THE BEST RACE-BAITING DEFENSE IS A GOOD RACE-BAITING OFFENSE

I don't mean to belabor this subject, but I want to address some things Brian Beutler of Salon says in this post about what he calls "the right's black crime obsession":

... it's intensified noticeably in the past year for at least two reasons. Conservatives, particularly white conservatives, feel a burning urgency to find a racial counterweight to the aftermath of Trayvon Martin's shooting (including President Obama's public comments about the incident), a logical response to the argument that things like background checks and an assault weapons ban are appropriate ways to reduce the likelihood of another Sandy Hook-style massacre, and anecdotal justifications for indiscriminate policing of dangerous neighborhoods.

I don't think the right has any interest in finding a counterweight to anger about the Trayvon Martin shooting verdict, or a counterweight to pro-gun control arguments -- at the federal level and in nearly every state, the right won the post-Newtown gun-control debate by brute force, and the right won the Zimmerman case in court. Stand Your Ground polls well, thanks to overwhelming white support. And the country is still split on whether gun laws should be stricter or not. The right doesn't seem to care about rebutting the left and center on these issues -- it's got the white base on its side, and that's all that matters.

"Anecdotal justifications for indiscriminate policing of dangerous neighborhoods"? There I think Beutler comes a lot closer to what the right really wants. Though I don't think it's about policy exactly, so much as it's about persuading the rubes that there's a Democratic/liberal conspiracy to unleash out-of-control negritude on poor, innocent whites. Harping on the real or alleged sins of blacks is about keeping whites loyal to the right and to the GOP, and keeping them worked up. It's always about that.

Beutler writes about the conservative obsession with comparing the Christopher Lane case to the Martin case, but I think he's misreading the right's mindset here, too:

... it turns out these stories aren't counter-parallel at all. And more to the point, the events don't even anecdotally augur for policies the right supports. The kids in Oklahoma weren't "standing their ground," and a "stand your ground" law wouldn't have saved Chris Lane. Neither would a stop-and-frisk regime -- the killers were trailing him in a car. By contrast, a "stand your ground" environment and a stop-and-frisk mentality were instrumental in Trayvon Martin's death. Take either away, and there's a good chance he'd be alive today.

Beutler is overlooking the fact that the angry right approves of the shooting of Trayvon Martin. The angry right doesn't wish Martin were alive today. We know angry right-wingers don't think it was an outrage, but they don't think it was a horrible misunderstanding that led to tragedy, either. They interpret everything piece of evidence about Martin in the worst possible light, to portray him as a thug-in-development. They absolutely believe he was on the verge of killing George Zimmerman before Zimmerman killed him.

The Jack Cashill article I cited in my last post describes Martin as barely distinguishable from Christopher Lane's killers -- the only difference between Martin and Lane murder suspect James Edwards is that Edwards "was on a slightly faster track than Martin." Cashill's evidence? The fact that, according to messages found on Martin's cellphone, he was interested in guns and mixed martial arts fighting. (You mean ... just like George Zimmerman?)

Few right-wingers will say it outright, but the angry-right-wing message on race seems to be that black people are incorrigible -- shiftless, dependent, and violence-prone. The exceptions to this are the ones who've gone Republican; the rest can't be salvaged. It's basically the angry right's message about Muslims. It's an ugly message, but if it rallies the troops, it's the message the right is going to go ith.