While discussing Rush Limbaugh's defense of the NASCAR crowd that booed First Lady Michele Obama and the Vice President Joe Biden's wife Jill and Rush Limbaugh's subsequent defense of those fans and calling FLOTUS Michele Obama “uppity”, which host Chris Matthews rightfully called not “just a dog whistle, but a bugle call”, Matthews asked whether President Obama is going to have a hard time garnering the white vote this election as he did during his first campaign for president.
Andrew Sullivan, for all of his faults and with being in the same class as the David Brooks and Tom Friedman's of the world out there and with being wrong in his support of the Republican Party for years and making excuses for their policies, even though they obviously had utter and complete disdain for gay men such as himself, gets this one right.
As Sullivan rightfully asked here, just how many more minority groups does the GOP have to alienate and piss off before they have a real problem where they cannot just be the party of white angry men any more.
SULLIVAN: But I think it's a huge problem for the Republicans too.
MATTHEWS: How so?
SULLIVAN: Look, you've been watching these debates. Everybody, a lot more have been watching them. If you're a Latino, if you're black, if you're a woman and watched the way they sort of coo-cooed sexual harassment allegations. If you're gay and they booed a gay soldier. I mean how many minorities are they going to tell not to vote Republican until they realize this is going to be a problem for them?
And the more the Limbaugh brand adheres to the Republican Party, the more doomed they are.
As all of them noted, Romney has moved so far to the right on immigration, he's going to have to eventually move on that, but we're not likely to see him flip-flop again until the general election. How much longer the Republicans can continue to follow the Limbaugh model and use racial divisions to win elections successfully remains a question we haven't answered yet, but I sincerely hope those divisions continue to go by the wayside as Rush Limbaugh and Fox's audiences continue to age.
It's long past time that it's not socially acceptable for some racist like Limbaugh to be openly calling the First Lady "uppity" and all I can say is I have to wonder how someone like Limbaugh can continue to look himself in the mirror and spout hatred such as he did here, but I guess those millions he's got coming in somehow make that reflection of such ugliness a whole lot easier to ignore.
I hope Sullivan is right that there's finally a backlash against such hatred and ugliness and that those who are engaging in actual class warfare are punished at the ballot box.
