A lot of people, including Rush Limbaugh, are out raged at the suggestion that calling Barak Obama a socialist is race-baiting.

Lewis Diuguid informs us that, in using the word “socialist” to describe Senator Obama,

McCain and Palin have simply reached back in history to use an old code word for black. It set whites apart from those deemed unAmerican and those who could not be trusted during the communism scare.

I have sad news.

It’s true. “Socialist” is code for “black”.

As a former leftist, I’m uniquely qualified to explain how this works. Socialism, as you know, is the opposite of capitalism. And who are the capitalists in the U.S.? Conservatives, right? And who are the conservatives in this country? White people, right? And what is the opposite of white? Black.

So, if black is the opposite of white, which is synonymous with conservative, which is identical with capitalist, well then of course socialist (which is the opposite of capitalist) is code for black.

I’m overjoyed at being able to resolve the difficulty here.

I wonder what Diuguid would have written if the McCain campaign had referred to Senator Obama as a Marxist. Typical contemporary journalist, able to write a few hundred words and never tackle the issue of whether a man is an adherent of that political-economical school of thought which used to be referred to by the term “socialism”.

“Socialism” means “black”.
“Conservative” means “white”.

I wonder what “journalist” now means in Newspeak.