Yay, My Decoder Ring Arrived

posted at 3:04 pm on August 21, 2009 by Howard Portnoy
[ Obama ]   

Hey, everybody — great news! Eight weeks to the day after I sent in four boxtops from specially marked boxes of White Guilt-brand Cereal plus 50¢ to handle postage and shipping, my liberal decoder ring finally arrived. And it’s a beaut, as you can see for yourself!

Now when liberals call us conservatives racists for opposing the policies of Barack Obama, I’ll know exactly in what way we were insensitive. I’ll know because I will be able to decipher the secret code liberals use to segregate acceptable political dissent (i.e., the kind they used against George W. Bush) from the racially charged type being used nowadays to demean our black president.

Imagine, if I had had this snazzy and useful-as-heck ring back during the presidential campaign, I would have had an entirely different reaction when I read an op-ed by Lewis Diuguid of the Kansas City Star taking John McCain and Sarah Palin to task for calling Obama a socialist. At the time, I thought Diuguid’s claim that socialist is code for black was nothing more than the ravings of a psychotic who happened to write an op-ed column.

I could have read articles like this one at Politico explaining the notion of “dog-whistle politics” and realized that it was something other than gibberish. (I am assuming now that it is something other than gibberish, though I can’t be sure because my decoder ring doesn’t pick up dog-whistle frequencies.)

Think of it: When angry, concerned voters had the audacity to stage “tea parties” on April 15, I could have twisted the outer dial on my ring and, like political commentator Janeane Garofalo, immediately recognized that these fools were effectively calling the the president the N word. (Or maybe it was the T word: “Take that, you stupid Tetley.” Give me time: I’m still getting the hang of this thing.)

Luckily, when Jonah Goldberg (by a remarkable coincidence!) devoted a column today to the accusation by liberals that we conservatives are racists for disagreeing with Obama, I was a step ahead of him. And when he quoted Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell as telling NPR that “language of personal responsibility is often a code language,” I did a quick 90-degree twist and–voilá! Oh . . . wait. I got the word chitterlings, when in fact Harris-Lacewell said it was “code language used against poor and minority communities.”

I guess with time I’ll get the hang of decoding the secret language of liberals. Then again, maybe not.

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