Ridgerunner, be honest with yourself, and I hope me questioning you doesn’t get me an infraction like it did last week.
But, be honest, be a man. Had Hillary said that or Biden or Obama, had they said the same words, would you back them up? Be honest, don’t be political.
Be assured if you got an infraction, it wasn’t me turning you in. I didn’t, and don’t believe in doing it. The only time I recall doing it was several years ago, and the reason wasn’t personal.
Election cycles seem to be infraction magnets, and not only for you.
It’s hard to make a direct comparison without inventing a scenario that doesn’t exist and would seem improbable. Well, there is one that’s mildly comparable. I recall the crack made by, I believe, Hillary Clinton, to the effect that Ghandi was a convenience store operator in St. Louis. I think I did compare that to the Trump utterance. My point was that both were stupid gaffes that probably didn’t mean anything more in the one case than it did in the other, but the Clinton one was quickly buried while the Trump one has been made a big deal.
But do I think Hillary Clinton is a racist because of that remark? No. That’s one of those dumb things people say in a lapse of “in the moment” judgment. I dislike her intensely, but not for that.
Personally, I think racism is both overblown and underestimated. People call things racist that aren’t and ignore things that are, particularly if they come out of their own mouths. I believe everybody is a racist in some sense, mostly quite mildly. But to me, the most important thing isn’t any of that.
I’m from a part of the “upper south” where there are almost no black people at all. When I went to college in a city, I was pretty unlettered in urban political correctness when it came to race. My fellow students were city kids, Catholic almost without exception, and they acted like a person was a howling racist if he didn’t go out of his way to befriend every black person there. Well, there were some of the black students I just didn’t like and, I think, for good reason. Being “up from the country” ignorant, I confessed to a priest that, try as I might, I just couldn’t like some black people.
“You don’t have to like them, you have to love them” he said. He explained that loving someone is desiring what’s good for them and, if occasion presents, to act on it. Real racism, he said, is desiring harm or worse, acting to harm.
I have not changed my view of racism since then. Nor have I changed my mind about some of the puffery and pretension that often accompanies disavowals of one’s own racism and extreme oversensitivity to it.
It’s possible, though not entirely impossible, that, in graduate school, I was the only white man in St. Louis given permission, at least in the otherwise all-black neighborhood in which I lived, to use the “N” word and live to tell about it. My “right” was affirmed by a black motorcycle gang I somehow befriended, because they came to realize I “meant it the same way” they mean it when they say it, not the way they think most white people mean by it. I know that sounds incredible, but it’s true.
And so, I have what probably most would now consider a “warped” view of racism. No, I don’t use the “N” word, but if some hillbilly or other says it, I almost never think anything of it because a lot of them never even got to the long ago politically acceptable word “negro”, let alone “black”, “Afro-American” and now “African American”. But if I was a black man with a flat tire on the road with no spare, the likelihood is that one of those hillbillies would be the one to stop and help me out.
I will admit I have had friendly arguments with local Hispanics who insist on distinguishing themselves from “white” people. Some of them are “whiter” than I am in appearance. I really don’t like hearing them say that, not because I think it denigrates me, but because I don’t really care for the self-separation it implies. And that’s why I don’t favor La Raza or anything that’s race-based, and I’m suspicious of any organization that announces itself as race-based, like that lawyers’ organization Judge Curiel belongs to.
Now we’ll see if I get an infraction for this post.
How did you go from Greg G. to all republicans? Stretch of the imagination?
No I simply rightly point out that voting democrat with Hillary and being Catholic is problematic. 
I don’t know why every group of people do what they do and I don’t think you can claim more than an opinion in regards.