The accusations that Obama opponents are secret (or not so secret) racists continue to fly. As does the pushback. By far, the smartest response I’ve heard if from John McWhorter:

“It gets to the point where we don’t have a word that we use to call people racist who actually are,” said John McWhorter, who studies race and language at the conservative Manhattan Institute.

“The more abstract and the more abusive we get in the way we use the words, then the harder it is to talk about what we originally meant by those terms,” said McWhorter.

It’s not like we don’t have issues of real racism to deal with. Drug arrests, for example, are heavily skewed toward black people. And just today, four black men were cleared of rape accusations in a case that was similar to the Duke case, only without a giant media machine screaming about it. (The latter case also illustrates the increasing need for people to videotape all sexual encounters; for legal reasons).

My personal opinion is that no debate is improved by injecting race into it, one way or the other. Let’s posit, for the moment, that Obama’s opponents are motivated by racism; I mean, we all know how eagerly Rush Limbaugh embraced tax hikes on the rich under Clinton. What’s the advantage of bringing the issue forward? It only diverts the debate into a cul-de-sac on racism. The ability to argue and persuade the American center to one side or the other is lost.

I’ll agree that there is some irrational and visceral hatred of Obama out there. But I think this has far more to do with his party affiliation than his skin color. We saw this sort of thing during the last Administration. The Left denounced Bush as evil even as he advanced agendas — big increases in education funding, campaign finance reform, Medicare Part D — that they had advocated for years. And now we have many “conservatives” denouncing the big-spending and bailouts they supported under Bush. It is my firm belief that about 2/3 of Americans decided their policy opinions based on the letter after the politicians’ name. That is not new.

In fact, that leads to the biggest problem with the accusations of racism — it destroys any possibility of crossing idealogical lines. During the Bush Administration, his defenders denounced his opponents as terrorist sympathizers who hated America. In doing so, they fell through an intellectual trap door. From that point, they could never criticize Bush and never agree with his opponents, even as he did stuff that they opposed and/or violated the law. Because to do so would mean that they had to agree with people who hated America. Thus the increasingly strained and laughable defenses of things like torture.

If the Left goes to the rabbit whole of racial accusation, they will find themselves in the same intellectual trap door. They will never be able to criticize Obama, even as he does stuff they oppose or violates the law (see his plans to expand Bagram). Because to do so would mean they agree with a bunch of racists.

The temporary victory of demonizing the opposition is not worth the long-term price of slicing ourselves up into intellectually isolated groups. Let’s move on. Please.

Media Matters goes there. Never mind that Oswald was a left winger.

Interestingly, if you ignore the political aspects and instead read the Census Bureau’s actual report, you will find that the contention that (a) median income fell under Bush; (b) poverty rose under Bush is mostly a product of the bookends chosen. Both statistics spiked very strongly at the end of Clinton’s reign, owing to the tech bubble, which makes Bush’s years look worse than they actually were.

Long-term, Bush was a wash. Things didn’t get any worse. But they also didn’t get any better. That’s hardly a record to boast about but hardly the worst in history either.

Look, comparing any American President to Hitler is beyond stupid; it’s ridiculously offensive. But when I see signs like this, I have to wonder what percentage of the protestors are saying such things. The media and the Left have a tendency to find the most stupid and extreme representative and claim they are part of the whole. But my Dad was part of today’s protests; he was going up with about a thousand other doctors to talk to Congressmen and explain the problems they have with the healthcare bill. Why does that get zero press and the Hitler-sign-toting fucktards get plenty?

Because it fits a narrative, that’s why.

Matt Welch has a much fairer take here. Interestingly, the protestors are very anti-Bush as well as anti-Obama.

You know, this isn’t far from the truth:

I have little to add to the controversy over Obama’s school speech, other than noting something you already knew:

The controversy over President Obama’s speech to the nation’s schoolchildren will likely be over shortly after Obama speaks today at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia. But when President George H.W. Bush delivered a similar speech on October 1, 1991, from Alice Deal Junior High School in Washington DC, the controversy was just beginning. Democrats, then the majority party in Congress, not only denounced Bush’s speech — they also ordered the General Accounting Office to investigate its production and later summoned top Bush administration officials to Capitol Hill for an extensive hearing on the issue.

Unlike the Obama speech, in 1991 most of the controversy came after, not before, the president’s school appearance. The day after Bush spoke, the Washington Post published a front-page story suggesting the speech was carefully staged for the president’s political benefit. “The White House turned a Northwest Washington junior high classroom into a television studio and its students into props,” the Post reported.

In the GOP’s and others defense, what they objected to wasn’t so much the speech but the creepifying instructions from the Administration for kids to figure out how they could support the President. I thought the reaction was overblown. But I also thought — for the political pundits, at least — it was cynical.

I don’t like the “Cult of the Presidency” aspects of the speech. I have, for some time, been concerned about the image of the President as the Great Moral Leader Of The Nation. But even before I saw the fairly innocuous speech, I thought wasn’t worth the fury it engendered.

So why did it become a big deal? Mainly because of people like Michele Malkin and Rush Limbaugh, who seem to thrive on stoking hysteria. I can’t even listen to Rush Limbaugh anymore, he has become such a caricature of himself. He has fallen from the towering figure of he 90’s, who responded to Clinton and the Democrats with reason, logic and fact — to a right-wing parody who peddles in paranoia and hysterical over-reaction. It’s not enough to oppose Obama, anymore. You have to think he’s evil. And that attitude has trickled down to more and more of conservative base.

It’s enough to make me want to stop blogging. I tire of getting flamed anytime I say anything remotely nice about Obama or obliquely critical of the Right.

I think Friedersdorf says it best:

Unlike some in the media, I don’t regard the grassroots on the right as uniquely insane. I’ve done enough reporting at that level to know that most Americans on the right and left are reasonable people acting in good faith. The right’s fringe problem at this moment in time is one that elites have created as much as any crazy fringe righty. Outfits like Fox News, people like Glenn Beck, talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh — these outfits deliberately play on the worst impulses of the conservative base, stoking their paranoia and misleading them about reality, all for the sake of bigger audiences and greater revenues. That ought to outrage anyone who actually respects the grassroots, and has their best interests at heart.

I am growing increasingly tired of smug lefties informing me that crazy racist hysteria has always been the heart of conservatism — it’s just coming out now. This is just false. I know these people; I’ve lived with these people; I’ve worked with these people; I’ve campaigned with these people. They are not racists or lunatics or hysterics. But they are being fed a constant stream of paranoia-stoking bullshit from a relentless and cynical Right Wing Echosphere.

The good news is that this too will pass. The problem with the fear-stoking rants of Glenn Beck et al. is that it will exhaust itself. Anger and fear are not sustainable and never have been. Eventually, people will tire of having their emotions toyed with. And when that happens, the rating/pageviews of the RWE will collapse and the reasonable Right will re-emerge.

Lovely. Another massive bailout looms with the FHA. Whoever came up with the idea that it should be the government’s job to encourage home ownership needs to be taken out and shot.

Can anyone take Pat Buchanan seriously anymore? After he write this piece of garbage arguing that Hitler didn’t really want a war? Serwer, silbey and Moynihan take him apart.

I could be generous and say this is based on Buchanan’s anti-communism and his desire to portray Stalin as a villain. But that’s simplistic thinking. Both men were evil.

I won’t be generous. This is pure ignorance. Any reading of the record — as detailed exhaustively in Schirer’s towering Rise and Fall of the Third Reich — will destroy the notion that Hitler did not want war. He may not have wanted war with Britain — not right away, at least. But he absolutely had designes on conquering the entirety of Eastern Europe and putting the vast bulk of its “inferior” population to the sword.

Maybe, as Buchanan has suggested, we could have stayed out and let Russia and Germany fight it out between themselves. But there’s no question that Germany would have won and emerged stronger and ready to bring the rest of the world to heel.

Anyway, Buchanan is a bad joke. This is the sort of thing that should end someone’s career as a commentator.

Update: Orac destroys Buchanan. It’s beautiful and includes a Mel Brooks clip.