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Jesus. We have now been treated to the grotesque spectacle of a longtime party of craven, slimy, old white bigots dropping their carefully crafted masks, embracing their demonic inner Klansman, and furiously dancing around reality by declaiming it's unseemly to call a vicious racist buffoon of a president a vicious racist buffoon of a president even though at this nefarious rate his next step is likely to be gleefully yelling "Nigger! " on Fifth Avenue to bland blind silence - after which Republicans will rush to blame as divisive whatever black person was being abused - within the toxic maelstrom of a US presidency that has become "a twentyfourseven firehose of bullshit fucknuttery sprayed right into your face at all hours."

Thus did the House passage of a resolution to condemn Trump for his obscene "go back where you came from" rant feature hours of sanctimonious GOP gamesmanship - asking Pelosi to "rephrase her comment" after she called Trump's racist tweets, gasp, "racist tweets," declaring her words "unparliamentary," seeking to have them stricken from the pious record, urging members to "refrain from personality based comments" even when rampant white supremacy is part of the presidential "personality," and, failing all else, charging the House had defied genteel precedent by voting "to condone this violation of decorum" because - bad words alert - to corrupt complicit Republicans, calling racism "racism" is worse than the real-life, soul-crushing racism itself. Unparliamentary? Unfrigginbelievable.

Heeding Orwell - "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears" - we are left with a debased Republican party frantically laboring to avoid the r-word while feeling they've been given permission to act as racist as they really are, a media too often following suit with agonized debates about when to say "racist" - what the hell happened to NPR? - and a batshit crazy racist so-called leader of the free world "with a perfectly liquified brain" and an ugly, old-world concept of American-ness wherein "white people belong, the rest are contingent." A racist in the White House, writes David Remnick, renders Trump "an heir to the tradition of American failure on race," one which ignores or rejects "the country’s fundamental premise that people, in the words of Martin Luther King, not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

"Segregationists told us to go back," said a fiery John Lewis during the House debate. "I know racism when I see it. I know racism when I feel it. The world is watching. They are shocked and dismayed because it seems we have lost our way." Passage of the resolution was a small step forward, many felt, with miles to go: "Cool, now do impeachment," read one hopeful tweet. But on Wednesday a still-skittish House voted it down, leading many of us to wonder, at this grievously late date, just what it will take. Given just four of 197 Republicans voted to call a racist a racist and the rest stayed stuck in a "full-on Klan," way-back machine whining about communists and Negroes, argues The Rude Pundit, it's clear we need to "makethis election about what America is about - diversity or white nationalism." To be on the right side of history, help flip these vulnerable seats blue and decorum be damned.