An interesting man said an interesting thing the other day.

Unfair, you say? Voters shouldn’t judge a candidate by his skin color. Maybe, but is it any more unfair than, for example, saying that because McCain and President Bush are both Republicans that a McCain administration would produce a third Bush term? No, it isn’t.

Ummm … you’re kidding, right? I mean, surely this taken out of context or something. Surely.

Well, read the whole thing and judge for yourself. It seems, at a glance, like Rothenberg is attempting to make a fairly valid point about how blind, uncritical preconceptions still exert a powerful influence on how people vote. So far, so good. But whatever valuable insight he was attempting to convey apparently got hijacked, drug off into the weeds and nard-stomped by a phalanx of Rovian Klan bikers.

If you’re missing the nuance, let me see can I clarificate for you: “Negro” is an ideology.

I know, I know. Up until now you always thought it was simply a genetic defect. And you naïvely thought that political beliefs had something to do with a more or less cognitive process. That is, one was how you were born and the other was a way you decided to think.

But the course of intellectual perfection is ever-ascending, and maybe Rothenberg is onto something. Recent studies have indicated that we may be born with certain political tendencies – that is, there may be a genetic predisposition toward being Republican. And thanks to Rothenberg, we now know that race is a political marker.

I’m not sure how we’ll graphically represent the new partisan order, but maybe it goes something like this: I’m open to revisions, of course.