Southern GOP Chairman Resigns Over Racist E-Mail, The Sky Is Blue

Virginia Beach Republican Party Chairman David Bartholomew has resigned after sending out a hilarious racist e-mail about taking a dog to get welfare benefits. We probably should have warned you before posting that sentence, as some of you probably fainted from the sheer surprise at reading such a thing. A Republican official sent out a racist e-mail and Christine O'Donnell said something stupid today? How do we make sense of these strange occurrences? So what's the deal with this dog? Was he eating watermelons with Obama in the White House garden? You know, that old cliche? No, this e-mail just compared blacks and Hispanics to the dog. Humor!

Here's this year's Mark Twain Prize recipient:

MY DOG

I went down this morning to sign up my Dog for welfare.

At first the lady said, "Dogs are not eligible to draw welfare".

So I explained to her that my Dog is black, unemployed, lazy, can't speak English and has no frigging clue who his Daddy is.

So she looked in her policy book to see what it takes to qualify...

My Dog gets his first check Friday.

Is this a great country or what?

Oh, but this guy isn't racist! He just doesn't understand how this e-mail thing works!

The e-mail was dated March 15 and sent from the address that Bartholomew uses as party chairman. Bartholomew forwarded it without reading the contents when "he was first getting familiar with the Internet," Byler said.

Just getting familiar with the Internet here in 2010 . We can't even make a joke about old people using the Internet for the first time because come on , even 104-year-old bed-bound paupers have used the Internet by this point. The only people who have not gone online are currently in the womb. And that's only some fetuses. Most fetuses have probably taken part in some sort of smart-phone application before they even get out of their first trimester.

But this racist e-mail does raise an important issue: naturalized dog citizenship. Get on that, Congress. [ Hampton Roads ]