Thom Hartmann: Dog Whistle Politics Rip America Apart

[thomhartmann]

Corey Saylor, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) joins Thom Hartmann. What do you do if you're Mitt Romney and you can't attack President Obama over issues that acutally matter? You blow the dog-whistle of course! How much damage is the Republican love affair with dog-whistle politics doing to the American society? They can't just suck up to racists by throwing out the lie that black people are lazy - or suck up to religious bigots by saying that all Muslims are terrorists - or suck up to the paranoid homophobes by saying that gays are pedophiles. So instead they talk in code - the Republican dog whistle. Sure - saying that President Obama's policies are "foreign" might sound benign to the general electorate. But to a much smaller, targeted group of individuals - like the Tea Party, the far Right, and Fox so-called News viewers - basically the crazies who actually think the President was born in Kenya or who are uncomfortable with a black man in the White House - characterizing the President as "foreign" has a very clear meaning. It's the Republican dog whistle. And Mitt Romney isn't at all afraid to get in the mud with these whack-jobs and tell them what they want to hear - albeit in code - because the paranoid, the racists, and the bigots actually show up to vote

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