Steve Scalise---YAWN!

You've probably heard of the story that Congressman Scalise spoke before a white supremacist group, and is now claiming total ignorance about what the group stood for.

Which is probably 99.44% bullshit, but that's not the point of this post.

When you get right down it it, what Scalise did was nothing more than a blatant application of the GOP's Southern Strategy, which Lee Atwater described over three decades ago:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

That, I submit, is what it was all about and what it is still all about. Mike Huckabee got Wayne Dumond released from prison,* a serial rapist, who went on to commit murder. But that hasn't torpedoed Huckabee's presidential ambitions. Not like the release of Willie Horton sank Michael Dukakis's campaign, at any rate.

You can probably guess the respective racial identities of the two criminals.

Scalise's error wasn't that he spoke to a bunch of white supremacists, for he was merely following the GOP's playbook. His error was being caught doing it. Which is why Boehner and the other GOP congressman will do nothing more than tut-tut in public, for Scalise knows that they are just spreading the ol' whitewash over him.
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* A particularly nasty twist to the efforts of some people in Arkansas to release Dumond was because one of his earlier victims was a third cousin to Bill Clinton. To some folks on the far, far right, any crime committed against anyone related to Clinton was (and still is) worthy of praise.