My race card in your face card

So are we all racists now?

When South Carolina Congresscrat Joe Wilson cried out "You lie!" during yet another daily Obama oration in front of yet another TV camera the professional race-baiters came crawling out of their crawl spaces.

Poor Joe had everything going against him that guaranteed charges of racism: he's white, he's male, he's Southern, he's Republican. And the president is black.

The perfect storm for racial ranters.

Alas, in politics, people who call other people racists always have something to gain from it. Whether the charge is true or not is irrelevant.

Former President Jimmy Carter had something to gain when he laid down his Habitat for Humanity hammer long enough to amble out of his peanut patch and pop up on a pretend news story on NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams and drawl, "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" (MSNBC)

It was a pretend news story because Carter wasn't there as a newsmaker, he was there to escape from his well-earned obscurity long enough to hustle ratings for his upcoming primetime interview appearance on NBC. His presence was a promotional infomercial staged to look like news on a news show.

Yep, flinging the race word at viewers the way a chimp flings his own feces at zoo-goers oughtta drive up those overnight Neilsens.

(The President did earn props, or at least credit for clever political posturing, for his rejection of Carter's racism reproach.)

But what if one person calls another person of the same race a liar? Is it still bigotry? If it is, what do you call it? Intramural Racism?

Much to the potential chagrin of the racial hog callers, writer Sean O'Donnell over at the Baltimore Republican Examiner discovered just such a culture war sporting event and reported on it in a recent article he titled Liberal hypocrisy: A black economist called Obama a liar days before Wilson did.

The black economist is one Thomas Sowell.

Thomas Sowell is perhaps the premierist of premier African-American writers and thinkers in America today. He has, according to his website, published books on economics (7), education (2), ideas and ideology (4), and race and ethnicity (6). He's a popular and widely syndicated columnist. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, earned a master's in economics from Columbia and a doctorate in econ from the University of Chicago. As a professor he taught at Cornell, Rutgers, Amherst, Brandeis, and UCLA.

Both the traditional small-government low-tax conservatives and the neither-right-nor-left live-and-let-live libertarians claim him as one of their own.

Thomas Sowell, a black man, called President Obama, a black man, a liar in the online news site Capitalism Magazine.

(If you are one of those culture war warriors who suffers from a severe knee-jerk aversion to the very word "capitalism" and can't get past what you perceive as a deeply offensive shibboleth long enough to read a person's actual words, you are hereby excused for the rest of this article.)

Sowell called Obama a liar in the very title of his article, not once Obama: Listening to a Liar, Part I but twice Obama: Listening to a Liar, Part II.

So what is a good race-chaser to do?

Ignore it, of course. Something like this just doesn't fit into the narrowly crafted race-abasing narrative of the political and cultural and media race junkies' playbooks. Politicians would have to discuss actual policies. Reporters and talking news videoheads would have to be retrained. Culture warriors would be forced to regard one another as real people with differing ideologies rather than conveniently-labeled stereotypes.

But the public may finally be getting wise to The Boy Who Cried Race syndrome, especially when it's used like too much frosting slathered on a cake to hide its stale taste.

After all, we've all been told that race became a dead issue once an African-American achieved the highest political power position in the land. When the majority of people who bother to vote cast their votes for a black man it can no longer be said that black people are being held back on the basis of their race.

At least that was the argument we were given. "Waddaya mean Whitie is holding you back? We have a black president, for chrissakes!"

So it's bad news for the mechanical race-bots. They're gonna have to come up with a new snipe-word if they want to keep avoiding intelligent discourse.

(Read the Reed interview at The US Report)