Not for the first time, I heard today that Obama (aside from being a secret Muslim socialist from Kenya) only does things to help “the blacks.” It is often said, without a hint of irony, by people who are neither wealthy, nor Anglo-Saxon, nor Protestant, nor male.

It’s simply true that a number of people consider any attempt to arrest the decline of the poor is “giving my hard-earned money to those filthy negroes.” Rick Santorum said it best when he informed supporters in Iowa, “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them someone else’s money.” Of course, Santorum said that he had been misunderstood and that what native speakers of English had heard as “black” had actually been a verbal stumble resulting in something like “blah.”

Shorter out-group-members-that-suck-up-to-right-wing-overlords:

“I feel better about being pissed upon if someone else is being shat upon.”

That’s what is sometimes referred to as relative comfort. Indeed, for those poor benighted also-screwed, they will share the fate of their peer in the peasantry of the Middle East. Each will accept as an article of faith that some third party is at fault for his state of affairs. How different is a South Carolina neo-Nazi from a Yemen bedouin really? Each is a religious asshole that blames his own sad situation on a third party on the word of a person that lives on a grand estate.

If your complaint is that the current president is “helping” the second worst-off racial group (native Americans have been the biggest screwee for a century), then remind yourself as to whether or not you would voluntarily change places with a member of that group in order to improve your condition. If so, I have a couple of bridges to sell you.