Former Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra from Michigan is running for Senate against current Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow. It's bad enough that his campaign thinks it's oh-so-clever to rename her "Debbie Spent-It-Now" (Get it? Ha-ha. You can do it, too. Like "Pete Porkstra." Now you can get big bucks as a political message consultant.)
But then he had to release an ad, run during last night's Super Bowl featuring a young Asian woman wearing a coolie hat and biking across a rice paddy in, presumably, China, stopping and telling us, in a voice filled with "Me so horny" resonances, "Thank you, Michigan Senator Debbie Spenditnow. Debbie spends so much American money. You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spenditnow." The kicker is that it ends with Hoekstra really saying, "I think this race is between Debbie Spenditnow and Pete Spenditnot," as if the voters of Michigan are goddamned first graders. And then Hoekstra (or "Spenditnot") says that he approves of the message.
Apparently, some people think this is racist. Hoekstra doesn't think so. He thinks it's just fine, as he told Fox "news" today: "There’s nothing in here that has a racial tint at all. But the bottom line is, when Debbie Stabenow and them can’t defend their record, what they’ll typically move to is they’ll move to the race card."
And that'd be valid, except that the ad couldn't be more racist if it had the woman shooting ping-pong balls out of her snatch while yelling, "Ching-chong-cheng." It couldn't be more racist if it featured a white actress with slanted eyes drawn on her face working at a laundry.
As if to underline just how horribly racist it is, Hoekstra has created a website that quotes the ad and uses a Chinese restaurant font to highlight the insidious yellow menace (and the Stabenow menace). They're inscrutable, you know.
Oh, and Hoekstra features it on the front of his own campaign website:
A Hoekstra spokesdouche said that the ad was meant to be "satirical" and show how "You have a Chinese girl speaking English - I want to hit on the education system, essentially. The fact that a Chinese girl is speaking English is a testament to how they can compete with us, when an American boy of the same age speaking Mandarin is absolutely insane, or unthinkable right now."
Yes, subtle suggestions like that really must be the point, not the thunderously dumb demonization of a huge voting bloc. Hoekstra, who wrote an editorial for Newsmax (motto: "All the non-news that's fit to shit out") titled, "Radical Muslims Murdering Christians," is noted for his sensitivity on these things.
