“A typical street whore.” “A bunch of ghetto thugs.” “Ghetto street trash.” “Wonder when she will get her first abortion.” These are a small selection of some of the racially-charged comments posted to the conservative ‘Free Republic’ blog Thursday, aimed at U.S. Most of the heat is being generated by this Vancouver Sun story about the comments on a Free Republic article featuring 11 year-old Malia Obama: The flap over comments at Free Republic and the Young Republicans’ election of a new president make for a sour cocktail this weekend. Two high-profile stories about the intersection of racism and the Republican Party are exploding all over the internet. It might mean a rough week for Parry, though. This does little to change the facts in this story, as Parry could hardly have pulled, then reinstated, the offensive thread. Gawker reports that Chris Parry, the Vancouver Sun reporter who broke this story, was also a blogger for Daily Kos, and has suggested, in the past, posting hate speech and blaming it on conservatives. In other words, we reported what Shaw reported, only sooner and more accurately. I’m not sure how that works, though, since we reported those tweets, and the attendant escalation.
He says we escalated the story, and then tweets by Shuster, et al, took it to 11.
Update 2: Michael Shaw at HuffPo thinks everyone except the racists should be ashamed of themselves, including us.