Racism isn't a real problem, but it makes a dandy tool for "fundamental transformation"

Daniel Greenfield at Sultan Knish does a great job of analyzing the layers of implication of Martin Bashir's infantile outburst the other night on MSNBC.  It was pretty vulgar, but I'm so inured to race-card antics, I nearly passed on blogging about it.  Then I saw this essay.

For one thing, he makes very clear just how Bashir deliberately mangled what the lat Lee Atwater had to say about race in politics:

As supporting evidence Bashir quoted the widely misrepresented Lee Atwater interview. In the interview, Atwater was saying that politics was becoming deracialized because even racist voters were backing non-racist agendas, even if for racist reasons, making racist politics abstract.

That quote has been endlessly misquoted to "prove" that when Republicans support lower taxes, it's really coded racism. Atwater clumsily said that racial politics were becoming abstract, and the left responded by racializing all politics, including the politics of the IRS.

Atwater was right that racism in politics has become abstract, but he was wrong in assuming that it was going anywhere. Real racism in politics is hard to find, but the political abstraction of racism is everywhere. Any attack on Obama is immediately racist, whether it's calling him a Socialist or demanding an investigation of IRS abuses, because Obama is, in Bashir's words, "the black man in the White House."

And he makes the important point that, for the Most Equal Comrade, race is merely a vehicle for good old  equal-opportunity hard-left fundamental transformation:

Race for Obama is abstract. His identity isn't racial, it's political. Race is only a tool for his politics, it doesn't define his politics. In this he is no different than the rest of the left for whom race, gender, class, profession and any other aspect of identity are tools to be used to promote the ideas and policies of the left, but can never be allowed to truly define those policies.

Obama represents the symbolic union of racial grievance and leftist politics; but there is no doubt which one of these is in the driver's seat. 

The left played the black community, bribed their leaders, tossed a few trinkets to the masses and then plundered their heritage and history. The economic potential of the black community was destroyed to leave them with few options but to serve as the cannon fodder of big government. Black history and politics have been so thoroughly hijacked that a media personality on the propaganda channel of big government can claim with a straight face that IRS is a racial slur.

The leviathan state becomes an untouchable golden calf.  Question it even gently and you're advocating ethnic cleansing.