Don’t believe me? My (black) wife got a piece of “literature” in the mail this morning that was so hateful that I decided to post it here so others could share its awfulness. It was a folded 11X17 piece, printed on both sides. Apparently this mailing was targeted at black registered voters here in (former Florida Secretary of State) Katherine Harris’s Congressionial District. Suzanne Elsoffer, Chairperson of the Manatee Democratic Executive Committee, got one too. Like Debbie, she’s’s black. And, like Debbie, she was offended. Suzanne and I had a short phone conversation. She was in a total rage over this piece of campaign trash. Note that I, as a white registered Democrat, didn’t get my own copy. I guess the local Republicans think only black voters will fall for this crap, and that other voters are too smart. What an amazing racial insult!

Update: See the scanned pages here.

Second Update: Some people seem to think I made this up or that’s it’s a Democratic disinfo scheme. Wrong. It was put out by the all-too-real SaraMana Black Republican Club, run by a woman named Frances Rice, and is spreading through the online neocon media like mad.

When I showed this junk to my coworkers, one of them replied, “There have been stories about how the parties would be micro-targeting in this election - now you see how.” He pointed me to this story on MSNBC.com

I’ve voted Republican more than once in my life, but there is no way I can vote for a Republican candidate now. This is simply sick. The Republican Party has sunk to depths that would make any decent person ashamed to be associated with them.

John Kerry is called “the presumptive Democratic nominee” daily in our nation’s newspapers. “Iraqi soil” is what we fight over, while troops returning from Iraq are always glad to be back on “American soil.” These phrases have been used too often. They have become trite. It is time for us to find replacements for them.

We Americans need to stop fooling ourselves about why we’re in Iraq. Weapons of Mass Destruction were never our primary concern. If they were, we’d be all over North Korea, not Iraq. And if we wanted to free an oppressed people, there are African countries where the level of oppression is and was far worse than Saddam could have imagined, but we leave them alone. Our interest in Iraq is oil. Our interest in the entire middle east is oil. We need to admit this openly. Once we do that we can start reaping the benefits of empire instead of paying the price of establishing one without getting anything in return.