If anyone doubted that the Republican Party is racist, a “joke” perpetrated by a man who wants to be the party’s chairman should settle the issue. Tennessee Republican leader Chip Saltsman distributed a Christmas CD that included a parody on “Puff the Magic Dragon.” The title? “Barack the Magic Negro.” (Photo below shows Saltsman with Fox News host Mike Huckabee, who is backing him for party leader, pheasant hunting in Iowa.)

And if that wasn’t enough, the party’s official apology should end all debate. It was titled “An official apology to America’s negroes.” That was followed by another apology – for not capitalizing “Negroes.”

I haven’t seen or heard that word, with or without the capitalization, in years. The last time I recall hearing it was back in the Seventies, in a movie. As I recall, the female lead asked the male lead whether he was a Negro and the young man replied, “No, I’m a Capricorn.”

But I’m not surprised that the Republicans didn’t get the memo. This is the party that recently elected a 19 year-old white supremacist to a seat on its Palm Beach County Executive Committee. Huffington Post contributor Paul Jenkins sums up today’s Republican Party this way:

Like a restricted country club that would rather die than change, the Republican Party is marginalizing itself for the sake of the white men who run it. “Barack The Magic Negro” and Palm Beach aryanists are just the more bizarre manifestations of a party that has wallowed for so long in the privileges of its white male supremacy that it does not even realize that everyone has left the plantation, and they are not coming back.

Jenkins makes the point that:

(Republican) Congressional representation is nearly uniformly white, and overwhelmingly male. So much so, in fact, that there is not one single African-American GOP member of Congress (out of 219 or 220); nor, for that matter, are there any black GOP Governors (out of 22). There are just four Republican Latinos in Congress, all Florida Cuban-Americans; one of them, Senator Mel Martinez, has announced his retirement. He is the only non-white or Hispanic GOP Senator. 

The Republicans are not only anti-black. They’re equal-opportunity offenders. Saltsman’s Christmas CD (called “We Hate the USA”) includes such songs as “John Edwards’ Poverty Tour,” “Wright Place, Wrong Pastor,” “Love Client #9,” “Ivory and Ebony” and “The Star Spanglish Banner.” First played on Rush Limbaugh’s repulsive radio show, the ditties were composed by a so-called satirist named Paul Shanklin.

These guys are not only racist. As their pathetic parodies show, they’re not even clever.