Your Lying Eyes

I'm going to concur with Jeff and say that it's always cool when Fallows gets angry:

This alone disproves Donald Trump's crock-of-shit* insulting and preposterous assertions that Obama was an affirmative action or charity admittee to the Ivy Leagues who couldn't really cut it on his own IQ or test scores, as if there weren't already evidence enough: It is his use at time 0:50 of the word "bemusement" in its proper sense (puzzlement, confusion) rather than what most people think it means (mild amusement). I would like to have someone ask Trump what he thinks the word means. Maybe some variant on "easement"? [* 

Update: OK, it's a sign of defeat to resort to profanity. My exasperation is a sign of how I feel about this line of slurs. First, whatever is wrong with Obama, no sane person thinks he's stupid. Second, I wonder how many people think Donald Trump is in a position to judge Obama's smarts. Third, there is no avoiding the racist connotation of saying that a successful black person got there -- wink wink -- through special treatment. "Of course the black guy ended up as editor of the Law Review. What do you expect?" So I should just have said that rather than "crock of shit." On the other hand, a crock of shit is what this is.]

I don't agree on the profanity point. I think cursing was quite appropriate. 

But beyond that, it is impossible to miss the racism at work here. This is not Vince Foster. This is not Swiftboating. This is the dude who passed health care reform as "the biggest Affirmative Action in history." This is the whitey tape. This you are an "Indonesian welfare thug." This is the host of "Celebrity Apprentice," questioning the intellect of the past editor of the Harvard Law Review. This is the scion of inherited money as populist, and the scion of a teen single-mother as elitist. This is, if you were white, you and the black dude who came before wouldn't be here. This is we don't believe you. 

In other words, this is a racism of the bone.

My ire is not so much for those who see their interests in that frame, but for the Very Serious People, who see nothing in the fact that those who are sorry that this country wasn't cleaved in half by Genosha, and those who believe the first black president is a Muslim sleeper agent, are all at the same party. Who with a straight face chalk it up to the inexplicable vagaries of the human mind, or mere chance. 

My ire is for those who claim to know better, but do not.