Frank Rich has a dishonest and disjointed column up today, the dominant theme of which seems to be smearing whoever he feels like. Here’s his take on Focus on the Family founder Jim Dobson who recently lashed out at some remarks Barack Obama made about religion two years ago:

Perhaps best remembered for linking the cartoon character SquareBob SpongePants [sic] to a “pro-homosexual video,” Mr. Dobson last week used the word “fruitcake” in a rant against Mr. Obama. He has been nearly as dyspeptic, if not quite as “fruit”-fixated, about Mr. McCain.

Based on his religious convictions, I think we know how Dobson feels about homosexuality and Rich is free to take offense at that. But when Dobson referred to Obama’s “fruitcake interpretation” of the Constitution, it’s pretty obvious by his use of “fruitcake” from the original context he meant nutty or crazy, which is a perfectly standard and benign usage. To imply that Dobson called Obama gay is mendacious and without merit, and poisons any attempt at honest discourse here. (And incidentally, it’s SpongeBob SquarePants, not “SquareBob SpongePants.”)

Of course, Rich’s choicest words were saved for Karl Rove:

Its racial undertones are naked enough. Earlier this year, Mr. Rove wrote that Mr. Obama was “often lazy,” and that his “trash talking” during a debate was “an unattractive carry-over from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard.” Last week Mr. Rove caricatured him as the elitist “guy at the country club with the beautiful date.” Provocative as it is to inject Mr. Obama into a setting historically associated with white Republicans, the invocation of that “beautiful date” is even more so. Where’s his beautiful wife? Mr. Rove’s suggestion that Mr. Obama might be a sexual freelancer, as an astute post at the Web site Talking Points Memo noted, could conjure up for a certain audience the image of “a white woman on his arm.”

In order to call Rove a racist here, you have engage in contortions not seen outside Cirque du Soleil. I can’t imagine any sane person would read that graph and not think that Rich is extrapolating to a degree that is utterly bewildering. Rove was calling Obama “lazy” much earlier in the primary process, as a way of explaining a number of his mistakes and misstatements. I don’t know if Rove’s assessment of Obama has changed now that he has the nomination, but it’s unfair to say it carried racial baggage. And if playing basketball and “trash talking” is negative racial messaging, somebody really needs to tell my neighbor with the Volvo in the driveway with the “Ballers for Barack” bumpersticker, replete with a picture of the candidate dribbling the “O” logo between his legs.

As for the country club bit, does Rich not understand how a metaphor works? Rove was clearly trying to paint Obama as an elitist here, thus the country club setting. How Rich gets from there to interracial “sexual freelancer” pretty much makes makes him the Bob Beamon of logical leapers.

I think we’d all agree that racism is still a problem in politics and elsewhere, but this column tells me nothing negative about what Dobson or Rove thinks about the color of Obama’s skin or much of anything else. It does, however, tell me something about the contents of Rich’s character.