Ronald Reagan owns Cliven Bundy: He’s born of GOP racial and anti-government hostility

[DonViejo]

It's no shock that conservative heroes always end up being racists. The Republican playbook made them that way

PAUL ROSENBERG

Surprise! Surprise! The latest conservative lumpen-hero of the moment, Cliven Bundy, turns out be incredibly—in fact, radioactively—racist. (Video here, in case you were abducted by space aliens on Wednesday, and have just now returned.) I say, ‘Surprise! Surprise!’ because, of course, it’s no surprise at all, as a New Republic piece by Brian Beutler puts it in its title, “By Sheer Coincidence, Conservative Martyrs Keep Turning Out to Be Huge Racists.”

But everything hinges on why, exactly, conservative martyr-heroes, keep turning out like that. Is it just a mistake you can blame on central casting? Nothing to do with the script! No sir! The script is golden! On “Andrea Mitchell Reports,” Chris Cillizza gave a perfect rendition of this neutral sort of journalistic take. “It’s in some way a function of our modern media world,” he said, “These people pop up out of nowhere all over the county,” and the poor hapless politicians fall for it, without doing proper research into them. Sort of like John McCain and Sarah Palin, I suppose you could say.

Or is the problem too persistent to explain away like that? Is there something actually wrong with the script? Something inherently inclined toward racism in complaints about oppressive big government on the one hand, and minority moochers on the other? It turns out there are multiple sorts of evidence that this is the case.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/04/25/ronald_reagan_owns_cliven_bundy_hes_born_of_gop_racial_and_anti_government_hostility/