More Rough News for “Not Racist” Community

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Looks like desperate right-wing efforts to make Sterling into the “Democrat Bundy” have taken a bit of a hit.

Turns out he’s a registered Republican.

For those of you who, unlike me, have lives and don’t listen to far-right white Republicans ranting on Twitter all weekend, this may all seem a bit odd. Obviously, Sterling’s partisan affiliation is mindbogglingly irrelevant since he’s a sleazy octogenarian pro basketball team owner who has zero role in our national politics. But weirdly, over the weekend, Sterling got sucked into the right’s collective nervous breakdown over the Cliven Bundy debacle.

Based on three contributions Sterling made to Gray Davis, Bill Bradley and Patrick Leahy during the Bush Sr presidency, Sterling was repackaged as a major Democrat donor and funder of President Obama. Of course, the failure of the mainstream media to treat the Sterling debacle as identical to Bundy became another example not only of conservative media bias but of the more recent and insidious trend of the oppression faced by embattled slice of the “not racist”/far-right white community mau-maued by constant false charges of racism.

Most of this stuff is just desperate and crazy. But it’s significant as part of the right’s inability to figure out what to say, how to spin or even what it’s trying to argue these days on the issue of race. The post-2012 rebrand has not gone well.

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