Dear Leader Rush calls for segregated buses

By Michael J.W. Stickings

For Rush Limbaugh, it probably would be for the best if the whole civil rights movement had never happened, let alone been successful. Then America would still be able enjoy those halcyon days of segregation and lynching.

I kid you not.

As The Raw Story is reporting, Rush went on an especially noxious diatribe on Wednesday, blaming the school bus attack directly on Obama -- and on "Obama's America."

He even added this: "We need segregated buses."

Now, of course, what he means is that segregated buses are needed in Obama's America, not Bush's America, or Reagan's America, or whatever. It is his incredibly distorted view that the very election of Obama has turned America into a racial/racist bloodbath.

Apparently, it would seem, no one should talk about race at all. What's funny, though, is that Obama doesn't -- aside from that brilliant speech last year, he tends to be rather post-racial in his politics. So it's not at all clear to me how Obama has ushered in this new America, an America that requires segregation to keep white kids safe from black kids.

Oh... there is it, isn't it? What concerns Rush, and others like him, is that the attack was black-on-white. Surely he wouldn't have hyperventilated so much had the attack been white-on-black.

Indeed, what so clearly bothers conservatives like Rush is that a black man has been elected president. What he would prefer, I can only presume, is that blacks, and every other Other, should be kept down in their place... on a sugar plantation, for example.

The white-first universe that makes Rush feel so special, and that he so wanted to preserve, has been upended. And all he can do, now, is spew the same old racism, if not quite from the same position of privilege.

The world has changed, America has changed, for the better -- even if an isolated incident that, we now know, may not even have been racially motivated, enrages the right.

Obama is not the cause of change for the worse, he is proof of change for the better. And the last thing we need now is a return to the dark ages of segregation.