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.

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.

“A lot of these outbursts have to do with delegitimizing him as a president,” said Congressman Jim Clyburn, a senior member of the South Carolina delegation. Clyburn, the man who called out Bill Clinton on his racially tinged attacks on Obama in the primary, pushed Pelosi to pursue a formal resolution chastising Wilson.

Maureen Dowd, NY Times 9-13-09

I'm afraid this is at the forefront now; suspicions of that other who comes from a different place; the fears of a black uprising, the same kind of paranoid delusions that filled the South when it came to the black man on the other side of town, after generations of slavery and Jim Crow. Obama grew up in multicultural Hawaii which is very mixed race. I doubt he even confronted a nasty white gang trying to accuse him of something, but maybe ....  But Dowd's point is relentlessly the case now, and with the death of conservatism which managed to accommodate some liberal ideas (LBJ had 14 Republicans with him on Medicare in '65), we have an extreme polarization fueled by the right wing talk people, Fox, etc. The tea party March on DC yesterday was relatively peaceful, but all the vast potential for hatred we saw during the Civil Rights days is back in full force. The pissed off congressman (Wilson) who shouted 'You Lie!' at Obama was the same archetypal shadow figure who gleefully called ML King, Martin Luther Coon, or who is able today to think of all black men in terms of 'you boy, get away from the white man's supremacy!' One can just hope there can be at least some voices to calm the waters of what could be an era of incivility, race warring, or worse ....  I doubt that Obama, even with his gifts of rhetoric and intelligence, can deal with this unfolding polarity. We need a lobbyist for sanity and the common good that can help even the blindfolded to see.  'It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Superman!'......BP