Goldberg: Liberals have turned to race baiting out of desperation

By Jonah Goldberg

Of all the poisonous, ugly and intellectually vapid controversies ginned up in my lifetime, the current breakout of St. Vitus' Dance over the “racist” opposition to Barack Obama may be the most egregious.

Al Sharpton tells CNN's Larry King that decent and racially sensitive Americans shouldn't let a small minority make health care into a “racial issue.”

Someone in the control room surely yelled, “Cue the laugh track!”

In case you don't get the joke, this entire “debate” over whether opposition to Obama's health care reform is racist is totally, completely and in every way conceivable an invention of the left.

Oh, sure, there are some racists who oppose Obama. Shocking news.

And yes, a tiny fraction of the signs at the Tea Party protests were racially insensitive. But if that's how we're going to score, then opposition to the Iraq war is anti-Semitic. After all, I saw a bunch of signs at antiwar protests that said bigoted things about Jews.

Meanwhile, no significant conservative politician, pundit or intellectual has said they object to Obama's agenda because he's black. Rather, they've said they oppose his agenda for precisely the same reasons they oppose Nancy Pelosi's and Harry Reid's agendas. They stand athwart Obama yelling “Stop!” just as they did with Clinton and Democratic presidents before him.

Magically, the alchemic powers of Obama's black skin transmogrify the same arguments and the same rhetoric into racism. Saying “you're wrong” to a white politician is a disagreement; saying it to a black politician is like shouting through Bull Connor's megaphone.

There isn't an issue or flavor of ice cream Al Sharpton won't inject racism into. But suddenly Larry King must ask him whether opposition to socialized medicine is racist - as if his response was ever in doubt.

Left-wing writers spent the week droning on about how it's now racist to say “I want my country back.” These amnesiacs are blissfully unaware that “taking back” America was the rallying cry of the Democratic Party for eight years under George W. Bush. Anti-white racists all?

Jimmy Carter sighs, “It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns.”

Well, ditto. Except I think the abominable circumstance is the eruption of nonsense belched forth from distempered liberals frustrated by their inability to win a public policy debate.

An “overwhelming proportion” of the vocal opposition to Obama stems from the “inherent feeling” that “an African-American should not be president,” testifies the de facto voice of Southern self-loathing.

Really, President Carter? Based on what? Polls you've studied? Or did you descend from the temple of the Carter Center, flee your enabling entourage of sycophants and canvass some neighborhoods yourself?

The good news is that the race peddlers have undermined themselves. The notion that opposing skyrocketing deficits and socialized medicine is racist is met with eye rolls by the majority of Americans.

Maureen Dowd of The New York Times hears Rep. Joe Wilson shout, “You lie!” and her instinctive response is: “fair or not, what I heard was an unspoken word in the air: You lie, boy!”

It's the “fair or not” that gives Dowd away. She admits to hearing racism whether or not it's warranted. That's called prejudice. Dowd, Carter and Sharpton can't grasp that conservatives are less hung up on race than they are. “Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it,” writes Dowd. She's right. She's one of them.

You can write to Jonah Goldberg at JonahsColumn@aol.com