The GOP: ever notice how close Grand Old Party is to the term ”good ol’ boys,” especially when it comes to racism? Sure you have.
Well, in Illinois, Montgomery County Republican Party chair Jim Allen has outdone even their accustomed idiocy with his vicious, willfully ignorant character assassination of Erika Harold, who is challenging U.S. Rep. Rodney Davis for his congressional seat in 2014. Allen was pressured into resigning and gave a half-baked apology for the damage done by airing his moronic remarks disparaging Harold in terms it would never cross his mind to say were she a White woman. Indeed, had anyone said such cruelly demeaning things about his sister, or even a friend, he’d be ready to fight.
Jim Allen is a supporter of Rodney Davis. Fine. The ethical thing to do is go around convincing everyone who will listen that your boy is the best thing since sliced bread.
So, no one will ever accuse a politician of being overly ethical. And it’s a common practice — hell, it’s expected — to engage in petty mudslinging against the other side, making him or her out to be all kind of bad for the public good. But, what Allen did is a new depth in sinking low.
In an email dispatched to Doug Ibendahl, publisher of the Republican News Watch, Allen referred to Ericka Harold as a “love child of the DNC [Democratic National Committee].” That’s a pretty ugly way to say she’s too liberal to suit him but he was entirely out of line with this crack that the Democratic Party and RINO (Republicans in name only) Republicans are pimping Harold, using her ”like a street walker.”
Yes, he called Democrats and RINOs ”her pimps.” There are more than a few words he could’ve and should’ve used instead: stooge, pawn. Even a dime-store thesaurus gives other options to say someone is pulling the lady’s strings.
He had to choose something that unsavory, dragging the woman’s morality and sexual availability into it, conjuring up the stereotype of a Black hooker holding a corner in some red-light district. This in spiteful reference to her being Miss America 2003 (she resembles actor Devika Parikh) and advocating for abstinence during her time wearing the crown.
That’s right, he took a woman who acted as a young girls’ role model for moral behavior by talking about the strictest moral stand imaginable and compared her to a hooker because she is Black. Just what kind of an animal is this jackass?
Mind you, Harold was the exceptional beauty queen that actually proved the rule — and not just on the strength of her birthday suit. That particular pageant is well known for crowning one dumb-as-a-bag-of-rocks bimbo after another, who’d have had trouble pouring water out of a boot with directions stamped on the heel.
Allen was ravaging the reputation of a Harvard Law School graduate and practicing attorney. Of whom he said that after losing next year’s election to Rodney Davis, ”Little Queenie….” would return to “working for some law firm that needs to meet their quota for minority hires.”
That may be. If so, it says a great deal more about an America that, half a century after the historic Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, still cares more about quotas than it does about equality or Ericka Harold.
It is hard to call a social savage like Jim Allen actually civilized much beyond the assumption that he uses a knife and fork and doesn’t eat with his feet (frankly, I wouldn’t bet on it). It speaks volumes that Republicans ever let him in the door, much less had him as a chair.
I’ll give the Democrats this much: they have enough sense to keep such attitudes towards African American women well under wraps (smart move, unless they want to feel Michelle Obama’s foot in a southerly orifice). Them good ol’ boys running the Grand Old Party, well, they’ve got a mess on their hands, now.
Even though Allen has been muzzled and dispensed with. Nobody — i.e. voters — is going to forget how they let a ruthlessly unprincipled racist (not to mention sexist) loose on this member of their own party. They must be aware, if they’re reasonably cognizant (again, don’t place any bets) that he may have handed Ericka Harold Rodney Davis’ seat on a platter.
Dwight Hobbes welcomes reader responses to P.O. Box 50357, Mpls., 55403.
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