By Emily Theroux

“Romney isn’t using birthers and bigotry against Obama. It just looks that way,” wrote Will Saletan of Slate in “Pin the Tale on the Honky,” his send-up of the Mittstorm-of-the-Week: the deplorable birther “joke” that Willard told last Friday during a Michigan campaign stop.

“No one has ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised,”  Mitt snarked, just before Twitter went wild with writers furiously typing “#futureMittjokes.”

RNC propagandist-in-chief Reince Priebus has the unenviable job of following in Mitt’s footsteps to scrape up whatever fresh heap of elephant dung the candidate deposits on the campaign trail each time he rolls out a new crock of “strategery.”

“Have we really gotten to the point where we can’t have any levity at all in politics?” Reince wheedled, in defense of the indefensible, on CNN’s State of the Union.

His shaky premise didn’t hold up to minimal scrutiny. Mitt’s descent into the cesspool of birtherism was a calculated effort to turn the page on Todd Akin’s “legitimate rape” imbroglio before it engulfed the GOP ticket. How better to put out a conflagration about women’s reproductive rights than to change the subject to race, the third rail of American politics?

Asked by Candy Crowley during the same program whether he thought Romney’s birther comment was “code” for “appealing to the white vote,” Democratic Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland replied, “Look at the number of Republicans that have signed bills that make it harder to vote. When you have a party that … makes totally false ads up saying the president is trying to undo welfare reform, I think you’re going to see a lot of … coded messages from the Romney-Ryan campaign that it (are) not in keeping with an America that is … becoming more diverse.”

Priebus tried again the next day on Morning Joe to shrug off Romney’s deliberate dog whistle to white Obama haters — targeted by an opportunistic pol who’s stooped to humoring bigots in order to reach a new strategic goal. In order to win in November, Romney must now capture at least 61 percent of the white vote — a figure that will not only be extremely difficult to attain, but which will only snag Mitt “a slim national majority” if Obama isn’t able to improve on his 80 percent share of the 2008 minority vote.

‘Tweety’ eats Reince’s Wheaties (on somebody else’s show)
When one of Joe Scarborough’s panel members, Chris “Tweety” Matthews, artlessly chomped Reince’s Wheaties over Romney’s shameless racial pander (camouflaged though it was as a lighthearted comedic “Mitt Moment”), nobody there was laughing. Joe, Mika, Tom Brokaw, and the gang were clearly anxious as hell over how Tweety’s outburst might look to viewers and critics. They kept trying to “shush” the garrulous Hardball host or, failing that, to succeed at talking louder than his rant.

Funny that the crowd in Michigan last Friday didn’t laugh, either, as Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC pointed out. “They cheered,” he observed, as if Mitt had made an important policy pronouncement. They applauded the new knowledge that Romney was willing to go there, to be on record as not merely the Republican who was running for president but the white man who was running to win back the White House for white voters.

Priebus muttered, “Garbage,” under his breath at the end of the cable segment — to which Matthews countered, “It’s your garbage.” A headline for the right-wing site Townhall.com’s story about the on-air tiff, however, read, “Chris Matthews Loses It, Calls Reince Priebus Garbage.” Neither combatant had characterized the other person as “garbage,” but only what he had said.

You can bet that the headline will go viral in the Nutbag-o-sphere, especially since blogger Katie Pavlich’s “story” consists of one paragraph referring indignantly to what she believed to be unwarranted criticism of “Mitt Romney’s joke about a birth certificate.”

How low will Mitt go to attain his 61 percent goal?
Unfortunately, Mitt will find no easy path to cobbling together a national majority, after burning almost every bridge once open to him among black, Latino, and women voters. That, of course, all went up in smoke when he talked trash to the NAACP, excoriated the DREAM Act, and paid lip service to everything from passing a “fetal personhood” bill to shutting down Planned Parenthood. Now, Mitt needs to woo and win three out of every five white voters, and he’s not polling anywhere near as well as Obama does (at nearly 60 percent) among the very “college-educated plus” white women who feel the most threatened by the Republican “war on women.”

What Romney needs, therefore, is the stereotypical Republican: the white, older, working-class male seething with racial resentment, whom Mitt believes he can rely on to vote against his own economic interests rather than reelect the hated “Obummer” —

• despite the Romney/Ryan plan to raise his taxes so they can even further reduce the taxes of people so rich and greedy, they’ll croak before they’ve even touched their principal, even as he dies a virtual pauper;
• despite their plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system that will start out costing him $6,300 more a year for health care than he pays now, and escalate in each successive year he’s still alive;
• despite  their plan to turn Medicaid into a block-grant program , so that when his wife needs nursing home care and he can’t afford long-term care insurance, he has no way to pay for it.

Everybody knows that the “MittWit” has become so desperate to break away from President Obama in the polls that the only pathway to the presidency he can envision is appealing to the “basest, racist” instincts of the lowest common denominator. White male voters may not be wild about Mitt Romney, but they hate Barack Obama so much more than they love anything — even America — that they’re willing to vote for literally anybody else.

Hordes of  ‘zombie voters’ prepare to descend on polls
If the simple fact that Mitt Romney’s face is as white as a KKK bedsheet doesn’t win over his target voters, he can always fall back on the kooky pop psychology of the Great Voter Fraud Hoax of 2012. This theory is held by purveyors of the myth that hordes of unregistered impostors are prepared to show up at polling places and “impersonate” registered voters if Americans fail to take drastic measures to stop them. These imaginary “vote-scammers” — sketchily described as urban blacks signed up fraudulently during voter-registration drives conducted by federally funded agencies, or “illegal aliens” who purloin dead people’s Social Security numbers — are so widely feared by the far right because they “tend to vote for Democrats.”

The infamous ACORN case, which led to 22 convictions in seven states after temporary workers registered ineligible or fictitious voters, involved cases of registration fraud, not impersonation fraud. “Mickey Mouse has been registered hundreds of times but Mickey has never turned up on Election Day to vote,” said Richard Hasen, a professor of political science and election law expert.

Yet Republican alarmists insist that, as GOP presidential candidate John McCain said during a 2008 debate, fraudulent registrations collected by ACORN were “one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”  (The Congressional Research Service “found no instances” of anyone who was “allegedly registered to vote improperly “by ACORN actually “attempting to vote at the polls.”

Even though voters are less likely to be victimized by “voter fraud” than they are to report sighting a UFO, the GOP embarked in 2011 on a nationwide effort to “shut down” this virtually nonexistent phenomenon. (News21, a national investigative reporting project, revealed earlier this month that only 10 instances of voter-impersonation fraud have occurred nationwide since 2000 — a period when 146 million people were registered to vote. The infinitesimal amount of in-person voter fraud that actually occurred equaled one out of about every 15 million prospective voters.)

Nevertheless, 34 states since 2011 have proposed or passed laws requiring that voters show state-approved photo ID cards at the polls. In other states, early voting days and extended voting hours have been curtailed — including Ohio, where Republican Secretary of State John Husted attempted to prohibit early voting in Democratic-majority counties while encouraging it in Republican-majority counties. Progressive pundits soon shamed him into abandoning his shamelessly partisan plan. In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott even tried to purge “non-residents” from the state’s voter rolls, until an analysis of a submitted list of 2,700 names revealed that 87 percent of the people on the list were minorities.

If Republicans can’t persuade more angry white men to turn out for their lackluster candidate, the Mittster still has one more ace up his sleeve. Anticipating a dearth of minority and female voters, Republicans recruited what they claim will be one million “True the Vote” poll-watchers. Should any straggling minority Dems make it through the gauntlet of GOP speed bumps and onto the threshold of the voting booth, this volunteer goon squad has promised to kick in, kick butt, and even Romney’s troubling odds.

GOP Convention attendee gets ugly with CNN employee
Just as the 2012 Republican National Convention’s roster of evening speeches was getting under way, former MSNBC anchor David Shuster tweeted: “GOP attendee ejected for throwing nuts at African-American CNN camerawoman + saying ‘This is how we feed animals.’ ”

Needless to say, this atrocious racial slur is not terribly surprising, given the venue, the occasion, and the decidedly “hostile environment” in which this professional journalist was required to work. It is, however, horrifying, degrading, and barbarous. This person must have felt emboldened by some sort of group camouflage to publicly target another human being that way, surrounded by people he imagined would harbor as much racial animus as he did.*

At least they looked as if they did. Out of 4,411 GOP delegates and alternates attending the 2012 convention, only 46 of them (a paltry 2 percent) are black, according to two Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters who collaborated on a story about the party’s struggle with diversity. By contrast, they noted, African-Americans comprise 26 percent of the 4,000-plus delegates slated to attend the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

I don’t care how many Nikki Haleys, Ted Cruzes, Artur Davises, and Mia Loves the GOP hustles onto that convention stage for the sake of appearances. All I could see on my TV screen was a vast, monolithic ocean of white privilege, flecked with clusters of jingoistic balloons.

* Update, 8-30-12: Yesterday, the racist peanut assault incident at the GOP convention was clarified by numerous new press accounts. Two “older than middle-aged white men” rather than one, of just the sort I described above,  collaborated on tormenting the CNN camerawoman. A number of pundits criticized CNN for apparently “hushing up” the incident because the channel has recently embarked on a campaign to appear the least biased of the three major cable news networks.

Just before the two white goons pelted Patricia Carroll with peanuts and called her a zoo animal, a Puerto Rican delegate included in the convention’s program, as part of the party’s effort to put on a false show of  “highlighting diversity,” was shouted down by the crowd, with chants of “USA! USA! USA!”, after beginning her remarks in Spanish.

By Emily Theroux

It’s been a wild fortnight, as the Brits would say, in America’s homegrown “killing fields.”

Two shooting rampages have bookended the nightmarishly brief span of a mere two weeks, leaving the national psyche reeling from a surfeit of firearms carnage. On Sunday morning, the cable news channels were firmly focused on Mitt Romney’s propaganda prizefight with former boxer Harry Reid over whether the GOP candidate had paid any taxes during the past decade.

Meanwhile, at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, a neo-Nazi white supremacist named Wade Michael Page allegedly opened fire on a dozen worshipers, killing half of them before being shot in the stomach by police and “finishing himself off” with a self-inflicted shot to the head. Amardeep Kaleka, the son of the temple’s slain leader, Satwant Singh Kaleka, 65, later said Page appeared to be deliberately picking off male members of the congregation who wore their uncut hair wrapped in turbans, in accordance with Sikh religious practice.

The mainstream press sat up that afternoon and took notice, however briefly — which, with the exception of CNN, appeared to be just long enough to ascertain whether any white people had been killed in Wisconsin. Here’s how I imagine the chit-chat in the afternoon news meetings went down: “Sikhs, you say? A 500-year-old monotheistic religion with 30 million members worldwide, approximately 500,000 of whom live in the U.S., according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, those strange lefties who keep track of racist hate groups. It says right here: ‘Sikhs are not Muslims.’ Bet Wade Michael Page thought they were. So what are we looking at? Brown-skinned ‘other’ victims; tattooed skinhead member of the white-supremacist Hammerskins; disgraced ex-soldier; punk-rock musician “hate band” member; and drunken loser of a shooter who is already ‘history’ himself. Well, we all know what happened there. No pretty young white girls killed or kidnapped. Nothing to see here. Bummer — toss it to the bloggers!”

Riddhi Shah, who practices a related Indian religion known as Jainism, wrote an opinion piece in The Huffington Post asking why the American media appeared to care less about this attack than the one that had stunned the nation two weeks earlier in Colorado. The Week, a roundup of online news and opinion, offered four possible reasons:

1. Sikhs are being treated as second-class victims.
2. The relative randomness of the Aurora shooting is scarier.
3. The Oak Creek shooting wasn’t as dramatic.
4. It’s just media fatigue.

My vote, I’m afraid, remains largely with Numero Uno — not because the mainstream media are racist, but because I truly believe they peg their coverage primarily to readership and ratings. Round-the-clock coverage had already been designated to the Olympics; did TV viewers really want gymnastics superseded by wall-to-wall cable broadcasting devoted to members of an obscure religion that most Americans — including, very likely, their killer — confused with Muslims?

Unlike the cases of Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, and even Major Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Sikh temple shooting by Wade Michael Page is reportedly being investigated by the FBI as a domestic terror incident. (Fox News, by the way, wasn’t at all pleased that the Hassan shooting case was classified as a “work-related” incident — and they’re not too keen on the shooting of non-white Sikhs warranting the domestic terror designation they expected for Hassan. The difference is that, while Page may have actually committed a hate crime targeting members of a specific ethnic and religious group, Hassan shot  co-workers of no particular race, creed, or nationality.)

Jared Lee Loughner sorry he ‘failed’ to kill Gabby Giffords

Two days after the Sikh temple tragedy, Arizona mass murderer Loughner — who killed six people and seriously wounded then-Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords — resurfaced to plead guilty to his crime.

During the tense weeks after Loughner’s arrest, pols and pundits alike buzzed with speculation about whether the shooting rampage had a political motive. The gunman appeared to have targeted a Democratic congresswoman who had barely won reelection in 2010 in a blazing red state. At issue was the fact that 2008 GOP veep candidate Sarah Palin had included Giffords among 20 “vulnerable” Democrats whose districts Palin believed had a good chance of falling to their Tea Party opponents. Palin’s infamous “Don’t Retreat; Reload!” map featured what resembled a gun sight hovering over each “targeted” district.

As it turned out, however, Jared Lee Loughner was a schizophrenic who was probably too preoccupied with listening to the cacophony of incoherent voices inside his head to have been paying much attention to the rantings of wingnut radio haters.

All Loughner had to reveal this week was how sorry he was that he had “failed,” as he had in most of his past endeavors, in his mission of killing Gabby Giffords. (Loughner also admitted that he likes the menial jobs he is assigned in prison, because even he can succeed at them.)

Gov. Rick Scott vows to defend Florida’s  ‘Docs vs. Glocks’ law

Somewhere along the short and winding road from Aurora, Colorado, to Oak Creek, Wisconsin, Florida’s trigger-happy governor, “Sheriff Rick” Scott, stepped out into the public square, six-shooters blazing, for yet another “Second Amendment remedies” showdown: a solemn oath to appeal Florida’s controversial “Docs vs. Glocks” law, which makes it a crime for doctors to ask patients if they own guns.

“The NRA’s gun for hire” (as Adam Weinstein, Mother Jones’ national security reporter, tagged him), Florida firearms lobbyist Marion Hammer told The Tampa Tribune, “Patients don’t like being interrogated about whether or not they own guns when they take their child with a sore throat to a pediatrician, nor do they like being interrogated in an emergency room when their Little Leaguer broke his leg sliding into first base.”

“First, do no harm” is rapidly being replaced by “Shoot first; ask (no) questions later” in the clinic and urgent-care waiting rooms of America. While you’re filling out the standard physicians’ questionnaire about past illnesses and unhealthy habits (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and fast food dripping in trans-fats and high-fructose corn syrup), doesn’t it stand to reason that your doctor might also want to know about “risk factors” unrelated to stuff you consume — such as whether you sleep with a loaded 9mm handgun under your pillow? Or how about locking up that unsecured Uzi before it occurs to your 5-year-old to play “show and tell” with his little neighborhood friends?

Until a federal judge tossed the 2011 Firearm Owners’ Privacy Act out of court on the grounds that it violated doctors’ First Amendment rights, this bogus bill was capable of costing inquisitive physicians their medical licenses and a $10,000 fine, according to Weinstein. Since the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act in June, NRA supporters now fear that the feds could “coerce the names and habits of gun owners out of doctors’ medical records,” as one Florida gun-rights advocate told a local newspaper.

Dr. Bernd Wollschlaeger of North Miami Beach, one of a group of physicians who successfully sued the state over the law, considers the governor’s quest dangerously quixotic.  Scott has already spent more than $880,000 in taxpayer funds, fighting largely unsuccessful court battles over conservative causes, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. “My fear is the state will appeal and keeping wasting money to fight windmills,” Wollschlaeger told a McClatchy Newspapers reporter last month. “This is an ideologically driven, politically motivated vendetta by the NRA that has to stop.”

Motormouth Mitt confuses ‘Sikh’ with ‘sheik’ at Iowa fund-fest

It couldn’t have been more ludicrous if Mitt Romney had attempted the tried-and-true tongue-twister “the sixth sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” at his recent Iowa fundraiser. Mitt made more moolah than any candidate’s ever pulled in at a single cash-bash in Iowa history — almost $2 million. (Looks like he’ll just have to undergo a news cycle’s worth of media humiliation to get his karma out of hock.)

Philip Rucker of The Washington Post took up the challenge of Mitt mockery, writing that, after getting the tricky articulation right Tuesday morning, Mitt muffed his lines at the Iowa fundraiser, where “he instead talked about the ‘sheik temple’ and the ‘sheik people’. Sheik is an Arabic honorific, whereas Sikh is a religion with roots in South Asia.”

Without a videotape, Mitt could just as easily have been talking about the  “chic people” — just doing a little bit of “framing” for his well-heeled audience. The outcome of this increasingly surreal election, after all, depends on how Mitt “sheiks” the dice.