Who Gets The Blame For GOP's Cliven Bundy Racism Debacle?

That's easy -- Sean Hannity should get all the blame.

Why do I say this? Because Hannity embraced this Bundy character as basically the Second Coming of Christ -- albeit a deadbeat, extreme-right-wing, hate-filled Christ, but a Second Coming all the same. So if you are going to embrace a guy like this, the very first things you must do are (1) realize any guy who believes in the shit Bundy believes in is probably a racist, and (2) send someone over to his ranch to educate this guy on how Republicans should engage in racist talk. 

Fox News could have hired Newt Gringrich to go over there -- nobody does racial code-speak better than he does -- and basically tell Bundy, "Look, you should probably avoid speaking about race, but if you feel compelled to do so, you need to use the proper codewords." 

Like I said, Gingrich can do this stuff in his sleep and I am certain he could have given Bundy some good pointers.  Who can forget such Gingrich racists hits like "Obama follows a 'Kenyan, anti-colonial' worldview," or "Obama is the 'food stamp president'" or other GOP-approved dog-whistle phrases like "welfare queen," "shared Anglo-Saxon heritage,” "voter fraud," or "where's the birth certificate?"

But Hannity didn't do any of the necessary groundwork beforehand, and that allowed Bundy to say shit like this:

“I want to tell you one more thing I know about the Negro,” he said. Mr. Bundy recalled driving past a public-housing project in North Las Vegas, “and in front of that government house the door was usually open and the older people and the kids — and there is always at least a half a dozen people sitting on the porch — they didn’t have nothing to do. They didn’t have nothing for their kids to do. They didn’t have nothing for their young girls to do.

“And because they were basically on government subsidy, so now what do they do?” he asked. “They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”

That's not speaking in code -- that's called speaking your mind, and radical right wingers just cannot do that publicly, even in today's radicalized version of the Republican Party.  Rick Santorum found that out the hard way when he famously said,"I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money."

Anyway Hannity -- when you find some other asshole out there to be the new poster boy for the Republican/Fox agenda, do a little prep work first.  You'll be happy that you did.