bigot – The Progressive Midwesterner

U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk (R-IL) is, once again, making some downright offensive statements. This time, he (figuratively) put his foot in his mouth while talking about the fact that fellow U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who is also a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, has no wife:

“I’ve been joking with Lindsey, cuz he doesn’t have—did you see that?—have a rotating first lady. He’s a bro with no ho. That’s what we’d say on the South Side.”

(emphasis mine)

Kirk the Jerk’s remarks were offensive for two reasons. First, he pandered to the black community. Secondly, he said something incredibly sexist about women.

Kirk the Jerk pandered to black Illinoisans in a absolutely ridiculous way. Not all black people in Illinois refer to men as “bros” and women as “hoes”. In fact, most black Illinoisans would find Kirk talking in that manner to be downright offensive. Additionally, Kirk the Jerk also implied that all women are prostitutes (“ho” is a slang term for a prostitute), which is flagrantly sexist.

Keep in mind that Kirk the Jerk is about as much of a South Sider as I am. (“South Side” refers to the predominantly-black South Side of the Chicago). Kirk is from Highland Park, a mostly upper middle class/wealthy suburban community in Lake County (I’m not sure where he currently lives), and I’m from Westville, a mostly poor/working class former coal mining town in Vermilion County, neither of which come even close to being like the South Side of Chicago.

Benjamin Cole, a former Baptist minister and mouthpiece for the energy industry who is now the senior adviser for policy and communications (i.e., press secretary) for Republican Congressman Aaron Schock of Peoria, Illinois, made racist Facebook posts referring to black people as “animals” and “hood rats” and wanting his D.C. neighborhood to gentrify (i.e., run the blacks, other minorities, and poor people out of the neighborhood):

While I strongly believe that shooting people and using or threatening to use a glass bottle as a weapon is highly unacceptable, referring to blacks as “animals” and hood rats” and calling for blacks, other minorities, and poor people to be run out of a neighborhood is racist and also highly unacceptable. Black people are not animals or rats, they’re people.

It’s been one scandal after another for Aaron Schock recently. First, he apparently violated congressional ethics laws by recently having his office decorated in the lavish style of the Lord Grantham’s room on the British TV series Downton Abbey, which airs in the United Kingdom on the British TV network ITV and is televised by many PBS public television stations here in the United States as part of the Masterpiece anthology series, and now his spokesman has been exposed as as a vile racist.