Brilliant, cutting satire or earnest policy suggestion?  The Philadelphia Inquirer runs Jonathan Valania’s column proposing a moratorium on Caucasian votes in Pennsylvania as a response to bald assertions of Keystone State racism from John Murtha and Ed Rendell.  Valania says whites in the hinterlands can’t be trusted with the franchise:

As a lifelong Caucasian, I am beginning to think the time has finally come to take the right to vote away from white people, at least until we come to our senses. Seriously, I just don’t think we can be trusted to exercise it responsibly anymore.

I give you Exhibit A: The last eight years.

In 2000, Bush-Cheney stole the election, got us attacked, and then got us into two no-exit wars. Four years later, white people reelected them. Is not the repetition of the same behavior over and over again with the expectation of a different outcome the very definition of insanity? (It is, I looked it up.)

Exhibit B is any given Sarah Palin rally.

Exhibit C would be Ed Rendell and John Murtha, who in separate moments of on-the-record candor they would come to regret, pointing out that there are plenty of people in Pennsylvania who just cannot bring themselves to pull the lever for a black man – no matter what they tell pollsters.

“Got us attacked” — you have to love the world-began-in-2001 mentality behind that statement.  Jonathan, we got attacked in 1993 (World Trade Center I), 1996 (Khobar Towers), 1998 (embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya) and 2000 (USS Cole).  The result of 9/11, which apparently Valania thinks we somehow provoked (by using the phrase “got us attacked”), was at least one war both presidential candidates have pledged to fight harder.  The other, Iraq, is about to wind down completely in victory, no thanks to Barack Obama, who demanded that we flee Iraq when the going got tough.

That’s why I tend to lean away from the “satire” explanation of the column, and lean more towards “earnest and mild hyperbole”.  Even if Valania isn’t serious about stripping white people of the franchise, which I’ll assume, it’s clear that he thinks the only reason left to oppose Barack Obama is racism.  Apparently the editors of the Inquirer also think the same thing, or at least that the allegation is credible enough to publish a column that suggests a color barrier to voting as a solution to it.  He picks up where Obama left off in describing his white neighbors as basically paranoid bigots who cling to guns and religion in fear of the Coming Black Menace.

In other words, Valania is nothing more than a liberal bigot who sees the entire world in terms of race.  According to this column, Obama’s positions on abortion, taxes, federal spending, national security, and diplomacy are so noncontroversial that the only reason to oppose them is the color of Obama’s skin.  That speaks to Valania’s narrow-mindedness, and that of the Inquirer, much more than it does the people of western Pennsylvania.