I know we posted the Dr. Laura Schlessinger story on C&L a few days ago, but I wanted to make another significant point, if I may. In our book, 'Over The Cliff," we talk about how the Southern Strategy was used by the Republican party and how it evolved from outright racism to using code words to get the same points across. Chapter Six:

In 1981, political scientist Alexander P. Larris sat down for an interview with an anonymous Reagan strategist who outlined for him how the strategy worked:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting
taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that.

But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

It later emerged that the strategist was a young South Carolinian and Strom Thurmond protégé named Lee Atwater, a former chief executive of the College Republicans who had worked on the Reagan campaign under political director Ed Rollins.

What we have happening now is that the extreme right wingers like Dr. Laura and Breitbart are actually throwing their dog whistles in the garbage because they figure that if they yell "nigger " enough times out loud to the world and hold their breaths then that vile word will no longer hold the same despicable meaning that symbolized Jim Crow in American history to the media and their acolytes. Cheap Labor Conservatives do hate to be called racists and they have been trying to shed their racist past, but now with the economy down, conservative propagandists are reverting to a pre-1954 mindset on racism. It's sad and sickening, but it's happening. I actually never thought that in less than two years, the right wing noise machine would be as emboldened as they are now over race. Limbaugh's openly racist rants began as soon as President Obama took office and then FOX News immediately jumped on the bandwagon to promote every phony New Black Panther type smear they could find. All Cheap Labor Conservatives better start loading up their Ipods with the top 100 songs of 1954. Can you name the number one song? It has something to do with the time of day.

And don't forget to buy our book.