1) We were the party that got rid of institutionalized slavery (the Party of Lincoln wasn't the Democrats, kids).

2) We didn't perpetuate the Jim Crow era. Southern Democrats were, for hundreds of years afterwards, the party of the South for precisely this reason. Republicans couldn't show their faces there for decades after the Civil War, therefore we can't be blamed for institutionalized racism down here.

3) We realize that there has been over a hundred years since slavery ended and 40 years since the Civil Rights movement. None of us own slaves and most of us have no monetary or economical advantage left from our slave-owning forebears, if we even had them. We know that there's no reason for a racial group to claim that they have not had the time to progress past its poor start because we see that Hispanics and Asians (especially Asians, most of whom came here with absolutely nothing after the Vietnam War) have significantly improved their lots in life in a few generations, through hard work and discipline, whereas this has not been the case for some other groups who continue to use racism as a crutch.

And 4) Conservatives don't really feel guilt, they repress it an it turns into colon cancer, which is all to the good.

And the mainstream Americans. To wit:

Mainstream America sees America as a whole. Each person is an individual and is responsible for their actions, but America is an aggregate that says something about us as a nation. We accept what we have accomplished and what we have failed to do as a nation. When the earliest Movement Conservatives began their divisive politics during the Vietnam War with the slogan "America - love it or leave it ", Mainstream Americans took that seriouly. We embraced America, but we didn't fool ourselves into thinking that what we were doing in Vietnam was right because America is great and could do no wrong. That sentiment came from the Movement Conservatives.

Besides, it is an extremely simplistic view to say that racism has been compartmentalized in America to a specific region and a specific time. We were all raised as racists in this country, even if we and our parents were not racist. It was and continues to be a warf and weave of our culture. You call yourself guilt free of this issue, but then you define achievement in terms of racial divisions - Hispanics and Asians have done better than......them. The irony of such a statement totally eludes you.

I think you did make your argument quite succienctly, however when you look at how neatly you did make your argument - America is a series of little boxes just like the world is a series of little boxes and each box is separate but not necessarily equal and you have had the good fortune to be born in the right box and can claim superiority over the other boxes.

Props to you. But please, could you just stay in your little box and be quiet. I know you can't see it, but there really is only one other box - it is the rest of humanity, and we are trying to struggle to make that box work for all of us not by denying what we and others have done wrong, but by trying to understand and work past it.

As guilty as that might seem.

ignorant and probably bigoted thing to say, "We were all raised as racists in this country, even if we and our parents were not racist."

In point of fact due to the pervasiveness of television and movies and popular culture in general pushing the message that everyone is as perfect and beautiful and intelligent and so forth as anyone else regardless of culture or ethnicity or race, religion, creed, we were all raised as non-racists in this country -- if one is under age forty-five or so, that is.

Psssst . . . your own little compartmentalized box is showing.

I forgot that the modern American (a thousand apologies to youth, I am 56) has virtualized reality with television and movies (don't get me wrong, I was immersed in Media as the Message long before you were, I just failed to abstract reality - television still seems so.....two dimensional).

I guess in my little compartmental box of reality, I missed the part where Denzel Washington got his house loan at the first bank he tried.

Compartmentalized indeed.

Many people don't get loans from the first bank they tried regardless of race.

Because we are grownups who take responsibility for our own emotions and the consequences of our actions - we don't hide behind the alleged shortcomings of others, we don't sanctimoniously put little halos on our heads "look at me I'm not a racist like those bad people over there". We don't manipulate people to support us by using slander and libel against others. We're not so unbelievably rude as to discuss what other people pay in taxes, how much they earn; we don't presume to know what motivates others. We mind our own business. We don't make phony apologies for things we aren't responsible for, just to score political points. Take it or leave it, we are going to give you the straight story. If you are fucking up big time, you are too dependent on government, you are failing to live up to your obligations, yeah, we are going to put it to you. Straighten up and quit laying your shit off on someone else. In short, we are the opposite of liberal. We are honest and we have integrity.

Sorry,but demographic comparison is not racism, just as not voting for an under-experienced, black liberation theology-indoctrinated, nanny state-proposing, tax the rich-spouting, 99% liberal voting (yet trying to call himself a "uniter") Democrat who happens to be black is not racism, either.

Republicans (and yes, "movement conservatives") can't be guilt-tripped because we're too pragmatic. We actually think about the consequences in the real world of our actions, not just how it will look now or make us feel now.

And it is in part because of my race.

So apparently this conversation is over your head. Maybe if you went back and read the whole thread over again you might understand what the point of the movie reference was.

Then again, maybe not. You see what you want to see, you hear what you want to hear.

Between your thought process and my father's, which is "I'm not going to vote for Obama for president because he's black."

Face it, what we have now is morally and fiscally bankrupt. Do you really think the Founding Fathers had little george in mind when they wrote the constitution? Have you noticed that more and more you find your defense of his policies make you look more and more like a weasel?

So Obama promises to think out of the box and come up with solutions that may or may not work, but they won't be solutions that have been tried and have failed. That is what McCain is promising. We know what is driving us down, we know what is making us weak. We know what direction we are heading.

If Obama doesn't have the right solutions, or is not capable of making those solutions happen, after four years of something different, we won't be any worse off than four more years of the same.policy that got us here.

Unless of course, you're like my dad....

We don't manipulate people to support us by using slander and libel against others.

Yeah, that wouldn't be you - that was those damn Swiftboaters that....worked for you!