Don't Call Me Slavish, Whitey

One of the year's biggest electoral busts has been the GOP's effort to elect some of their black stalwarts to major statewide offices. (A little more here.) At the start of the year the party had four such candidates running in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland—now the Michigan one's already gone, and the Ohio and PA ones are heading to landslide defeats. Maryland's Michael Steele is the only candidate that Republicans think could still win. That's in part because the Maryland party has co-opted the P.C. outrage of liberals.

Earlier in the week, Democrat Steny Hoyer (the party's House whip) told an audience of black businessmen that Steele had a career of "slavishly supporting the Republican Party." No one in the audience took offense; the word "slavish" isn't related to American slavery, after all. But Republicans did their best imitation of D.C.'s mayor Anthony Williams, who fired an aide for using the word "niggardly," and started howling for Hoyer's apology—then for his resignation.

I call on Steny Hoyer to resign his post as House Minority Whip due to his reprehensible comments and I call on Ben Cardin repudiate the comments. Additionally, Congressmen Elijah Cummings and Albert Wynn should end their silence on the racial attacks on Michael Steele and denounce the bigoted statements by their colleague.

All this for using a word that wasn't even offending blacks in Maryland, if The Washington Times's follow-up is any indication. So if the GOP's black outreach works, we'll have two parties that pound the table and scream about political correctness. Hooray!