Lynching Advocate Toby Keith: Obama Acts White To Win

Toby Keith

Last week, I reported for the Huffington Post that country singer Toby Keith had performed a pro-lynching anthem on the Colbert Report, and would be playing the same song soon on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and a slew of nationally televised talk shows.

The lyrics of Keith’s song, “Beer For My Horses,” which I transcribed, could hardly be less explicit — “Hang ‘em high, for all the people to see.” In my piece, I also noted the racially tinged nature of the song’s video and the forthcoming movie that Keith’s song inspired.

Toby Keith’s latest: Obama “talks, acts, and carries himself as a Caucausian.”

The response from right-wing blogs was swift and strident. Townhall.com whined that “The Liberal Lynching of Toby Keith” had taken place; Lonewacko claimed that Keith was actually “promoting lawful executions.” And Keith found an avid defender in Robert Stacy McCain, the disgraced former Washington Times reporter and avowed neo-Confederate who once allegedly ranted in the middle of the Times newsroom that slavery was “good for the blacks and good for property owners.”

The comments section of my post was immediately swarmed by right-wing trolls going into contortions to defend the indefensible. A typical comment read: “I can’t believe that this Max can’t find something real to complain about in this crazy world… I think Max is the bigot – he obviously hates country music, country singers and Southerners.”

Describing Keith’s over-produced truck commercial schmaltz as “country music” besmirches the dignified tradition established by Bill Monroe, Johnny Cash and Dolly Parton, while insulting the genre’s innovators, from Neko Case to Son Volt to my good friend Dave Bryan (hear his music here). At his best, Keith is Merle Haggard with a lobotomy. But that’s beside the point.

The comments by the literally hundreds of trolls who leapt to Keith’s defense are significant for only one reason: they reveal the extent to which the radical right has anointed Keith as a leading movement icon. Keith’s schlock rock is the soundtrack of the culturally deprived australopithicenes who populate the cyber-caves of freeperland and comprise the movement’s most fervent activists. He is a faux working class chickenhawk who clamors for English-only laws but can hardly speak his own language; he is “White Trash With Money,” and like them, he’s proud of it. He is one of them.

Now, Keith has trained his sights on Barack Obama, attacking him in racially tinged language that startled even the notoriously reactionary radio jock Glenn Beck. During Keith’s appearance on the July 30 broadcast of Beck’s show, he remarked, “I think the black people would say he [Obama] don’t talk, act or
carry himself as a black person.”

“What does that even mean?” the audibly shocked Beck replied.

“Well, I don’t know what that means,” Keith drawled, “but I think that that’s what they would say. Even though the black society would pull for him I still think that they think in the back of their mind that the only reason he is in [the general election] is because he talks, acts and carries himself as a Caucasian.”

How will Keith’s fans among the Republican base explain away his latest paroxysm of bigotry without dismissing the essence of his argument? The comment section is open.

Gary says:

August 10, 2008 at 10:47 pm

Toby sucks!!!

Tom Meyer says:

August 11, 2008 at 1:24 pm

Mr. Blumenthal:

I was appalled by your unfounded allegation that Toby Keith’s music video “Beer for My Horses” was racist, let alone your charge that he condoned the lynching of innocent African Americans.

You have no basis to make this claim, and your lies were as vicious as they were incompetent. The “swaggering black man sporting short dreads and baggy clothes…the profile of Keith’s ideal lynching candidate” was presented as a humorously drunk bum and possible informant; the true villain in the video is clearly a Caucasian male. I discuss this in more detail — and with screen shots from the music video — in a post on my website:

http://snarkybastards.com/index.php/2008/08/08/max-blumenthal-is-a-liar-a-lousy-liar-at-that/

Please publish a correction on this site and on the Huffington Post.

Tom Meyer
Quincy, MA

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August 14, 2008 at 3:45 am

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A man named Bob says:

August 15, 2008 at 11:38 pm

Hi Max,

You talk about tolerance and yet you go on a right wing radio show that has been preaching hatred toward gay people.

You hypocrite!

bryan says:

August 26, 2008 at 2:05 am

since obama is indeed (also) white, i do not find keith’s claim that obama carries himself as a white person to be even mildly controversial……..

wow power leveling says:

August 29, 2008 at 5:54 pm

this is going to be an interesting race, i saw the democratic convention the other night and was really captured by their views.

niherasebekei says: