Today a reporter for one of the local television stations sent a Tweet out asking whether anyone had seen an increase in the number of skunks in their neighborhoods. Being the smartass that I am, I immediately tweeted back that of course there has been an increase in the number of skunks in the area because it’s an election year and the skunks are everywhere! I didn’t realize in hindsight that such a comment might be considered racist. Now I know that racism has jumped the shark when a commercial is labeled as racist because of its content and the coding by which the video (the HTML code) is used to create the video.
I first saw this video yesterday and frankly, didn’t think much of it – other than it wasn’t all that great from a production point of view. It lacked that captivating visual, music and narrative that causes one to pause and actually watch the commercial. The point of the commercial, that Congressmen who borrow and spend are destroying jobs, heaving debt onto future generations, and weakening the United States, is a valid, irrefutable point of view. Deficit spending is out of control, devaluing the dollar, increasing the threat of inflation, and weakening our national security by making us more and more dependent upon foreign governments that own our debt.
According to that icon of information, Wikipedia, as of January 2011, foreigners owned $4.45 trillion of U.S. debt, or approximately 47% of the debt held by the public of $9.49 trillion and 32% of the total debt of $14.1 trillion. The largest holders were the central banks of China, Japan, the United Kingdom and Brazil. And even though they have started divesting themselves of some of our debt, as of May 2011 the largest single holder of U.S. government debt was China, with 26 percent of all foreign-held U.S. Treasury securities (8% of total US public debt).
So with that information in mind, watch the following political ad on behalf of Pete Hoekstra, who is running for U.S. Senate from Michigan against Democratic incumbent Debbie Stabenow:
Already the politically correct crowd is crowing that the ad in-and-of-itself is racist. The woman speaks broken English, appears on a dirty road between what appear as rice paddies, and is obviously Asian (is it politically correct to refer to her as Asian, or is some other word now used…). The ad, to my simple mind, simply points out that those who borrow and spend are giving away national security and jobs to the Chinese (who, last I checked, were, indeed Asian). So initially the left claimed that the ad was, ipso facto racist.
But that wasn’t enough.
Buried deep in the HTML code that creates videos and such for use on the Internet, was a reference to “yellowgirl” in the code language. Now James Fallow at the Atlantic and John Marshall at Talking Points Memo have seized upon the computer code as proof that the ad is racist. Here is the bit of code I pulled from the Atlantic article:
Really? That’s now racist, putting the reference “yellowgirl” into the HTML code? Could they have been referring to the color of her shirt instead? I hardly count this commercial as racist, but apparently I haven’t been checking all of the code behind those evil Republican commercials. I can see it now, “my name is __________ and I approved this message. No racist coding was used in the production of this message.”
