I was very sorry to read the now-notorious column by Andy Rosenthal, whom I met back in Moscow in 1986 when he was the AP bureau chief there, and whom I liked very much. One hestitates to say that unsupported and wholly imaginary accusations of racism are the last refuge of a liberal with no facts on his side, but alas, such is the case.

For the modern Left, racism is their greatest obsession. It consumes them, and causes them to seek out its hidden manifestations everywhere and everywhere, seeing signs that only they can recognize and interpret. It’s a kind of de Clarembault’s syndrome variant, a delusional monomania. This is not to say that racism does not exist. But (unlike the Times) we no longer live in a world in which Bull Connor’s dogs and fire hoses stand ready to be sicced and trained on freedom marchers. (Connor was, of course, a Democrat.) Indeed, the more progress America makes in race relations, the more liberals are certain that the Scottsboro Boys are just around the corner. It explains their ferocious fealty to Barack Obama, even when he disappoints them by not being radical or progressive enough.

Rosenthal’s lede sets the tone:

Talking about race in American politics is uncomfortable and awkward. But it has to be said: There has been a racist undertone to many of the Republican attacks leveled against President Obama for the last three years, and in this dawning presidential campaign.

And yet, “talking about race” is pretty much all we’ve been doing ever since Obama’s widely hailed and now-forgotten 2008 speech on race in the aftermath of the Rev. Wright near-debacle. In fact, the Times itself has interactively memorialized the address. And who can forget Attorney General Eric Holder’s charming accusation that America was “a nation of cowards” when it came to discussing race? Or his more recent remark that criticism directed against him and Obama was “due to, you know, the fact that we’re both African-American.”

I have no doubt that Rosenthal genuinely believes that, burbling just beneath the VRWC surface, racism still runs deep — it’s one of the ways the Left, which lives largely in the world of its imagination, consistently misapprehends the Right. Alas, in his piece he gives no specific examples of behavior that any sensible person would deem inherently racist, even by today’s expansive definition, and instead settles for citing routine insults typical of the kind directed against any president with whom one disagrees (e.g., Dan Rather’s public sassing of Nixon, the Jerry Ford ridicule, the Reagan hatred, Bush Derangement Syndrome). Then the tinfoil hat stuff really kicks in:

Sometimes the racism is more oblique. Newt Gingrich was prattling on the other day about giving “poor children” in “housing projects” jobs cleaning toilets in public schools to teach them there is an alternative to becoming a pimp or a drug dealer. These children, he said, have no work ethic. If there’s anyone out there who doesn’t get that poor kids in housing projects is code for minorities, he or she hasn’t been paying attention to American politics for the last 50 years. Mr. Gingrich is also fond of calling Mr. Obama “the greatest food stamp President in American history.”
Is Mr. Romney playing the same chords when he talks about how Mr. Obama wants to create an “entitlement society”? The president has said nothing of the sort, and the accusation seems of a piece with the old Republican saw that blacks collect the greatest share of welfare dollars.

Talk about emanations from penumbras! This is simply ahistorical nonsense. Even a cursory reading of American history between 1880s and the 1930s would reveal that how to deal with the unassimilated underclass — mostly Irish, Italians and Jews, each of which was considered a separate “race” by the standards of the day — was foremost in everybody’s minds, in part provoked by the ethnic gangsters, street thugs who evolved into the Prohibition-era legends (Owney Madden, Dutch Schultz, Charlie Lucky) and later, the Mafia. Inculcation of the Protestant work ethic and getting people off the dole, away from crime and put to work was deemed crucial to the future of the nation. And they succeeded.

Finally, there is something insulting about the notion that opposition to Obama is rooted in his race. It demeans the president to effectively assert that criticism of him is due to his African patrimony. The country is not facing the choice next November between a white man and a black man.

Rather, it’s between two diametrically opposed schools of thought. Between personal freedom and individual liberty on one hand, and collectivist tyranny and coercive “virtue” on the other. Obama — forget his race — represents the culmination of what the Left has been trying to achieve at least since McGovern in 1968, and they are not about to go down without a fight — they need victory “by any means necessary,” to use one of their favorite expressions, and if they have to play the race card, they will.

The attempt to paint principled conservatives as racist is deceitful, disgraceful and dishonest — and, alas, utterly typical of the post-Alinsky Left. It’s high time we started calling them on it, and their own odious past history.