Charles Blow: GOP, Limbaugh, Racism To Blame For Bus Bullying Incident

I don't know that I've ever much bothered wasting my time reading Charles Blow given some of the reaction pieces I've seen. It seems I've made the right call. That the NYT's publishes him only hurts their credibility all the more, to the extent they have any left, anyway.

NewsBusters has a report up on Blow's column.

From the Wow That's a Stretch Department: New York Times columnist Charles Blow has taken the story of a grandma being bullied by children on a school bus in upstate New York and found another metaphor for Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, and conservatives in general. 

This is a very stupid, sad little man trapped by his own biases. Life's too short to bother with people like that.

Bullies on the Bus

This kind of behavior is not isolated to children and school buses and suburban communities. It stretches to the upper reaches of society — our politics and our pulpits and our public squares.

Whether it is a Republican debate audience booing a gay soldier or Rush Limbaugh’s vicious attack on a female Georgetown law student or Newt Gingrich’s salvos at the poor, bullying has become boilerplate. Hiss and taunt. Tease and intimidate. Target your enemies and torture them mercilessly.

Maintain primacy through predation. Traditionally inferior identity roles are registered in a variety of ways. For Klein, she was elderly and female and not thin or rich. For others, it is skin color, country of origin, object of affection or some other accident of birth.

The Republican-Democratic divide is increasingly becoming an all-white/multicultural divide, a male/female divide, and a more religious/less religious divide — the formers the traditional power classes, and the latters the emerging ones. This has led to some increasingly unseemly attacks at traditionally marginalized groups, even as — and possibly particularly because — they grow more powerful.