Jacob Weisberg has a grotesque bit of writing in Slate today, in which he asks "Does Bush really care about black people?" and then answers, "Of course not."

At the heart of the matter is the racial pattern of American constituency politics. I don't think Kanye West can support his view that George W. Bush just doesn't care about black people. But it's a demonstrable matter of fact that Bush doesn't care much about black votes. And that, in the end, may amount to the same thing.

Does it? Constituency politics are all that matters? Let's see...so Louisiana has twice as many electoral votes as Rhode Island. Does that mean that if al Qaeda nuked Rhode Island tomorrow, Bush and Rove would huddle in the White House bunker and decide to just let those 4 electoral votes irradiate and die? Oh wait, but all those white folks around the country would be outraged at all their fair-skinned brethren dying so Bush would have to do something about it?

Follow the tortured logic where you will...it still ends up in blatant stupidity.

Weisberg goes on to talk about how the GOP just hasn't courted black votes. Which of course logically leads to the conclusion that the Bush Administration wanted a bunch of poor black people to drown. Try this syllogism on for size:

The GOP hasn't historically courted black votes.
New Orleans is predominantly black.

therefore...

Bush doesn't give a shit if the city drowns.

Nice, huh?

Some more of his reasoning:

Though he appointed the first and the second African-American secretaries of state, Bush seldom appears before black audiences.

Yeah, those appointments were cynical political moves (but why did he make them if he didn't care about black votes...hm). Or you could say Colin and Condi aren't really black anyway, right? Or that they are really black, but that they're Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima.

And Bush seldom appears before black audiences. Okay. What the fuck does that mean? Does he appear before audiences that have black people in them? But he doesn't often appear in front of exclusively black audiences? What, exactly, is wrong with that?

Oh there's much more to the article, but it's just a wretched piece of drivel and you can go see for yourself if you don't mind sitting through Slate's advertising.