I don't care if Hillary Clinton is "really" a racist or not; this is just reprehensible

I don't believe for one minute that Hillary Clinton is herself racist, at least not any more than the average American.

On Tuesday, Marc Maron was back in fine form in the black hole that is Air Americas afternoon timeslot, taking the race bull by the horns and forcing us to look it right in the eye. He described the kind of casual racism many Americans have as not hate, or even prejudice, but nervousness. He challenged listeners, next time they lose something of value in the house, to see how long it takes them to envision a Black or Hispanic guy in a sweatsuit breaking into their homes before they find the item underneath the couch cushions. Of course this is why Maron belongs back on radio -- because he's able to strip aside all the niceties and the delicacy and get down to that mean, scared place in all of us and make us look at it. But the larger issue is the point he made -- that the "nervousness" which is part of the human condition when dealing with "otherness" is sitting right there on the racism spectrum. It might not be snuggling up cozily with wearing a white hood and burning crosses, but it's racism.

This week ModFab declared this one of the top 20 moments on Broadway right now. This is from London's West End, but whatever -- you don't get a better commentary on racism than this:

Apologists for Hillary Clinton are claiming she's not REALLY a racist to try to blunt the devastating impact of these words:

Obama's support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening.

And Clinton spokeswoman Lisa Caputo talked before Tuesday's primaries about "the white middle-class voter...and that's the people who are most impacted by the economy going into the recession":

Does anyone see a pattern here? Just as the states Clinton isn't winning don't REALLY count (unlike, say, West Virginia, which is mostly likely going to go for her and therefore is an Important State™) but states that held primaries in violation of rules TO WHICH SHE AGREED do count because they went for her, so the many voters -- black voters and young voters -- who have been added to the party's base because of Barack Obama's candidacy -- also don't count. Only white middle-class voters count.

Is this what the Democratic Party wants to be? The party of racial divisiveness, where black voters who have voted over 90% Democratic for decades can be thrown on the scrap heap to pander to low-information white voters who have voted against their own interests time after time after time and who are probably going to continue that pattern in November and pull the lever for McCain?

I don't know what the Clintons have on the superdelegates who are still wavering, though with the steamer trunks o'baggage the Clintons bring to the proceedings, it's hard to imagine they have anything worse on anyone else, but if in fact it's "fear of the Clintons" that's driving the reluctance of the superdelegates, then it's all the more reason to strip this duo of their role as party powerbrokers. If it's some other concern, such as of something coming out about Obama to damage him as the nominee, then why the hell don't they just sit down with him and ask?

The longer they remain silent, the more it looks like tacit approval of the kind of race-baiting we haven't seen directly from the mouth of a presidential candidate since George Wallace in 1968.