No other word for it!..... It's a scourge

The fact that racism and bigotry has reared its ugly head in the US - principally directed toward Obama - is more than troubling. Some of the language has been so bigoted and intemperate that it is hard to reconcile it with a civil society, let alone that we are in 2009 after all.

Bob Herbert, writing his weekly op-ed column "The Scourge Persists" in The NY Times takes up the issue:

"I have no patience with those who want to pretend that racism is not an out-and-out big deal in the United States, as it always has been. We may have made progress, and we may have a black president, but the scourge is still with us. And if you needed Jimmy Carter to remind you of that, then you’ve been wandering around with your eyes closed."

And:

"But the fact that a black man is now in the White House has so unsettled much of white America that the lid is coming off the racism that had been simmering at dangerously high temperatures all along. Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow with Media Matters, said, “If someone had told me in February that there would be mainstream allegations that Obama was a racist and a fascist and a communist and a Nazi, I wouldn’t have believed it.”

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