Helpful Associated Press Is Helpful

The AP has decided that since liberals are simply crying racism too much to make them comfortable, that the claims themselves have no meaning, and therefore nobody is in fact racist because really, everyone is.

Everybody's racist, it seems.

Republican Rep. Joe Wilson? Racist, because he shouted "You lie!" at the first black president. Health care protesters, affirmative action supporters? Racist. And Barack Obama? He's the "Racist in Chief," wrote a leader of the recent conservative protest in Washington.

But if everybody's racist, is anyone?

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The word is being sprayed in all directions, creating a hall of mirrors that is draining the scarlet R of its meaning and its power, turning it into more of a spitball than a stigma.

"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," he said.

What the word once meant — and still does in Webster's dictionary — is someone who believes in the inherent superiority of a particular race or is prejudiced against others.

I choose to respond through prior precedent.

On Fox & Friends today, Glenn Beck called Obama "a racist" during a discussion of how the president handled the arrest of Henry Louis Gates.

"This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture," Beck said. "I don't know what it is."

The AP is apparently deeply confused about what actually qualifies as racism, so much so that they are directly buying the winger argument that anyone who points out that the wingers believe the President hates white people and that America should reconsider bus segregation are themselves the real racists.

The real argument of course is "Well now, you wouldn't be so uncomfortable with these statements if you hadn't gone and forced us to make them when you elected a negro President, you stupid libs."

It's simply too obvious to grasp, apparently. The hatred of Obama's "otherness" actually transcends racism to include hating him for a variety of other prejudicial and bigoted reasons. It's so much worse than racism it's frightening, it's delirium on a scale of millions. But it's not just racism...that would be wholly underestimating the hate.

Also, what Digby said.

[UPDATE 12:52 PM] And David Brooks continues the Village assault on the Left, blaming them for all this.

What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.

“One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,” the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. “The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.”

It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.

Yes David, it's America Versus The Stupid.