"It may be just me, but the Drive-Bys are not talking about the amnesty bill vote from yesterday very much."

Said Rush Limbaugh today. (Drive-Bys = mainstream media.)

I think they don't want to report what's in this bill. They don't want people concerned with Alec Baldwin's latest rant to know what's in this. They don't want people occupied, focused on Paula Deen to know what's in this. They don't want people who can't believe the star witness at the Zimmerman case....

The latest is that it was reported by some British newspaper that Alec Baldwin's wife was tweeting smoothie recipes at the funeral for James Gandolfini.... Paula Deen said the N-word 30 years ago, and has probably cried 15 buckets of tears about it all week long...

"What does anybody learn? I'm not sure what the purpose of these teaching moments are."

Wonders John McWhorter, talking to Glenn Loury about the Paula Deen thing (which the NYT columnist Frank Bruni had declared a "teaching moment").



It's at least a teaching moment in the sense of: this'll teach you not to be the next teaching moment.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lem said: "I voted with my wallet.... and I don't have much. In fact, I have nuthing."

"Revealed: Bush ancestor was heavily invested in kidnapping Africans into slavery."

I assume this report is true and that the tainted blood of the Bush clan is interesting, but why is it being revealed now?

Because Obama's in trouble, and it's the next thing that could be pulled out of the country's miscellaneous bag o' distractions?

Because Jeb's in that lineage too, and he's in the running for next President, and he said something embarrassing recently, so it was a good time to kick him?

Because the George Zimmerman trial is getting underway, and that hasn't worked out as well as some in the race-baiting industry had hoped, and maybe some unrelated racial disturbance would resonate?

Because Paula Deen said something really stupid about slavery, so the editors at Slate looked around in their storehouse of as-yet-unpublished articles and found one that had slavery?

Racial clowns: What Paula Deen said in the deposition.

"Perhaps most damning for the butter-loving mogul, who recently came out with her own line of spreads at Walmart, the Enquirer claims that Deen wanted to use a 'slave motif' at her brother's 2007 wedding."

Deen said she got the idea from another restaurant at which the couple dined. Said Deen, per the Enquirer: "Well, what I would really like is a bunch of little n-----s to wear long-sleeve white shirts, black shorts, and black bow ties. You know, in the Shirley Temple days, they used to tap dance around."

All right, this is so wrong on so many levels. First, obviously, don't use the n-word. Second, a slave-themed wedding is a terrible idea. But — and I know these are lesser offenses, but I've got to say it — slaves don't wear shorts. Modern American white men wear shorts all too often and look like overgrown boys when the do so. For all of the diminishment of black men over the years — including calling them "boy" — the stereotype did not have them dressed in shorts.

And, obviously, there were all sorts of problems with the way black people were depicted in old Hollywood movies, let's at least get it clear in our minds what the movie reference is. There was a 1935 Shirley Temple movie called "The Littlest Rebel," and here's what it looked like when Bill Bojangles Robinson (playing the slave "Uncle Billy") danced. He's not tap dancing "around" — as if slaves dance around while working — he's giving a performance at an elegant affair — as a soloist, not in "a bunch." And he's not in shorts and shirt-sleeves. He's wearing long pants and a vest and a jacket. So Deen's mental image of what went on in the bad old days of Hollywood is itself an embarrassing distortion.