L.A. Times Hears Racist Dog Whistles from Romney Voters

Sandy Banks of the L.A. Times has figured out why anyone would vote against Barack Obama. Why, they are all racists, of course. Oh, you don’t use “the N word,” she tells us, but we know what you Romney voters really think.

Banks dropped all pretense of logic or fairness in her Sunday piece, claiming that the nation’s “kumbaya era” is over merely because a white man dared run against Barack Obama for the office of President of the United States.

Like all these hate-filled screeds that cast any non-Obama voter as a racist, Banks doesn’t bother trying to actually explain how a nation that elected a black man as President could suddenly revert to pre-civil rights oppression. She just states it straight as if it is obvious fact.

This has been the single most disgusting attack against Romney voters and, if Obama loses his bid for reelection, be prepared to see every last left-winger on TV and in the commentariat claim that the only reason Obama lost is because the country is filled with hood-wearing, Jim Crow-loving racists.

Banks notes that she and her “reporter” friends hear from people “on the campaign trail” who explain to them why they are voting for Romney this time: “When those flag-waving voters are asked what they mean, their take on the president makes it clear: He’s Kenyan-born, he’s a closet Muslim, he has European-socialist tendencies.”

But even those claims, she says, are lies. Romney voters, Banks says, are using Obama’s failure over the economy, his failures in foreign policy, and his bowing to foreign heads of state as a “proxy” to hide their racist hearts.

No one is using the N-word these days. The “foreign” label is its proxy — a signal that Obama is the “other” in a nation trying to come to grips with seismic economic changes and unsettling demographic shifts.

Banks goes on to use that boring, pervasive idea popular among her fellows that code words explain how racism is as bad in America today as it’s ever been. She can’t find any overt racism, of course, so she has to pretend she can read between the lines to find it.

Naturally, Banks uses that lie of a poll disgorged from the Associated Press last week to “prove” that racism is worse now than ever in America.