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.

My report on Barack Obama’s evangelical outreach strategy is up at the Nation. I open by revealing a testy moment between the candidate and Franklin Graham:

On June 10, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama convened a meeting in a law office in downtown Chicago with a wide array of about thirty evangelical leaders, in an unprecedented effort to win their support. Obama insisted that the meeting remain entirely off the record, forbidding participants from disclosing his statements to the press. His campaign has kept the names of attendees a closely guarded secret. But through interviews with participants and overlooked statements in obscure publications of the Christian press, a first-hand picture of the meeting emerges, starkly at odds with the news reports that accepted the formal version at face value.

News accounts about the meeting stated that Obama impressed his audience with his sincerity, depth of theological knowledge and communication skills. But according to those present, he did little to assuage the hostility that many of the assembled–particularly the conservative white evangelicals–harbor toward him and his liberal positions on social issues. Those differences reached a crescendo when the Rev. Franklin Graham directly confronted Obama about his supposedly Muslim background and Christian authenticity.

Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon Billy Graham and head of the international Christian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse, was seated next to Obama at the meeting. He peppered Obama with pointed questions, repeatedly demanding to know if the senator believed that “Jesus was the way to God or merely a way.” Graham, who once incited an international controversy by calling Islam a “very evil and wicked religion,” proceeded to inquire about the Muslim faith of Obama’s father, suggesting that Obama himself may be a Muslim.

“They focused on abortion, gay marriage, and then Franklin Graham tried to get Senator Obama saved,” said Rev. Eugene Rivers, an African-American pastor from Boston who attended the meeting. Rivers told the Religion News Service that Graham pointedly questioned Obama’s “father’s connections to Islam.” Obama reportedly said of his father, “The least of things he was was Islamic.”

Read on here.