I’m Not a Racist But….

Ty Cobb was a great baseball player but not a very nice person.  Actually, he wasn’t a very nice baseball player either, regularly trying to hurt the competition.  The thing about Cobb, though, is that he never pretended to care about other people.  Love him or hate him, you could never say that he was a hypocrite.  He did everything balls out and that included his racism.

That’s the difference between Cobb and two of the remaining candidates for the Republican presidential nomination.  When Cobb said something, he owned it. He was an awful person but he didn’t try to hide behind obfuscations and pseudo-intellectual drivel in an attempt to prove that he actually meant something else.

What is truly amazing is that  50 years after Cobb’s death, Rick Santorum can say he doesn’t want to  ”make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” and Newt Gingrich can regularly call Barack Obama “the food-stamp President.”  And then both men try to claim that they’re just trying to help black people.  I have a feeling that Newt’s phrase “I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable…” has a good chance of becoming the new “I’m not a racist but…”

The only thing black that Santorum and Gingrich should be talking about is the space inside their respective heads.  Come to think of it, there was an article written about that recently, too.  ”Abyssal yawns 10 times the size of our universe.”  Yep, that sounds about right.

-A