Memory Lane

For the last 8 years, we have had to suffer Republicans telling us that they, in fact, care about diversity more than Democrats. They are a big-tent party -- just look at Bush's cabinet! He's so blind to race that he hired an (incompetent) African-American Secretary of State and a (yet more incompetent) Latino Attorney General. The rebuttal that the Bush administration was happy to accept racial diversity in the service of the greater goal of ideological lockstep fell on deaf ears. And so it was that many, including David Brooks, were able to declare, in public no less, an end to racism in America. Seriously:

Well it reveals what sort of people George W. Bush is comfortable with. You look at the guy's life story he could be the ultimate white man -- Harvard, Yale, old line family. He was in the bombastic Bush kid at the Midland, Texas Country Club. And yet, look who he's going to be spending time with -- a very strong woman in Karen Hughes, a very strong black woman in Condoleezza Rice, a Hispanic guy from Houston, a black guy from the South Bronx. I think this is symptomatic of who George Bush is and maybe where his generation is -- somebody who is just comfortable with people of different backgrounds, and for those who say this is a racist country or a patriarchal country, it’s very difficult to explain how this Republican conservative is so personally comfortable with these sorts of people.

Fortunately, we have a new crop of conservatives to demonstrate to us that, thank goodness, we still live in a world we can recognize. Via Matthew Yglesias, a bar graph of the ethnicity of the advisers to the major presidential candidates. It's really something to see. Among other things, it confirms one's sense that Rudy is trying very hard to fashion himself as a caricature of the only possible way things could be worse than Bush.