Just as I was blogging about hate [this is government jargon] speech having the ability to become inflammatory and harmful (something some libertarians don’t seem able to understand), along comes a GOP operative to provide the requisite moronic example – he compared a gorilla to Michelle Obama.

Frankly, this isn’t only bigotry, it’s an example of such oral incontinence the man shouldn’t be let outside without Pampers around his mouth.

Animal imagery is an important clue to racist tendencies in a speech. Calling someone a “bitch” is fairly generic, but thinking up specific animal comparisons that have clearly racist histories to them is inflammatory and offensive. How do people not get that?

And by the way, why do these terms always seem to come out of people who don’t particularly look like the flower of the human species themselves?

I feel personally offended by this.  Not having Scandinavian features and a bustless, hipless physique doesn’t make you ugly. That’s cultural conditioning.  You don’t have to subscribe to the Michelle-is-Jackie-we’re-all-back-in-Camelot-whoopdeedoo being peddled, but what is this ugly reference?

And then I noticed in the blogosphere recently a few references to Jewish people that also use animal imagery – parasites, vipers.

With women, it”s bitch, dog, and body parts – but that’s almost standard.

We don’t want to recognize the faces of other people. Reducing them to bodies, body parts, animals, animality…is a way of  doing that.

Very troubling.

Words are powerful. We can’t use freedom in essentially cowardly and self-destructive ways without causing a reaction. People remember attacks like this for a very long time. They don’t forget them. I recall reacting to some of the language about Jerry Falwell at his death. I loathed many of Falwell’s Christian Zionist positions. But the language used about him was so venomous and degrading, I felt the critics lost their own self-respect and dignity when they wallowed in it. [The piece is “God’s Son, Falwell’s Mother and the Rest of Us ‘Ho’s”- at Dissident Voice, 2006].

And then people ask what a middle-class, privileged black women has to be angry about…  How about – not being able to escape this sort of thing even when your husband is in the White House?

Criticize the Obamas as savagely as you want for their policies. Leave their children, their bodies, their private lives alone. Same with the Palins.