Trump and the ‘Racist Tweets’. "What does “racist” even mean anymore?"

"There’s a difference between racist and just stupid."

Tony Branco

Andrew C. McCarthy  "Racism is the headline on President Trump’s Sunday tweets — the media-Democrat complex assiduously describes them as “racist tweets” as if that were a fact rather than a trope. I don’t think they were racist; I think they were abjectly stupid.
"Like many Americans, I am tired of being lectured about racism by racists and racialists, individuals whose full-field explanation for all life’s issues is this matter of genetic happenstance that should be increasingly irrelevant in a pluralistic society.

"Is it “racist” to tell people who have contempt for the country — who abhor the common culture that makes us American — that they ought to go back to where they came from? It has nativist and reactionary overtones, but I don’t think it is racist. I’ll grant this much, though: It is closer to actual racism than the Left’s usual demagogic claim: I am a racist if I extend to a non-white nincompoop like Ilhan Omar the courtesy of taking her seriously as an individual and a public official, as if it were her race rather than the idiocy of what she says that moves me to dissent.

"It would be racist to tell the progressive “Squad” that they don’t belong in our country because of their race or ethnic roots. I don’t understand Trump to have done that. He is attacking their radicalism, which they wear like a badge of honor.

"I don’t believe Trump is a master strategist who did this to force Speaker Pelosi and other mainstream Democrats, at their electoral peril, to embrace the radicals. That’s just the lemonade that Trump supporters are trying to make of the president’s never-ending supply of lemons*. In any event, while it is beneath a president to carp in Trump’s juvenile way, I have less heartburn in principle with a president’s attacking radicalism than I do with a congresswoman’s claim that any criticism of her is an implicit criticism of immigrants, women, black people, etc. 

"The real problems here, in 2020 terms, are the stupidity and insensitivity of the president’s Twitter twaddle." . . .
*In contrast, Rush Limbaugh thinks Trump is brilliant for this.:

Off the record, House Dems tell CNN’s Tapper that Trump was ‘brilliant’ snookering Dems into letting The Squad become their symbol
. . . "Kudos to Tapper for getting the truth out of the Dems, and for publishing it on Twitter. It takes some guts for an employee of Jeff Zucker's CNN  to tell the public things that don't support The Narrative that the Left continues to peddle." . . .