npi), Republicans keep coming up with new policies and programs that just happen to disproportionately affect black people negatively (tax cuts, voting restrictions, refusal to raise the minimum wage, etc.). Jonathan Chait’s fatuous column from last week excuses these political maneuverings because some white people are affected, too, so it’s wrong to call it racist.

EXCEPT that it’s pretty obvious from even a cursory analysis that the majority of the impact from these proposals is going to fall on black people, who vote about 10-1 in favor of Democrats. Chait and the Republicans are trying to peddle the line that it’s merely coincidental and nothing racist about it; it just so happens that Republican policies slam blacks time after time.

Which is flat nonsense. And while individual Republicans might be able to make a case that they are not racist, their party of registration clearly is. What are individual Republicans doing about that? Are they punishing their elected officials for advocating for racist policies? No? Then they’d better get used to being called racist, because their silence ensures a racist result, whether they like it or not.