As you might imagine, I read a lot of blogs. I rarely bother with the comments, though, unless I’ve commented, and that’s pretty rare too.

Today I commented on a blog post by an old colleague from back in my radio days. Boyd Lewis is one of the coolest dudes around. And he knows his shit. So when he wrote a post at Like the Dew called “Southern to the bone, and scared witless,” well, naturally I read it and left a brief comment. And I even subscribed to the comments so I could see for myself what kind of responses Boyd got.

Most of the responses to a post about the really scarey racism that has become increasingly open among the conservative set since Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president was intelligent, thoughtful and in agreement.

But there was one guy there — apparently well known to the other commenters — who was nothing more than a well-educated bully. He berated Boyd for his views. He accused Boyd and the commenters of “playing the race card” because they couldn’t defend Democratic positions otherwise. And while he didn’t quite come right out and say there was no racism involved in protests against the president, that context was pretty damn obvious.

Really? Isn’t it interesting how the racists rush to deny any racism is present in their positions? Now, I can’t say if Mr. You Stupid Democrats is a racist, but I tend to think that if you can’t see the blatant racism that’s been on display lately, then you probably are.

Boyd was moved to post by Joe “Don’t talk about Strom Thurmond’s illegitimate mixed race daughter because it will soil the good name of a good man” Wilson’s little shout out to the fools who don’t believe what’s written in black and white. And just why was it that every Democratic head in the House chambe that night whipped over in the direction of Addison Graves “Joe” Wilson at that moment but every Republican head stayed glued to Twitter or whatever else they might have been doing?

Anyway, here’s something of what Boyd said:

Lissen up, Joe Wilson (if that is indeed your real name): you and your newly-minted fans are un-American racist dirtbags. And I, descended from slaveowners, know whereof I speak. Wear the garment proudly.

“You lie!” isn’t exactly what I had been yelling at my TeeVee screen in the eight years of Bushism. I echoed Vice President Cheney’s insult to Senator Lehey on the Senate floor (and then some) in my outrage at the honest-to-god turn to fascism we underwent under the pretext of a war on terror. But I didn’t yell FU on the floor of Congress, with the whole damn world watching. Where were the TeaBaggers when we were lied into a multi-trillion dollar, unnecessary and worthless war in Iraq? We could have used them in the largest demonstrations the world has ever known in March 2003. We decent southerners and real Americans didn’t need to carry loaded guns to those protests. Not one. Never happened. Google it. Our ammunition was the truth, not the lies embedded in the stupendous mendacity of Bushist cadres and the Joe Wilson/Babbling Boy Beck/ Fat Druggie Radio Mouth/ Simpering Sean/ Bloviating Bill/ Dick Armey and his entire assembled army of dicks who dribbled into Washington Sept. 12 with more racist signage than I ever saw in Klan rallies I covered in Alabama, Georgia or Mississippi.

I’m afraid we now stand on the brink of the abyss. We look into it, and discover the abyss is looking right back at us, in Nietsche’s phrase. We hear the clicks and chamberings of Murderous Evil locking and loading its arsenal. Something wicked this way comes, and it is blind, furious and armed to the teeth. The AR-15s and AK-47s at presidential appearances are but a prelude. The right to bear arms is now dangerously close to the perceived right to kill presidents of the wrong color.

The Sept. 12 mob, the birthers, deathers, gun nuts and assorted examples of White Men Behaving Badly are not merely misled by media shills for rich and shadowy powers who despise the very concept of We the People. Their behavior in Congress and at the Summer 2009 town halls show they’re almost hysterically angry and have no respect for democratically elected government. These excitable idiots represent the worst aspects of the American experience. They are in league with the demonic strain in our national character. The witch-burners, Indian killers, slave-owners of our past; those Manifest Destinied, greed-soaked, imperialist, segregationist McCarthyite ignorami who have soiled our reputation here and abroad over the centuries are now joined by this sorry pack.

And then came the comments, including Mr. You Sir Are A Disgrace To The Motherland’s screeching condemnation of Boyd and every other human being who can see the truth with their own two eyes.

Meanwhile, my colleagues have spent hours upon hours ruminating over whether Jimmy Carter was right or wrong when he said that racism plays a role in the criticism of the president.

Really? You have to discuss this? A photoshopped picture of Obama as a witch doctor isn’t enough for you? Just what part of that image over there isn’t racist?

And yet, even the president — yes, the black guy who won a democratic election last fall — said he thinks Carter is wrong.

Really? I mean, come on, Barack. Is it gonna take white-sheeted jackasses coming into the White House in the dead of night, dragging you out of bed while Michelle screams and stringing you up on the White House lawn for you to see what’s going on? And if it comes to that, won’t it be just a little too fucking late for the president of the United States to call bullshit on this bullshit?

The conservatives like to say it’s just a few extremists acting this way. But they sure as hell don’t condemn it, now do they? How many Republican congresscritters now have signed on to that ridiculous belief that Barack Obama was born in Kenya?  Oh my fucking god, Martha. We’ve got us a black president with a funny name and he wasn’t even born here.

Truth is, these extremists aren’t very big in numbers in the grand scheme of things. They make up virtually all of the Republican base, though, and a sizable group of the rest. And besides, it only took one Scott Roeder to kill Dr. George Tiller.

My colleagues are getting death threats now if they dare to stray over the acceptable line. Talking about racism, really talking about racism, that’s verboten. We can only bring on a Democratic and a Republican and debate whether what somebody said about racism is right or wrong, and god forbid we should come close to an answer to that question.

So here it is, boys and girls. All conservatives are not racists. There are even racists amongst the more liberal of us. But the undercurrent of all this unhinged anger at President Obama comes from the general conservative hatred of Anything That Is Not Like Us, and goddamn, but an African American Democratic president is sure as hell not like any of them.

And yes, I know quite well that there are legitimate criticisms of this president. Hell, I’ve got a laundry list of ‘em myself.  I’m not one of those cowering liberals who thinks that every slight is racism, every insult bigotry. No, sometimes you lose your job because you’re an asshole and you’re late to work 4 out of 5 times a week and call in sick the 5th.

And it goes both ways. Back in my wayward youth, I got in a lot of trouble for daring to complain when the organizers of  an anti-racism rally– in a Deep South county that was making sport out of harassing the folks on the other side of the tracks — objected to our openly lesbian selves and stuck us at the tail end of the march with no security presence, just a pickup truck full of rednecks wearing conferedate battle flags with shotguns on their gunracks.

Apparently my lesbian-feminist-radical-wannabe socialist sisters didn’t think it seemly to object to being put into a very dangerous situation by the march organizers. Did I mention they were black? Did I mention all of us were white? I didn’t, but it doesn’t matter. What they did showed utter disdain and lack of concern for the lives of one specific group that joined them on that march.

Every one of us experienced the same thing that day, but not a single one of the other women who took that ride ever opened their mouths to object to how we were treated.  Why? Because we can’t have an honest discussion about race in this country.

We can’t have an honest conversation about race in this country because the racists will flatly deny they are racists and promptly accuse whoever brought it up of racism. Jimmy Carter, come on down.

We can’t have an honest discussion about race in this country because the racists and their apologists will claim the real racists are just a small fringe group and you know, we can’t police everybody who comes to our teabagging rallies. And free speech and all, we can’t tell them what to say or not say.

And we can’t have an honest discussion about race in this country because some of the victims/targets of racism and racist behavior lack the ability to tell honest criticism from bigotry.

And we can’t have an honest discussion about race in this country because some of the liberal, white, “anti-racist” people are so fucking afraid of offending anyone and so fucking desperate to prove they’re not racist that they pile on with the numbskulls who see prejudice in every shadow.

Can’t imagine why it’d be so hard to talk about the effect of centuries of racism with all that going on, can you?

But I gotta tell ya, folks, we have to. We have to put aside our egos and our guilt and our fears and the chips on our shoulders and get real. Nothing is gonna change until we do.

Stop being like my idiotic colleagues, who apparently think they’re doing us all a favor by debating endlessly over whether it’s worse to be called a racist or to be a racist.

There is racism afoot, my friends, because we have never — never — had a real national conversation about it. For decades, we’ve ignored it and hoped it’ll go away.

And now the mainstream conservatives aren’t sure if Barack Obama is real American. They call him a socialist, they call him a Nazi — rather mutually exclusive, but facts never stopped these folks. They pass out pictures of watermelons growing on the lawn of the White House, muse if we should call it the Black House now. They do most of this undercover, but we find out about it because eventually one of them sends their little “jokes” to the wrong e-mail list.

What haven’t we seen? Obama raping white women?

This is what ignoring this problem has wrought. It’s way past time to have this discussion, but we damn sure better start now because no amount of ignorance or wishing or hoping is gonna make this go away.