The Legendary K.O., "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"

This weekend saw the fourth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, an ugly storm that revealed an ugly side of America. Our nation's slothful indifference to the needs of the people trapped in the region was nothing short of shocking, and Kanye West was right to call it as he saw it.

But the Legendary K.O. made one error in transferring Kanye's loaded soundbite to the song "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People": they rendered the refrain as "George Bush don't like black people. That's not the case. I'm sure there was no personal animus from W toward African Americans. What Kanye meant - and what I agree to be the case - was that black people in the Deep South, being on the whole poor and uninfluential, were simply off George's radar; dull man that he was, he just couldn't conceptualize that there were actual people down there in actual suffering. Their economic and social status defined their humanity in his and his administration's eyes. Like most Republicans in 2000s America, the only people George Bush was able to recognize as people were people who were a lot like him.

Alas for George and his GOP cronies, it's a different world: Your neighbor may well not be at all like you anymore. Your sister-in-law may well not be at all like you. Your boss may well not be at all like you. And, yes, your president may well not be at all like you. For those reactionaries and John Birch-inspired fearmongers, I have but one word in response: Deal.

And the comic tragedy, of course, is that "not at all like you" is a fallacy anyway. Not that you could tell a modern-day right-winger that.