Two igno­rant crack­ers got them­selves arrested today after plan­ning to assas­si­nate Barack Obama.

Law enforce­ment agents have bro­ken up a plot by two neo-​Nazi skin­heads to assas­si­nate Demo­c­ra­tic pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Barack Obama and shoot or decap­i­tate 88 black peo­ple, the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobacco Firearms and Explo­sives said Monday.

Assas­si­na­tion plot tar­get­ing Obama dis­rupted — Yahoo! News

Frankly, I’m sur­prised we haven’t seen more of this by now. I grew up in Texas, in a pre­dom­i­nantly black neigh­bor­hood. Seri­ously, there were three white kids in my high school, one of the larger schools in Hous­ton. Until I was ten or so, I thought I was just a really pale brother. But even so, I ran into enough big­oted red­necks to under­stand that the irra­tional roots of racism run deep in the south. It was only 40 years ago that the fed­eral gov­ern­ment had to inter­vene to guar­an­tee the right of reg­is­tra­tion and vot­ing to African Amer­i­cans (which still doesn’t work that well, see Florida 2000, Ohio 2004).

There are still a lot of igno­rant white peo­ple in the south who just can’t accept the idea of a black pres­i­dent of the United States. It is lit­er­ally alien to their entire world­view. I think one of the few things the Repub­li­can party has done right this elec­tion cycle is keep­ing these wingnuts out of the news, sweep­ing real domes­tic ter­ror­ists like the Klu Klux Klan under the rug until the elec­tion is over. But those idiots are still down there, and they’ll still be there after Novem­ber 4th. What do we do about them then?