In his typically self-serving know it all style, Joe Scarborough, posed the question to Pat Buchanan, and Peggy Noonan regarding whether Maureen Dowd’s column was unjustifiably playing the race card. How dare Maureen accuse Joe Wilson, the congressman from South Carolina, of being a racist?  Never mind that he reportedly belonged to the Sons of Confederate Veterans, led a 2000 campaign to keep the Confederate flag waving above South Carolina’s state Capitol and denounced as a “smear” the true claim of a black woman that she was the daughter of Strom Thurmond, the ’48 segregationist candidate for president.  

As Maureen writes, "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.”  

She describes the reluctance with which she concludes that racism is rearing its ugly presence with this president. She writes;   

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.

Obama did not win the presidency because of his race he won despite it. Winning the presidency did not eliminate racism in America. It remains alive and vibrant. To paraphrase that famous Rap Brown quote, “Racism is as American as apple pie.”

Maureen Dowd is to be congratulated for saying what many of us have observed from the beginning of the Obama campaign in watching him navigate through the American racist minefield. America’s saving grace in this election was that reason trumped racism. After the debacle of the Bush administration the superior intelligence and political acumen of Barack Obama, black or whatever, was like the proverbial “breath of fresh air.”

During the campaign period, racist resentment had simmered among those “guns and religion” people who for a while appeared stunned into inaction by the election outcome. They were like the bull that had been twisted into momentary paralysis by the matador’s cape work with the election of the first black President. However, it took less than three months for them to come out of their stupor and start their pushback jumping on any issue that represented opposition to the black guy even if it was against their own interest.

These people are now, to their own detriment, in lock step with the insurance companies that stands to pick up 40 million new customers with the health care bill. In opposing a public option that would as the President said, “keep the insurance companies honest,”  they are proving to be not only racist but self-defeating suckers of the insurance companies.

Maureen has broken the silence and dared to utter that the Emperor has no clothes on, along with the nods of agreement there is that group of detractors who have never been comfortable with this sea change and have been attending these rallies brandishing everything from pictures depicting the president as a naked aborigine, posters connecting Senator Kennedy’s death to “Obamacare,” to bringing assault weapons to Obama rallies.

The only thing left out are the hoods and the sheets, which even if they were included would likely not compel the Scarboroughs, Buchanans, and Noonans of the world to admit that racism is an integral part of this blowback.

It’s interesting watching the shrill denials and denouncements of columnist and commentators who have been stripped of their impartial cover by Maureen’s racism column.  

A day after Maureen Dowd’s column appeared pointing out the racist motivation of much of the extreme criticism of our first black President; President Carter reinforced Maureen Dowd’s conclusions. In an interview with Brian Williams on NBC President Carter stated, “he has been extremely bothered by the heightened climate of racial and other hate speech since the election of President Barack Obama.” He went on to say that “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African American.” President Carter had much more to say further supporting his observation.

It shouldn’t go unnoticed how Republicans and conservatives of all stripes are deafeningly silent or supportive of what is obviously racism raising its ugly presence. Fox news anchor Britt Hume chimed in with a commentary stating that making the charge of racism against the Presidents critic’s amounts to its being used whenever the president is criticized and cheapens its effectiveness.

Scarborough poses the insightful cogent argument that President Clinton was hated like none other before him and ergo the hate that is being directed at Obama has nothing to do with race. In other words all hate and criticism comes from the same place none of which being race. Once again Joe exposes his Limbaugh logic.

Bill Cosby put the whole issue in context when he recalled the polls taken during the election period in which a sizable number of Caucasians said they could not vote for a black man. Clearly those people remain in America. And there is no reason to believe that all of these hardcore racists are now sitting on their proverbial hands. It’s particularly noteworthy that the congressman who made the disrespectful insulting precedent setting “you lie” remark while the President was speaking to congress and the country has received over a million dollars in contributions from donors around then country

However, that the question of whether racism is a factor among those who criticize this president with unprecedented vitriol and venom in a country that continues to struggle with the subject of race speaks for itself. If it was out of the question the issue wouldn’t be raised. As long as Fox news, and people like Scarborough, Buchanan, Glen Beck, Russ Limbaugh, Peggy Noonan, and Britt Hume assure us that there is no racism involved in this extreme criticism of the President, we can be certain that it is.