ARE McCAIN AND HIS BACKERS GOING TO EVER STOP THROWING AROUND RACIST EPITHETS?

This morning John Aravosis over at AmericaBlog pointed out what a pathetic racist and throwback Jon McCain is-- something maybe appropriate for someone in 1930s Panama but definitely not for 21st Century America. Aravosis points to McCain's refusal to apologize to Asian-Americans for using a racial epithet during an earlier campaign in South Carolina.

"I hate the gooks," McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. "I will hate them as long as I live."

I couldn't find a specific entry for "Gook" in Wikipedia. Instead they have a page of ethnic slurs. Here's the one for the term McCain was throwing around:

Gook 
(U.S. military slang) an Asian person, especially an enemy (e.g. Koreans or Vietnamese during the Korean and Vietnam wars). By extension, any Asian person. Derived from the Korean words “hanguk” and “miguk”. Guk is from the Chinese word "guo," which means country. “Hanguk” refers to Korea and “miguk” is the common word for the United States. American troops thought "miguk" sounded like "me gook" (i.e. "I am a gook"). The word persisted during the Vietnam War, perhaps also because the Vietnamese people have a similar word “quoc,” meaning "country." "Gook" was also used by white soldiers in Africa to designate enemy insurgents.

A thesaurus takes it a little further: "Oriental, oriental person-- a member of an Oriental race; the term is regarded as offensive by Asians (especially by Asian Americans)"
McCain, still stubbornly refusing to apologize or even rethink his racist instincts, claims he-- in his pig-headed way-- that he was just referring to his prison guards and that "I will continue to refer to them in language that might offend some people because of the beating and torture of my friends." Among those who might be offended are the millions of Asian-American voters, and other American voters who think it's long past time  to put racism and bigotry behind us and to stop justifying the use of racist language.

"The use of a racist slur can't be acceptable for any national leader, regardless of his background," said Diane Chin, executive director of the San Francisco-based Chinese for Affirmative Action. "For someone running for president not to recognize the power of words is a problem."

..."Historically, straight talkers who say things off the top of their heads eventually hang themselves with those sorts of remarks," said Bruce Cain, a political scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.

Acknowledging that McCain suffered at the hands of his Vietnamese captors, who may have been angry that he was dropping bombs of their country when he was shot down and captured, Aravosis makes a good case that that is no excuse for racist outbursts, and especially not from someone who would like to be a national leader of all Americans.

[A] lot of people have personal trauma in their lives doled out to them by bad guys of every stripe, be they white or black or gay or Jewish or female. But we don't give those people the right to use racist and bigoted terms to describe an entire class of human beings, or even the specific people who hurt us. This goes a long way towards showing just how messed up Vietnam left John McCain, and why John McCain seems so willing to use racist attacks to take down Barack Obama. To McCain and the Republicans, Obama is just another "gook."

Oh, and just to be clear, the Somalians who dragged the lifeless bodies of US service members behind their trucks in 1993 after their Black Hawk helicopter was shot down, does McCain think it would be okay to call them "n-ggers" or "sand n-ggers"? (Or didn't those US service members suffer as much as John McCain?) Or how about the Israelis troops who blew up the USS Liberty, killing 34 American service members in 1967, does Senator McCain think it's appropriate to call them "k-kes"? Is attempted presidential assassin Squeaky Fromm a "c-nt"? I'm quite serious. Now, I'll bet John McCain would refuse to even answer the question because he'd say it's absurd, of course he wouldn't condone any of those words (at least that's what he'd say for public consumption). But when the victim of the slur is Asian, and the victim of the crime is John McCain, suddenly it's okay for John McCain to spout racism because John McCain would have you believe that he's the only American, the only soldier, to ever have suffered. He was tortured, you know. And he doesn't plan on ever letting you forget it.

After he's defeated on November, hopefully the whole country can forget John McCain and what he stands for. Most Americans in 2008 do not find even subtle appeals to racism by candidates and their surrogates acceptable or attractive. Or do you think this is attractive: