Extremely Lame

If you do a Google search on davis+tar+baby, you’ll find a bunch of blogs going absolutely crazy over something Representative Tom Davis said about the upcoming election in November and the issue of immigration. Here’s the quote that everyone’s just going crazy for.

“Remember,” Davis writes, “Hispanic voters are a swing group in this election and future elections. John McCain, being from a border state, may be out of sync with many Republicans but he has standing among Hispanics. Barrack Obama has not made the sale to Hispanic voters. Thus, this issue is a tar baby for anyone who touches it, with land mines everywhere.”

Apparently there are multiple stories regarding a doll made of tar used to ensnare a character from folklore. The earliest comes from the West African folk hero, the trickster Anansi, who got stuck with a tar baby whilst stealing food. The most well known one in the United States, however, is the Uncle Remus story of B’rer Rabbit and the tar baby. As a way to get back at B’rer Rabbit, B’rer Fox made a doll made our of tar and turpentine, put a straw hat on him, then put him in the middle of the road. Along comes B’rer Rabbit, who tries to strike up a conversation. When the tar baby continues to do nothing, B’rer Rabbit gets angry and punches it, getting his fist stuck. He continues to fight it and gets more and more stuck until he can’t move at all. At this point, B’rer Fox comes out and gloats about how he’s going to kill B’rer Rabbit. Eventually, B’rer Rabbit escapes by tricking B’rer Fox to throw him into a briar patch.

See, tar baby isn’t a racial slur. Second off, even if it were, which it’s not, he isn’t referring to Barack Obama as a tar baby. A tar baby is used to mean some sort of sticky situation where once you get involved in it, the more mired in it you become. So, Davis is saying that this election, immigration is an issue that is best avoided because there’s no good way out of it for anyone once it’s brought up. I’d say that’s a pretty accurate assessment considering how McCain was on the more lenient side of the immigration debate a couple years ago (as was George W. Bush, interestingly enough). The idea of having a fast track for immigrants to become citizens and opposition to a border fence along our southern border really irks some of our more xenophobic brethren on the right side of the aisle, so it could well be a big issue for McCain. Hell, it was only four months ago that you had people wailing and gnashing their teeth over John McCain’s apparent weak stance on border security.

This nonsense of getting offended over nothing has got to stop. Have we learned absolutely nothing from Obama’s speech on race? This is the exact kind of nonsense he’s arguing against, and here you have a lot of Obama supporters doing just that, accusing their detractors of being racist for the most idiotic of things. Bringing up another fable/folk tale, people who make such a big deal out of race are like the boy who cried wolf. Eventually, you’re going to piss people off to the point that they just aren’t going to listen to you anymore and will ignore genuine incidents of racism when they come up.