Those of us who admire and respect the President, who agree with his policies and support his programs, have had to endure an unending litany of insults and obscenities hurled at him by his enemies. He has been accused of being a foreigner, a Muslim, a Socialist, a coward, a fraud and a forger, a traitor and a liar, an "anti-British, anti-imperialist Mau-Mau" and most laughably of all, a rich, over-educated intellectual elitist (even since before he was elected), and he has been insulted and humiliated publicly, in the halls of Congress on national television. Many of these allegations, by the way, are not crimes or even immoral. And some of them, I feel are downright laudable.

And remember, these insults are not directed at his incompetence or his failures and mistakes, or even his politics. They are specifically aimed at him as a person. He is sub-human, not one of us, an outsider. He is not a Real American. Presumably, only his critics are Real Americans, no one else counts in their little patriotic book of smug self-congratulation.

Maybe that's why the comparisons with plain old racism and bigotry are inevitable. Yes, go right ahead and feign shock and disbelief and self-righteous umbrage. I've already anticipated that objection and I don't believe a word of it.

I am old enough to remember racist political rhetoric from a long way back, all the way to the Kennedy election in 1960. I know all the code words and rationalizations, how it is couched and disguised and euphemised to make it acceptable in polite society, in the church parking lot and in civic-minded Letters to the Editor. I am also from the South, so my ears are highly attuned to the rarified upper frequencies of dog whistles. I can tell you I have not heard political vitriol like this out of the Right since the Civil Rights Era. But it sounds mighty familiar to my ears. I've been here before.

Obama has been repeatedly cast as being "un-American", "anti-American", of not even "knowing what it means to be American". He is "not like us" because he dares to represent policies which are in conflict with the self-appointed professional patriots and their assorted sycophants and boot-lickers on the Right; policies, which by the way, the voters in the country knew he held, and which over half of them presumably approved of, even before he was elected. He is hated not because of what he's done, but because of who he is.

And its not just the Limbaughs and Becks and Coulters and Joe Walshes. There are petty, mean little whiners like that in both parties, I'll be willing to concede that. What is really contemptible is that the responsible, influential leadership of the GOP, its most respected and powerful spokesmen, have looked the other way and let these outrages pass with a (wink, wink) and a "but I never said that myself" smirk. These men are probably not racists themselves, hell, some of them are even black, like my own state's Allan West. But they are not above letting racist thugs do their dirty work for them. Only two, Sen McCain and Gov Huntsman, have stood up publicly and called out this trailer trash for the hateful drooling cretins they are. It appears that they alone, out of an entire political movement, are capable of expressing vigorous opposition without relying on personal slurs to back it up. It's no wonder they are mistrusted and disliked by their own party.

So perhaps you'll have to forgive me if I do crow a bit when a popular GOP celebrity's little mean-spirited partisan stand-up routine falls flat and comes across as the childish, pathetic and hateful tantrum it really is.

Caw, caw, caw.