Tim Montgomerie on ConservativeHome ran an interesting article called “Am I racist because I don’t support Obama?“. In the lists of Questions To Which The Answer is No, this would definitely feature. However it’s interesting that he asked it. The comments, as usual on CHome run the whole range of the spectrum from erudite and insightful to banal and downright stupid, but that’s true of most of their threads anyway.

Quite a few of the comments on this one seem to coalesce around the idea that if patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel then crying racism must be in the other half of the duplex. It’s an idea worth considering further.

Many of us noted back during the 2008 primaries and general election that the Obama camp would cry racism at the drop of a hat. He performed poorly in Pennsylvania because of racism. He was trounced in West Virginia because of racism. In August 2008, Jacob Weisberg wrote that the only reason McCain could win the election was because of racism. They could never quite fathom that there were lots of reasons to oppose Obama other than race. Being the least qualified presidential contender since Wendell Wilkie and choosing convicted terrorists, terrorists who would have happily murdered Westerners were it not for their epic levels of incompetence, and racist hatemongers as advisors and and mentors certainly supported the argument that even Hillary Clinton was preferable to Barack Obama. And it was obvious that after he won, the climate would only get worse.

Up until this weekend the accusation that only racists opposed Obama had been made sotto voce with the real criticism being directed at cartoonists. Now that criticism is being directed more generally.

On Saturday, The New York Times’s aging spinster Maureen Dowd opined:
I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

I tended to agree with some Obama advisers that Democratic presidents typically have provoked a frothing response from paranoids — from Father Coughlin against F.D.R. to Joe McCarthy against Truman to the John Birchers against J.F.K. and the vast right-wing conspiracy against Bill Clinton.

But Wilson’s shocking disrespect for the office of the president — no Democrat ever shouted “liar” at W. when he was hawking a fake case for war in Iraq — convinced me: Some people just can’t believe a black man is president and will never accept it.

Leaving aside the fact that many of the charges in Dowd’s first paragraph are actually true to one degree or another it is breathtaking to see a columnist in a major paper, albeit one lurching slowly towards bankruptcy, paint something over half the registered voters in the nation as crazies simply because they don’t support Obama’s various lunatic schemes.

On Monday, the Washington Post, which studiously ignored the march on the Mall on 9-12 at least in comparison to every pissant antiwar demonstration it covered since 2003, ran this story, a half-page above the fold in the Metro section, which begins:

Seeking Healing, Seeing Hostility
Some at Black Family Reunion Criticize Protests Against Obama

On Saturday, tens of thousands of protesters thronged to the U.S. Capitol to angrily accuse President Obama of taking the country in the wrong direction.

A day later, in the shadow of the Washington Monument, many participants at a much smaller gathering — the 24th annual Black Family Reunion — said the level of hostility toward the nation’s first African American president had little to do with policy differences over health care or taxes and everything to do with race.

“It’s not conducive to the coalitions we need to build in this country,” said Vera Hope, 60, of Mount Rainier as she left a booth promoting health prevention. “I’m disgusted and upset by the hostility. Let’s call it was it is – it’s just a disguise for right-wing racists. They are fomenting a climate of violence to provoke people.”

My first thought was that the comment here and those of Dowd was probably related to something 60-ish women had in common but then in today’s Washington Post columnist Petula Dvoark takes up the subject:

We will never know if Rep. Joe Wilson would have screamed “You lie!” at a white president. Or if Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. would have been arrested at his home if he were white. Or if the parents who feared that President Obama was going to deliver a political address to America’s schoolchildren would have felt the same way if Hillary Rodham Clinton or John McCain were giving that speech. Or if the tens of thousands of overwhelmingly white protesters on the Mall on Saturday would have assembled against a president who looked more like them.

“Take a look at the Joe Wilson incident. There are a number of members on the Democratic side who believe George W. Bush should have been in prison, that he is a criminal, yet they didn’t disrespect him that way,” said Michael Fauntroy, a professor of public policy at George Mason University who specializes in race relations. “The disrespect that’s going on with President Obama has race woven into it.”

Many black people, who have endured experiences I can’t begin to imagine, would say the answer to those questions is painfully obvious.

There is plenty about Obama for a great number of Americans to oppose that has nothing to do with his race. He has squandered trillions of dollars that the US does not have on projects which seem devoted to enriching those who supported him in the election. He has taken a sure victory in Iraq and turned it into a closely run thing through actions which seem designed to minimize American influence while maximizing both internal dissent in Iraq and Iranian influence. His actions to date in Afghanistan can best be described as flaccid. He has attempted to destroy US industry through his disastrous cap-and-trade initiative, etc. etc.

What we are seeing is simply a campaign to silence those who fervently believe that Obama’s Administration is both dangerous and incompetent. They have had their ideas savaged every time they have been brought to the attention of the American people. It should be illustrative that each and every one of Obama’s policies could be law by now, Cap and Trade, Card Check, Health Care, you name it, with Democrat votes alone. The fact that he can’t even get his party to vote for his policies should be the story, not some nonsense about opposition to Obama being linked to racism.