This is a repost from Too Sense. That blog is inactive, and password-locked, so I can't just throw up a link. It dates to the last days of the 2008 election (I stepped away from blogging right after the election). But I still feel that many of the issues discussed are relevant, hence this repost.

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I have a new acronym that I'd like to introduce to the world: WAWP...short for Whinin' Ass White People (or person, depending on context). It specifically refers to those white people who claim to be victimized by accusations of racism.

The current honorary King of the WAWP: Rick Davis of the McCain Campaign.

"Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign," he said late last week. "Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we're all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you've got to rethink all these things. And so I think we're in the process of looking at how we're going to close this campaign. We've got 19 days, and we're taking serious all these issues."

First of all, that's not even close to what Lewis said. Here is the key passage from Jonathan Martin's original story about Lewis' comments:

Civil rights icon and Georgia congressman John Lewis is accusing John McCain and Sarah Palin of stoking hate, likening the atmosphere at Republican campaign events to those featuring George Wallace, the segregationist former governor of Alabama and presidential candidate. McCain's campaign has responded with a statement in the candidate's name, urging Barack Obama to repudiate Lewis's comments.

"What I am seeing reminds me too much of another destructive period in American history," Lewis said in a statement issued today for Politico's Arena forum. "Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse."

Lewis didn't accuse McCain of imitating Wallace, but suggested there were similarities.

"George Wallace never threw a bomb," Lewis noted. "He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama."
...
[McCain's response:] "I am saddened that John Lewis, a man I've always admired, would make such a brazen and baseless attack on my character and the character of the thousands of hardworking Americans who come to our events to cheer for the kind of reform that will put America on the right track," the GOP nominee said in a statement this afternoon.

Nothing in Lewis' statements makes any reference to the people turning out to support McCain, much less any blanket statements about those people. But McCain has responded as if the honor of his poor, downtrodden supporters has been smeared. He even went so far as to offer the following defense of Veterans With Hats:

“Whenever you get a large rally of 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 people, you're going to have some fringe peoples,” McCain said.

“But to somehow say that group of young women who said, 'Military wives for McCain' are somehow saying anything derogatory about you . . . and those veterans that wear those hats that say 'World War II, Vietnam, Korea, Iraq,' I'm not going to stand for people saying that the people that come to my rallies are anything but the most dedicated, patriotic men and women that are in this nation, and they're great citizens.”

I'm already on record agreeing with Lewis' comments. Well, more accurately, I made some very similar observations a couple of days before Lewis did:

...[T]here's just no way that the Republicans don't know what they're doing. The Dixiecrats, after all, became closely intertwined with the core power structure of the GOP when they switched over from being Democrats. If any group of people has collective knowledge about the nature of these emotional forces, it's the Dixiecrats. For most of their period of ascendancy in the South (from the Tilden-Hayes Compromise onward), the Dixiecrats' hold on power was predicated on manipulating those exact emotions. There is no credible basis to assume that somehow the rest of the GOP remained ignorant of these things after they welcomed the Dixiecrats with open arms.

No, the Republicans know. They know, and they continue. There is nothing innocent in their conduct. The road that the GOP has put themselves on, the road that they want the rest of us to take, leads directly to black preachers bleeding out on hotel balconies, to small chidren blown to pieces in their own church, to presidential candidates dying in hotel kitchens. The road to Hell is paved with political intentions.

So...was I attacking McCain and "his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we're all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time"? In a word? No.

I know quite a few perfectly sane, reasonable, non-hateful McCain supporters. Most of the ones I know support the GOP for fiscal reasons first and foremost (hey, I'm a civil defense litigator, we're not the most liberal crowd in the world). Obviously, not all of McCain's supporters are borderline-homicidal nutjobs. But given the tenor of recent McCain/Palin events, it is becoming more and more clear that at least some of them have the potential to be exactly that.

Davis is engaged in one of the most annoying political tactics, at least as far as I am concerned: playing up alleged white victimhood. "Oh, woe is us! We poor, hard-working white Americans can't catch a fair break! All we want to do is accuse Obama of being a terrorist-sympathizer, a crypto-Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate, a traitor and a socialist...and because of that people call us racist! When will the oppression of white political speech end?"

Memo to my white brothers and sisters: we own 95% of the fucking country, you morons! We have the best jobs; the best land; the best schools; the most tax breaks; and generations of accumulated material wealth. All but two Supreme Court Justices have been white, and every single President so far has been white. The vast majority of elected officials in this country have been and are white. The vast majority of media figures are white. Almost every wealthy person in this country is white (seriously, take away Oprah and Bob Johnson, what's left?) HOW THE FUCK IS ANYONE SUPPOSED TO BE OPPRESSING US WHEN WE OWN EVERYTHING?

Stop whining, white folks. There's nothing worse than a WAWP. White people whining is exactly like those spoiled little girls on "My Sweet Sixteen" screaming because daddy only got them a Hummer instead of a Lexus. It's not just disingenuous, it's obscene.

We're not victims, we're not oppressed, we're not disadvantaged. Nobody is holding us back from anything because of our race. We're in the catbird seat. We won the wars, the toys are ours. We have nothing, absolutely nothing, to justify crying in our beer. Individually, a lot of us are hurting because of the state of the economy. But collectively? We have the cow, the milk, and the cream. So shut the fuck up about being victims, okay?