Republicans and race

The case of the Jena 6 in Louisiana is putting a spotlight on Republicans and the issue of race. A roundup:

• No Way, Baby (digby at Campaign for America's Future)

• "Republicans don't talk to minority groups" (MissLaura at Daily Kos)
  
• The Ugly Side of the G.O.P. (Bob Herbert in the NYTimes)
  
• Making Carefully Nuanced Distinctions Regarding the Totally Unacceptable (The Phil Nugent Experience - a post from April but very relevant) [Note: Phil Nugent is not to be confused with raving wingnut moron Ted Nugent, who, like many Republicans his age, got out of serving in Vietnam]

When it was time for Reagan to move on into his twilight years, his vice-president, George Bush the Elder, overcame his essential emptiness and lack of any serious widespread support in part by means of a TV commercial that tied his opponent to a scary-looking black man. Of course, everyone understood that Bush had no racist impulses in him but had to do what he had to do to ensure the votes of Joe Caveman. [...]

On the other hand, during the same period as Bush's presidency, David Duke got himself elected to the Louisiana legislature and then set his sights on the governor's mansion, and this, everyone agreed, was a crisis. No one was more upset about it than Republicans like Bush, who feared that Duke might be taken as representative of a part of the Republican party and give it a bad name. Duke didn't stagger around calling people "niggers" and calling for a return to slavery. He talked about rising crime rates and too much money going to welfare families and a society gone to hell in a handbasket because of excess tolerance of the wrong sort and government sticking its nose in where it didn't belong and making things hard for Mister and Missus Lily-White. In other words, he talked like Ronald Reagan and like a hundred other Republicans who had learned to speak in code to white bigots who felt that some measure of their freedom had been curtailed because black kids could sit next to their kids on the bus. The problem was, Duke had been a self-proclaimed Nazi and Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. If Duke had appeared out of nowhere in 1989 with no paper trail and no photos of him wearing swastikas and prancing around his college campus toting a sign reading "GAS THE CHICAGO 7", there would have been no reason for the media or his fellow Republicans to object to the obvious racist strain in his positions and statements; it would have been as okay as it had been with Reagan and Bush, because it would have been "just politics." But Duke's past made it uncomfortably likely that he wasn't simply pandering to open-mouthed hillbilly bigots. Everyone agreed that he had no place in American politics, because he meant what he said.