Back in the 1700s, English author Samuel Johnson once declared that patriotism was "the last refuge of a scoundrel." That may have been true then. Today, calling someone a "racist" goes to the head of the list.
Former president Jimmy Carter, along with countless others on the left, have decided that anyone who disagrees with their cherished dogma and its standard-bearer, president Barack Obama, can be dispatched with the utterance of a single word.
Such thinking reveals far more about those who embrace it than those towards whom it is directed.
There isn't a more tattered playing card in the deck of modern political discourse than the race card. It has been played so often that its ability to cow even those who harbor genuinely racist feelings has been completely dissipated. Those who don't recognize the word's metamorphosis from a club to a feather are myopic.
And what breeds such willful blindness? Ideological snobbery. "We're right and you're stupid" is the template. With the election of a mulatto president—who, for the sake of leftist invective is "officially" black—"we're right and you're racist" is the current variation of the underlying theme.
So, who's buying it? Virtually no one, save the perpetrators of such intellectual vacuity themselves.
And therein lies the ultimate irony of what they are trying to accomplish. No one will be won over to a point of view by name-calling—unless it's opposite side of those doing the name-calling. Join us and we'll stop calling you a racist—or a sexist, homophobe, red-neck, etc.—is hardly the siren song of thoughtful persuasion.
Such name-calling is also wearing very thin. Americans genuinely concerned with the direction in which this country is headed are already scared and angry. Scared, angry—and racist? Good luck with that.
Unfortunately, the invective will continue for one simple reason: with each passing day, more and more Americans are realizing leftist "solutions" to America's problems are anything but. Bankrupting the country in order to institute "fairness" isn't flying, especially when such fairness is to be determined by a handful of elitist politicians, pundits and unelected czars.
As a result, people must be brow-beaten into accepting that which is "good" for them, whether they like it or not. With that goal in mind, we're all "racists" in need of leftist redemption from our wayward concerns. Debate is unnecessary—and time-consuming—when the end, courtesy of a Democratically-controlled White House and Congress, is "inevitable."
Nothing is inevitable. If it were, Barack Obama's approval ratings wouldn't be lower than those of George W. Bush at the same point in their respective presidencies. 57% of Americans wouldn't be ready to toss the whole Congress out on their ears and start over. Millions of Americans wouldn't have bothered to show up at town hall meetings, and thousands wouldn't have traveled all the way to Washington D.C. to express their misgivings.
All of those Americans are racists? According to the left, they are also "tea-baggers," "Nazis," "angry mobs," "right-wing extremists," "astro-turfers," etc., etc. Racist has become a one-size-fits-all term of convenience under which all other derisive characterizations of ordinary Americans can be filed.
I'm guessing linguistic "diversity" proves unwieldy when it comes to insulting large numbers of people.
So here we are. For the foreseeable future, all of us who disagree with the current administration's policies for any reason will be tantamount to a cross-burning, sheet-wearing, lynch mob, determined to put a poor, misunderstood, (half) black president "in his place."
Those who perpetrate such nonsense? Scoundrels, one and all.
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