Republican Ethnic Humor: "Just a Joke"?

Okay, I am known far and wide among my friends and acquaintances as being a "funny guy". I love jokes, I have a low threshold of what's funny, and I am willing to cut someone a LOT of slack if they tell a joke that is "offensive" to the vast majority of Americans, as long as that joke is funny.

But even I have limits, and one thing that is pretty much off-limits to me is racial humor, especially when it comes to African-Americans. Maybe it's my defensive attempt to overcome my own history: My upbringing in rural and blatantly, matter-of-factly, racist early-50s Oklahoma, the fact that my ancestors were slaveholders before the Civil War, maybe something else. But it's still a fact. Note that I say "pretty much" off-limits, because I can still laugh at racial-humor jokes, if they are told to me by one of my African-American friends. They have the right to do it. I don't, and neither does the whole fucking Republican Party.

Which brings us to today's topic. A California Rethug official from -- where else -- Orange County recently sent an email depicting Barack Obama as some kind of ape, with the caption "Now you know why no birth certificate".

Whoa, hold it, blow the whistle, totally and completely out of bounds.

"Normal" people agree with me on this. It's only the Rethugs, and the official herself, one Marilyn Davenport, who is willing to attempt the lame excuse that it was "just a joke"...

Okay, Marilyn, some things can be "just a joke". Some things can't. This is one of them.

Oh, and do I need to add that Mizz Davenport is also a Teabagger?

No, I didn't think so...