Louisiana strikes again

Everything may be up to date in Kansas City, but it didn't even take a day after the inauguration of our first black president for Louisiana to reassert itself as the closest thing this country has to a Jurassic Park for crackers.

ONE WOULD THINK it'd be hard to top political consultant Mike Bayham's dismissing the Rev. Joseph Lowery -- co-founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and dean of the civil-rights movement -- as a clown:

I had a ticket to go, but my attitude was “been there, done that” during President George W. Bush’s two inaugurations. I would have probably been beaten, or to use the Old Testament manner of executing non-believers, stoned to death for erupting in laughter after the circus clown…I mean preacher…delivered his benediction, but more on that latter in this column.

(snip)

And then there was the money shot: not Barack HUSSEIN Obama’s inaugural address, but the closing prayer of Reverend Joseph Lowrey in which he ended it with a crude nursery rhyme that asked brown to stick around, the red man to get ahead, yellow to be mellow and, my favorite and what caused me to almost fall off the treadmill, for white to embrace what is right.

It was good to see the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was there in spirit if not in body. Nothing like spitting in the faces of white folks whose support was instrumental in putting Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

THERE'S NOTHING LIKE playing the racial-grievance game, only to prove the point to which you object. Oh . . . and it wasn't a nursery rhyme. It was the blues -- Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown and White," to be exact.

And nothing says "circus clown" like the resumé of Joseph Lowery.

One of the organizers, with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955. Co-founder of the SCLC with King. Organizer of the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965.

Yeah, what a clown. And I guess the civil-rights movement was just a joke, right?

Republicans are such an erudite, tolerant and even-tempered bunch -- and none more so than Louisiana Republicans. I can't understand how it is they'll end up relegated to the sidelines of politics for years and years.

OF COURSE, the blog rantings of a cracker politico is jes' a warm up act in such a stet as the Gret Stet. The main "Fergit, hell" act came Wednesday in Baton Rouge, as chronicled by The Advocate:

State and federal authorities are investigating an incident in which a twine noose was found Wednesday morning on a black employee’s chair at the Governor’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.

“This type of hateful behavior and hateful crime will not be tolerated,” said Mark Cooper, the agency’s director, during an afternoon news conference.

Cooper dubbed the noose a “gross violation of an individual’s right to work in a safe and positive environment.”

A female supervisor and her male coworker, both black, found the miniature noose, Cooper said.

Both were “rattled” by the discovery, he said.

State Police Superintendent Col. Mike Edmonson said at the news conference two State Police detectives and an FBI agent are interviewing everyone who had access to the office on Florida Boulevard.

Cooper said Wednesday was Homeland Security employees’ first day in their new offices after moving into a two-story office building from the four-story office next door.

The noose, which measures 8 inches long and 5 to 6 inches wide, was placed sometime between late Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning, Edmonson said.

OFFICIALS SAY there's no evidence of a link to Obama's inauguration but, given the timing, how could there not be?

It would make just about as much sense as saying there's no evidence of a link between disproportionate numbers of crackers, a lingering antipathy to the notion that "all men are created equal" and the state's permanent residency at the bottom of everything.