Will Someone Please Give Michael Steele A Balsamic Shoe Shine With My Compliments

Because I'm busy right now, and miles away.

Pity the poor Black Republican, who must customize their standard-issue Conservative Reality Distortion Shield with all kinds of dodgy, aftermarket parts to generate a protective delusion 10,000 atwaters beyond the design tolerances just to keep themselves convinced that the Party of Loonies and Bigots loves and respects them.

Also insulating their minds with layer upon layer of protective cash helps enormously, which brings us to the case of former RNC chair Micheal Steele, a reliably pliant, glib, utterly shame-proof front-man for the Party of Lunatics and Bigots for most of his professional career.

You could whiplash yourself into the ICU trying to follow his rapid-fire changes of direction on the subject of race. Depending on the prevailing wind, you are just as likely to find Mr. Steele chastising "the Left and Democrats in this country" for blaming their problems on race --

"In fact, you know, I'm kind of sick and tired of the left and Democrats in this country when they get into trouble and don't get their way and their backs are up against the wall on legislation or whatever it is they're trying to do, they go to that card, they play that race card, that slavery card, that civil rights card."

-- as you are to find him peevishly blaming criticism of his own, incompetent and publicly embarrassing performance as RNC Chair on race: --

-- and then back again, admitting publicly what everyone outside of the GOP already understands as a settled matter of American history:

Frankly, nothing you or I will ever say is going to stop people Mr. Steele from being invited onto our teevees over and over again, and there is no point in pretending otherwise.  Instead, for the benefit of future historians, I wanted to focus this one little piece of self-serving resume revisionism from Mr. Steele (via The Daily Beast), if only because one of the principals involved in no longer around to defend himself:

According to former Republican National Committee Chair Michael Steele, who is African-American, the media do not seem particularly interested in covering perceived racial slights when the victim is a black conservative.

“In my race for the U.S. Senate, I was painted in blackface with big red lips and called an Uncle Tom,” Steele told the Beast. “I had Oreo cookies thrown at me during the Lieutenant Governor debate in 2002.” 

“And there seems to be this attitude they can get away with it and in a large number of ways they do. Because the press does not go after such attitudes the way they would if, for example, a conservative were seen holding a poster of Barack Obama in a disparaging caricature."

Yes, Mr. Steele was painted in this way.

By one, lone blogger, named Steve Gilliard.

Who was also African America, and did so to make his contempt for how Mr. Steele had made a career of selling out African Americans crystal clear, and express his delight that Mr. Steele was, at the time, in process of being abandoned by the side of the road by the GOP money guys.

And yeah, Steve went too far, as a lot of us have gone too far from time to time: 2005 were Wild West days of blogging, back when Liberals like Steve were inventing the medium and making do with any fireworks-generating tools we could lay our hands to force the Mainstream Media to notice that the Conservatives they were busy fawning over were proving to be horribly, bloodily wrong about everything, and the Liberals they has exiled from the national discourse were, in fact, being proved right again and again and again.

(Thanks goodness that's all changed, and Digby now has her own column in the New York Times while traffic on David Brooks' MySpace page has been dropping exponentially since 2006.)

But it's the second part of Steele's mythology -- that the press somehow did not go after Gilly for this graphic because, y'know, Librul Media Conspiracy -- which is truly hilarious.  I guess Mr. Steele somehow forgot how The Washington Post dropped  a house on Steve's head.  Democrats disowned him.  The Maryland Democratic Party officially disowned him. Virginia'a then gubernatorial candidate, Timothy Kaine, yanked his ad from Steve's site.

I guess Mr. Steele forgets the mileage his campaign got out of using this one graphic from one blogger to attack the entire Democratic Party:

"The Democratic Party has finally reached a new low with the worst kind of racist gutter politics, and it's the kind of racism that people in Maryland reject, regardless of their political party."

And of the tens of thousands of words of passion and wisdom and genius he shared with his loyal and diverse readers over the years, this was the one fucking post Matt Bai chose to include in Steve's official New York Times obituary:

In the incident that brought him the most infamy, Gilliard acidly attacked Michael Steele, the black Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Maryland in 2006, as a traitor to his race. Black conservatives like Steele infuriated Gilliard, who couldn’t understand how any African-American could support a party that exploited racial prejudice. “I’s Simple Sambo and I’s Running for the Big House,” read Gilliard’s caption, below a doctored photo of Steele as a minstrel.

Of course the quickest way to avoid being tagged as someone who rents himself out as a racial figleaf to the Party of Loonies and Bigots is to stop renting yourself out as a racial figleaf to the Party of Loonies and Bigots, but then Mr. Steele would have to get a real job, about which Mr. Steele has a long record of not knowing a damn thing.

Finally, about those swarms of Oreo's which were thick, I tell's ya!, thick "in the air like locusts", turns out, not so much.

But when has that ever mattered?