I started to read Parker's article and stopped in disgust very soon. I work in a very small town with a population of about 1500 people. There is a very small grocery store, but it is the only grocery store in town and the owners have a little more money than most other people. In this town, if you are even an extended relative of the grocery store owner, but you still have the same last name, then you have more power. The teachers at the school will treat you with more respect. The police force of three will defer to you. You will always be an important member of the PTA if you want to be. If you want to be in charge of anything at all, right down to fund raising for your daughter's dance class, you will be. This little microcosm has made me think a lot about America. It seems that some people can only be big if they make other people small. My family has been in America for several hundred years too. I don't know everything they ever did, but if some of my relatives are indicative, that isn't anything to brag about to the detriment of some immigrants I've known.

I second mischief. Hardily.

and to answer your supposition that I "have to be stunned by the unbelievable ignorance of Kathleen Parker's latest column":

not really

I been around the innertubz a while now

this ain't my first rodeo, dude

novakula outing a NOK agent ???, that was a stunner

this is just par for the course from the repuglitard media. you're gonna see a lot more of this in the near future

the repuglitards are so predictable that I was ready to contradict your assertion just by hearing the name kathleen parker

the repuglitard media is tooooooo predictable

come to think of it, I don't really need this scorecard anymore ...

anybody ???

slightly used repuglitard score card ???

only ripped in half twice ...

O Hell No indeed. I just posted this to the trib comments:

I refuse to rate this because I don't think it even deserves one star. Why don't you just say what you mean - that Barack Obama doesn't deserve to be president because he is black. At least that way you'd be ignorant, foolish, short-sighted, and HONEST, instead of using "some people think" to hide your own views.

I rarely protest aloud to my computer, but I did at this:

We love to boast that we are a nation of immigrants. But there's a different sense of America among those who trace their bloodlines back through generations of sacrifice.

She's so fucking wrong in so many fucking ways, but the sacrifices of her elders are frankly irrelevant to the "fullness" of her American identity. I don't share this with my 145th generation American friends very often, but I suspect that the longer the bloodline is located in America the less likely it is that the values most cherished by the piously xenophobic just don't matter that much. Instead, what matters is money, status, class, and identifying and eliminating the Stranger.

America isn't about purity; Parker's precious bloodline can't resist the power and passion of millions of new Americans. In fact, she doesn't know how good she has it, with first and second generation immigrants propping up her sorry white-bread ass.

The right AND the ability to disagree, to struggle, to flourish and prosper psychically as well as spiritually, that's America. And as much as she has a right to be a complete and shameless idjit, I'll keep spraying sputum at my poor Mac every time I have to read this kind of offal.

Yeesh. Thanks, Bserious; as pissy as it makes me, I need to keep remembering that xenophobia and race hate is hale and hearty well outside the confines of Appalachia.

I was mad enough to dash off a letter to the Post Writers' Group, which syndicates Ms. Parker. Since they probably won't read it, here it is for y'all:

To the editors:

I'm writing in reference to Kathleen Parker's column of May 14, 2008, entitled "Getting Bubba." I'd like to declare up front that my politics are decidedly liberal, and that Parker is not a writer with whom I'm likely to agree about anything of substance. But I'm also a political junkie, and an avid consumer of opinions to the left and to the right of my own. I like to keep track of how the conservatives are spinning things, and occasionally I'm even persuaded by an argument from their side of the line. I don't venture into the wilds of the opinion pages with a chip on my shoulder, but with firm opinions and an open mind.

But Ms. Parker's column crossed a line. There is only one word for its underlying logic, and it is racism. Ms. Parker cites Josh Fry, quoted in a Howard Kurtz column ("Hillary Agonistes," 5/13/08) detailing the "bogus rumors" about nationality and religion that have been circulating around Barack Obama's candidacy, as having "hit upon something essential in this presidential race." It is indeed, of course, a "bogus rumor" that one's "blood" has anything to do with one's Americanness, or that Obama is anything other than a "natural born" American citizen (he's not the presidential candidate whose ability to meet this standard is in doubt). Ms. Parker's column, though, offers full faith and credit to Fry's ideas, and everything that follows from this premise is a logical shambles and my high school civics teacher's worst nightmare.

But I've never been moved by bad thinking or bad writing to protest the publication of an opinion piece. I protest now because Ms. Parker's piece is not just bad but utterly base. "Blood equity, heritage, and commitment," Ms. Parker informs us, are the true tests of patriotism. Her language transparently derives from the lexicons, respectively, of the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, and McCarthyism. Throughout the piece she implies that American citizens who can't trace their origins back through "generations of sacrifice" on native soil don't "get America." That America is what's "getting lost in the dash to diversity" as if America can be defined as a single culture and any late arrivals are a threat, not an addition, to that culture. That not a single rural white voter's "antipathy toward people who aren't like them" is inspired by racism or xenophobia but that all such antipathy is excused by a legitimate concern for the rule of law. All of this is jingoistic cant. But what specifically marks it as racist is not just its reference to the language of purity and heritage beloved by white supremacists for centuries back, but its clear suggestion that their descendants purchase for whites of European extraction a stake in America that others don't share. In fact, America's "dash to diversity" began when Ms. Parker's ancestors abducted my ancestors and brought them to these shores (those who weren't killed by the journey) to labor in forced servitude on pain of death. (The genocide of Native Americans even before that could euphemistically be labeled a dash away from diversity.) I certainly don't blame her for those ancestral crimes, nor do I argue that she is any less American for inheriting a culture steeped in values so profoundly un-American as those that justified them. But I, sharing Barack Obama's racial heritage, am apparently not in turn a "full-blooded American" to her.

Usually, if a piece angers me enough, I will write to its author to explain my objections. But I have nothing to say to Ms. Parker. I write instead to her sponsors to urge you to discontinue her syndication in your group, and to reject her prejudices publicly. She makes no argument but an appeal to what is worst in us and her logic, implicitly and explicitly, falls outside the bounds of reasoned opinion meriting a public airing. I am not a paid subscriber to any of the newspapers in which Ms. Parker's column is carried. I can make no threats to withhold my patronage from her employers. I can only appeal to your sense of decency and your guardianship of your own prestige. I do both now. Please say no, forcefully and unequivocally, to the author of any opinion that serves only to legitimate racial bigotry in public discourse.

She sounds hung up on race. But then so do you.

I agree with HusseinTenaX again, Kathleen Parker should get a DNA test for racial blood lines and then come back and tell us what "full-bloodedness" really means. She may be as flummoxed as my father was when his twin sister had it done for herself.

Both sides of my family have been traced back to pre-revolutionary days in America - I would challenge Ms. Parker on those grounds to prove anyone has more blood equity invested in this country than my ancestors, but we are by no means unique. She is probably dim enough to be surprised by the fact that the oldest bloodlines in this country also have the most likelihood of native american ancestry.

If Ms. Parker herself is truly of pioneer heritage she should go ahead and get the DNA study done, and sit down and have a good hard look at the results, and see who really built this country. It is in the blood.

If she is like my own family, our traditions were white as could be, though we did admit to "indian" ancestors in the deep past - someone with the middle name "swift deer" between the christian name and the surname in the old records, for instance. But all the old names on all the old grave stones gave testament to mainstream white "full-blooded" american ancestry, back to the beginning of settlement when the old churches were built.

So imagine the surprise of the DNA evidence, the genetic markers that do not forget where they came from. And our old, solid, salt of the earth "good people" in every accepted sense were less than 50% north european in origin, when that was the only origin we actually claimed.

Percentages not exact of course, but approx. 48% north european, 24% south european, 12% middle eastern, 8% native american and 8%....sub-saharan african.

Yes, I would ask Ms. Parker to be fearless and do a little checking on her own, and if she has questions, do some research on the Melungeon heritage in this country. And please remember, the older the roots, the MORE likely this mixture of races is. I would venture to say a recent immigrant from Ireland is much likelier to be a "full-blooded" white person than the deep-rooted Americans she is speaking of.

We are all out of Africa. Hundreds of mitochondrial DNA expansion studies have proven that (don't tell Huckabee, who thinks we sprang forth from the Garden of Eden 6,000 years ago). Any two people will not vary from each other genetically by more than .1%. So blood is not a useful metaphor for differentness, race, or ethnicity, not to mention the other sociocultural nonsense Parker spews as if it has some legitimate bases.

As a very young country, it's extraordinarily challenging to define what is true American culture anyhow. If we attempt to tease out that which is of European influence and label it as American culture, we'd have no cultural achievements at all to celebrate. Music, food, language, dancing (while crossing one's feet), healing traditions, etc....everything that is American was born from the infusion and mixture of various cultures. Even if we look at certain American Christian religious traditions we can find African influences.