IT'S BACK. America's favorite misdirection game, "Racist/Not-a-racist."
We've all played it. This is the one in which some public figure gets hauled before the people's court after making an arguably racist remark.
We line up along our separate sides of the racial divide to decide whether the defendant is a racist or if there is some more benign explanation for his offensive remark. Maybe he's ignorant of the racist overtones in his remark or perhaps the poor schlub is just stupid.
The results of this referendum are as predictable as sunrise. Defenders of the great man and his ilk rush to his defense. Those who have a history of being singed by similar remarks call for his pelt.
Deal me out!
I learned long ago that this parlor game always works to the benefit of the offender.
The inevitable result of this futile exercise - indeed its unstated purpose - is to distract our attention from the offense as we litigate this emotional side issue.
In the docket this week are Colorado Republican Rep. Doug Lamborn and repeat offender Pat Buchanan.
Lamborn's racially tinged reference to President Obama as a "tar baby" is a classic example of the strategically veiled reference. Lamborn now says he meant to say only that getting involved with the president would connect him to what, he claims, are Obama's failed economic policies.
Offering a candid view of the GOP election strategy, he says the president and not the GOP's tea-party wing will take the blame for a debt-reduction bill that nobody likes.
"They will hold the president responsible," Lamborn says. "I don't want to be associated with him. It's like touching a tar baby."
His initial response to the very predictable blowback was the age-old nonapology: If anyone is offended, I'm sorry. He followed this with a more sincere-sounding written apology to the president in which he regretted not using the term "quagmire."
If he had used the term tar baby as a reference to presidential policies, he may have been able to sell quagmire as a synonym for tar baby. In fact, that is one of the meanings of the term.
But what he said was "I don't want to be associated with HIM. It's like touching a tar baby." That's an obvious personal reference not, as he wants us to believe, an allusion to Obama's policies.
So, is it racist or just stupid?
