Oh, how giddy Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen must have been when he came up with his mighty point about racist symbolism. How he must have wriggled his pudgy, semen-crusted fingers in glee above his keyboard as he prepared to type it, pausing to clap like a toddler that just sang his ABCs before rewarding himself with a pudding cup. He might have even been drooling at the thought of the thunder he was bringing to out-of-control liberal political correctness (or something) as he tap-tapped, "Did you know that this newspaper is named for a slaveholder? It’s right there on our masthead, the name of a man who for 56 years held other human beings in bondage on his Virginia plantation."
Imagine Thiessen, giggling, looking forward to wrapping this up so he could click back over to the strangle porn he had been jacking off to. He continued, describing the slave owner and concluding, "George Washington also emancipated his slaves in his will, won our independence and became the father of our country — but no matter. It is an outrage that this paper continues to bear the name of such a man. It is time to rename The Washington Post!" Yes, he must have thought, these sardonic exaggerations will make people crumble in their wake. Then he quickly pounded out the rest of it because that naked dude wasn't gonna come after asphyxiating on "pause."
In his latest "column" (if by "column," you mean, "stiff, overused wipe sock"), Thiessen is outraged, flabbergasted, even, at how the tight-assed left and race baiters are fucking up his nice Confederate flag symbols, especially when it comes to his favorite TV shows: "The TV Land network has pulled the plug on reruns of one of America’s most beloved shows, The Dukes of Hazzard, because the car in the show, the General Lee, bears a Confederate flag. There is nothing racist about The Dukes of Hazzard." Let's not even argue how "beloved" the show is (at worst, it's a nostalgia trip for idiots; at best, it's a piece of kitsch worthy of being laughed at). Let's instead focus on the quickest, easiest response: What's racist about The Dukes of Hazzard is the fucking Confederate flag painted on the goddamn car. Thiessen sees this as our "miasma of political correctness," this desire to rename things that were named after Confederate generals and to remove the flag from government flagpoles. It's a "historical purge," Stalinistic in its insidiousness. Of course, it's not the purgers who are doing the killing here.
He approves of the way the black people of Charleston reacted after the massacre at the Emanuel AME Church: "There were no race riots. The city didn’t burn. People came together — black and white — to mourn and heal together." Christ, Thiessen doesn't seem to get that there's a difference between crazy racist murderers and white cops who kill black people. Crazy racist murderers with a badge provoke a different kind of reaction.
But Thiessen can't see the forest for the stars and bars: "The recent criticism of the Confederate flag is really not about a flag — it is about the people of the South. It is driven by the notion that most Southerners are a bunch of racists who agree with the Charleston shooter’s murderous actions." No, that is simply not true. Southerners who defend the flag and Confederate honor are racists, yes, pretty much by definition, if you're not lying to yourself. But that's not the majority of Southerners. It's just loud assholes who everyone is sick of and finally wants them to shut the fuck up. They've had their say and most Americans, including those well-behaved black people in Charleston, want to get the racism out of their faces and away from their state government buildings. And today, those Southerners voted to take down the racist fucking flag in South Carolina.
To return to Thiessen's opening salvo, yeah, we gotta deal honestly with Washington the slave owner. We should be taught that in history classes, the good with the bad of our Founders. A mature nation would be willing to grapple with its past and accept and learn from it, not just deny it because you get a simpleton's pleasure watching those Duke boys elude Boss Hogg for the umpteenth time.
