A recent item I found on Brietbart by Charles Hurt compared a couple of current TV shows, “Honey BooBoo”, and “Duck Dynasty”. Both shows treat the daily lives of two southern families. “Honey BooBoo” paints a distasteful caricature of redneck “trailer trash”. Painful to watch, it tracks the daily lives and thoughts of Mr. and Mrs. Booboo (or whatever their name is, who cares), and their daughter, Honey. They don’t appear to have jobs or stand for much of anything, and their main reason for living seems to be Honey’s beauty pageants. The show serves mainly to reinforce liberals ideas about rednecks.

The other, Duck Dynasty, which is redefining cable TV ratings, is about an actual family, the Robertsons, self made millionaires who live by values that have made this nation what it is. The show works, and it appears to drive liberals crazy for at least two reasons: one, it’s a perfect rebuttal to liberals’ convictions about their own cultural superiority, and two, the Robertson’s religious faith is a central value in their lives. I mean, my God, they actually pray at the dinner table. Out loud. Think any of that’s over the top? If you haven’t already done so, watch the program and you decide.

Something about the article that I found interesting was the nature of the comments posted. The article made a serious point about the relative merits of the two shows and what it suggested about all of us, a point well made, and worthy of discussion. But in the piece the writer made a passing reference to “chiggers”, and the majority of the comments became focused on whether the word “chiggers” was a racist term. I’m serious. At some point, someone threw in the word “niggardly”, and the entire point of the article was lost, in favor of a long series of comments about these two words.

For those lucky people who never encountered one, a chigger is a tiny, almost invisible creature related to fleas that inhabits grassy areas, mostly in the south. They can end up on your skin, where they will proceed to burrow in, causing extreme itching, and they are very hard to get rid of. It can go on for days. A good way to get them would be to roll around on the lawn. This is something most kids will do at one time or another, as opposed to most grownups.

I looked up the Webster’s definitions of “chigger”, and “niggardly”, and this is what I found:

chigger: noun/ derivation of chigoe, a tropical flea (Tunga penetrans), of which the fertile female causes great discomfort by burrowing under the skin.

niggardly: adverb/ grudgingly mean about spending; provided in meanly limited supply.

Hence, used in a sentence, “The niggardly chigger caused much itching while refusing to share his lunch money.”

To impute any connotations of racism to either of these words is, frankly, stupid.

Eric Holder famously declared that Americans are “a nation of cowards … afraid to talk about race.” Conservatives are not afraid to talk about race, Mr. Holder. The problem is that the left doesn’t want an open discussion about it, because it’s a tool they use to silence any objection to the abject incompetence of our president.

It occurs to me that Mr. Obama is 50% white, while his motives and competence are 100% disastrous for this country. When you’re incompetent, you’re incompetent no matter what color you are. The left has to keep this fact off the table, even though they know it’s true. They have to avoid any discussion that exposes the harm caused by their agenda. Race hustlers such as the “Reverend” Al Sharpton insist that anybody who disagrees with Mr. Obama’s policies is motivated by racism, but even he knows that for what it is, which is an elaborate lie.

I grew up in the Jim Crow south, Mr. Holder. I remember segregated restaurants, buses, drinking fountains, baseball stadiums, and restrooms. The entire “separate but equal” concept was just a huge lie, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 put an end to it, but you and others insist on ignoring that. If you really want to have a discussion about race, I believe I can overcome my “cowardice” if you can get over your apparent need to perpetuate that division.

Or here’s a better idea. Just admit that all the race baiting is a harmful, deadly game to play on America, and I’ll drop around some weekend when you’re free and we can go duck hunting.

It appears that the left doesn’t really want a discussion. What they want is for conservatives to sit quietly and be lectured about the matter by people like Mr. Sharpton. We can’t have a serious discussion about race until the left is willing to stop using it as a weapon to silence any views that oppose their own.

Posted at nuking politics.com, Aug 29, ‘13, by springeraz.