Charlie Daniels Explains He's Not A Racist, Just An Unhinged Paranoid

Has-been fiddle man Charlie Daniels would just like to make a very, very important point that no one has ever noticed before: It is possible to disagree with Barack Obama because of your heartfelt convictions without automatically being a racist. We would just like to go on the record as stating that we fully agree with Mr. Daniels. Of course, when your heartfelt convictions are a batshit crazy stew of John Birch Society tropes, why would you need to throw racism in on top of everything else?

Mind you, we would add that Mr. Daniels can plausibly be called at least a teensy bit racist, considering he penned a dumb post-9/11 anthem that goes

This ain't no rag, it's a flag and we don't wear it on our heads.

It's a symbol of the land where the good guys live.

But on the whole, most of Mr. Daniels' public statements are just mainstream right-wing paranoia and half-truths. Consider his Twitter feed, where he shares with the world a melange of Bible verses, thoughts on the popular game of foot-the-ball, and whatever Fox News is saying on any given day (Hillary Clinton's "concussion" is fake, Obama wants to take all the guns away, and Al Gore is a fat hypocrite because he has not renounced electricity, for instance). Also, for some reason, Mr. Daniels has made a point of posting a daily tweet, since January 9th, asking "MR OBAMA WHAT REALLY HAPPENED IN BENGHAZI?" Because apparently this will keep the President's feet to the fire. But we would be hard-pressed to characterize any of it as "racist."

And so, let us examine Mr. Daniels' careful attack on a straw man. First off, he knows what racism is and what it isn't, since he was "born in the Deep South when the Jim Crow laws were in full force" and has seen for himself "the cruelty and downright stubborn foolishness of segregation and all it's attendant inequities":

Having lived through those days and, on my own, shook off the yoke of racial prejudice that was once so firmly ingrained in me, I deeply resent the careless and reckless use of the word by people who are merely trying to be insulting, having absolutely no idea of the gravity of it's meaning.

Disagreeing with somebody of a different race, color or religion does not constitute racism; racism is when you disagree with somebody because of what they are, not because of a difference of opinions.

We'll even agree with Mr. Daniels on that, and congratulate him on overcoming his childhood prejudices, even as we wonder at how he manages to use semicolons correctly, but not apostrophes.

Needless to say, this means that most accusations of racism are false, because people who support Barack Obama are dummies who don't understand their own beliefs:

If you disagree with President Obama, as I often do, you are sure to be accused of racism by some individual who doesn't have enough imagination or is too prejudiced themselves to come up with a valid argument about why what you've said is wrong in their opinion so they hide behind insults, innuendo and hyperbole, unable to defend their position, many times because they don't really know what their position is, being basically political parrots, only able to repeat what they've read or heard.

Golly. We feel compelled to point out that we are an elastic material and you are an adhesive material, ha-ha, so there. Poopyhead.

In any case, what are these heartfelt convictions that lead him to non-racist-ly oppose Barack Obama? (we should note that Mr. Daniels does not call him "Obongo" even a single time)

My concern is that he is centralizing the federal government in an attempt to make it an all-powerful entity unanswerable to anybody, even the citizens it purports to serve.

I believe that President Obama has mistakenly perceived the election he just won as a mandate to make this nation in the image of what he thinks it should be which will continue to tear it apart as the opinions of roughly half the population will be ignored.

As opposed to the roughly half of the population that is too lazy to take any responsibility for their lives, of course. They deserve to be ignored. And why would any president think that merely winning an election means they have legitimacy? The nerve of that fellow!

I don't think he takes the Constitution seriously and will attempt to subvert it by presidential fiat, executive privilege and backdoor, midnight deals with Congress, getting his way by any method at his disposal.

Why, yes. That is a very serious concern, and we are very impressed by the evidence you marshall to support it.

I believe that, as the entitlement society grows under Obama's watch, they will become a monolithic political force and will elect local and federal candidates who will give them more and more.

Only a maniacal ideologue would hear a dog-whistle here. He did not say that the poors who will bring about tyranny belong to any particular demographic group, after all!

I believe that the one government entity with a steady hand on the wheel, the Supreme Court, will become a rubber stamp as the members retire and Obama type presidents appoint new ones and the sheep in the Senate confirm them.

This one surprised us -- we thought that wingers distrusted those "unelected judges who legislate from the bench."

Daniels continues on with a nightmare scenario in which a 3-point increase on the marginal tax rate on incomes over $400,000 brings all investment and economic growth to a halt, the world economy crashes, and then

the federal government will one day suddenly run completely out of funds. It won't be able to borrow any more and, when the entitlement checks and food stamps don't go out, there will be mass and uncontrollable rioting in the cities.

Again, no dogwhistles here. Mr. Daniels is fully aware that the majority of food stamp recipients are white, and it's only logical that the riots will happen in cities, because the rural poor just don't come together in big enough concentrations to riot.

I believe that martial law will be declared, posse comitatus will be ignored and federal troops will be used on American soil to quell the violence, which means a complete collapse in American society.

That is my problem with President Obama. Don't confuse my heartfelt convictions with racism.

What do you think?

What we think, Mr. Daniels, is that if the standard for being a racist is "calling for a good lynchin'" or "using the n-word (and have you noticed the blacks say it all the time?)", then, no, you are not all that racist, even if you're somehow unaware of those dogwhistles you're blowing. You would undoubtedly say all this crazy shit about any president who's a Democrat, which means you're merely a paranoid nutcase whose heartfelt convictions are not based in reality. That is what we think.

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