What is tragic to the point of being pathetic is Michael Steele’s honest surprise that your average Republican is a racist jagoff. He seems authentically shocked. It indicates the level of brain activity required to be a Republican.
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Then he admitted to Affirmative Action. 
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Seems to me this quote really is being taken out of context. Of course they put a black man, Michael Steele, in charge to counter the new POTUS who was black and Democratic. But how is that different than McCain taking on Palin just to counter the popularity of Hillary Clinton? Steele was going to be literally the figurehead of the GOP in a cynical ploy to take some of the racist image away from the party just as Palin was going to attract female voters just because she was a white female. Everything is calculated and scripted for the GOP and Michael Steele knew what he was getting into. Was already immersed in matter of fact.
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Not all rethugs are racists, but all racists are rethugs.
Rinse, repeat.
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Maybe now he’ll stop peddling his “both sides do it” bullshit on his show.
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Anyone who is surprised by the overt racism in CPAC has been in a coma for the last 30 years.
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LOL. He’s right though. The hiring of Steele was an act of the most flagrant, cynical “look, we’ve got one too!” tokenism. The only person in the world still laboring under the delusion that Michael Steele was hired on his merits is Michael Steele.
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And who replaced him? Someone just as bad whose reputation has been turned into mud, thanks to his association with the great destroyer.
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The guy is right, Steele being black is really why they gave him the job, qualifications notwithstanding.
It was right after Obama got elected and a lot of Republicans seriously believed that Obama being black is the only reason he won. To them it was ALL about race. Race is why they voted against Obama so they figured race was why everybody else voted for Obama. A thousand other issues notwithstanding.
They seriously believed they could checkmate the librulz by putting a black guy in front.
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Steele was “a little shocked, a little disappointed”? Really? How could he not know what he was getting into? He talks a good talk now from time to time, but I don’t care whether he switches parties. I don’t see Steele as a reliable Democratic campaigner or voter.
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The mask is ripped off revealing the ugliness of CPAC.
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The mask was equally ugly.
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Were he actually smart and a man of integrity, we wouldn’t be in the Republican Party in the first place.
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Once again I think there’s a contrarian take possible on this. Ian Walters looks like a POC himself, certainly. And he may have been trying to say, feeling that as a POC himself he had a certain standing to, that Steele’s hiring was an example of tokenism and wrong for that reason. (There’s some animus against Steele in Conservative World for his recent anti-Trumpism.) It’s not a stretch, they think that all too readily. I really don’t think people are reading this right.
Walters:
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Michael Steele has come a long way from being a mouthpiece on “politically incorrect”. I find him to be more courageous than I thought he would be. Honestly, the 1990’s version of Steele would have sucked Trumps colon stronger than Mittens is doing these days. But lately, he has become a liberal.
BUT…
He can’t be stupid enough to not know the racism wasn’t there all along. He cannot be shocked. He was a “token black” for the Republicans. He built a career on it.
Sorry to say it, but I paid attention back in the day. Michael Steele was not a leading light of intellectualism, ever.
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If Steele was authentically shocked, he’s been in a state of HUGE denial for many years.
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Overt racism is a feature, not a bug, of today’s Trump GOP.
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Agree, but the Trump CPAC is even uglier than the former RWNJ CPAC. I didn’t think it could get uglier, but it did.
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I think it was J.C. Watts, when he was first elected to Congress from Oklahoma, who, when he arrived at the hotel for the Republican National Convention, was asked by a couple of white congressmen to carry their bags to their rooms. It would only take one incident like that to convince me I was in the wrong party.
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“I’m surprised that people still in the party feel this way and look at the contributions that anyone would make to the party through the prism of race,” Steele said.
“Surprised”, as in “disappointed,” or “surprised” as in you couldn’t imagine it happening? If the latter, you haven’t been paying much attention to the rhetoric of your party over the past half-century.
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