Jack & Jill Politics

Woo chile! It’s really thick out there in the Clintons’ old stomping ground of the AK. Some hillbillies best watch those mouths cuz oops! Your bigotry is showing. Please lord, let none of these ignorati be elected — to anything, let alone the Senate. Senate Guru has the 411:

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The pattern of bigoted comments by Arkansas Republicans running for Senate began in May with the Arkansas state Senate’s Republican leader, Kim Hendren, when he notoriously referred to U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer of New York as “that Jew.”  As inappropriate as the comment was, Hendren’s explanation was even more jaw-dropping:

“I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on ‘The Andy Griffith Show,'” Hendren said.

I must have missed the episode of The Andy Griffith Show where Andy taught Opie the “traditional value” of anti-Semitism.

That was May.  Then June rolled around and Republican businessman Curis Coleman, while campaigning for Senate, decided to open his mouth:

“You go from here to southeast Arkansas, and you might as well get a visa and shots because I’m telling you the world changes,” he said, talking about the differences across the state.

Southeast Arkansas contains a sizable African-American population; and, Curtis Coleman joked that people might need “a visa and shots” before visiting the region.  I suppose this is the Arkansas Republican version of racial sensitivity.  Like Hendren’s incident the previous month, Coleman’s explanation only compounded the idiocy:

Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Curtis Coleman said today his comment that traveling to Southeast Arkansas one “might as well get a visa and shot” was not meant to be derogatory, but rather as a metaphor for the diversity of Arkansas. …Coleman said he was trying to “accentuate or maybe even celebrate the enormous diversity we have in Arkansas.”

“I’ve done a lot of international traveling since the 70’s, and when going to a new and different land, you had to have a visa and shots. I only meant it to show the tremendous differences you see from one corner of the state to the other. I love Southeast Arkansas and meant it only as a metaphor,” he said.

“Maybe even” celebrating Arkansas’ diversity by suggesting that a heavily African-American region of the state is a “new and different land” requiring “a visa and shots.”  Way to keep digging your own political grave, Mr. Coleman.  (By the way, Mr. Coleman, the “digging your own political grave” line, that is a metaphor.)

[snip — head here for the rest of the excellent article]