GETTING THE PRIORITIES STRAIGHT. Robert Stacy McCain on a story about some redneck who put up a sign saying "Obama's plan for health-care: Nigger rig it":

First of all, Patrick Lanzo isn't originally from Paulding County, Ga., and...

...second, his tasteless sign is not a valid commentary on ObamaCare. But among the several other things wrong with this CBS News story, let's start with the dateline.

Thus a story about a self-evident racist -- not a crypto-racist, not an impression-of-racist, but an honest-to-God specimen -- becomes one about poor fact-checking. And how McCain suffers from the unfortunate and inexplicable "presumption that all white people from the South are uniquely racist."

The story to which McCain links notes that "Black and white people who live in the area say the sign is offensive and they want it down," and makes no judgments on or allegations of racism among resident of Carroll County or Paulding County of wherever this is. (It does quote a source from the NAACP, which for him may amount to the same thing.)

Confedrate Yankee on the same subject:

Democrats in the media and in politics have so over-used cries to racism in an attempt to marginalize legitimate opposition that the word has rapidly lost the stigma attached to it...

It's a shame the left has decided to make such reckless use of the word in an attempt to stifle opposition, because when real racism occurs, calling it out with the level of derision it deserves becomes that much more difficult.

Really? I don't find it difficult at all. But in the spirit of the First Amendment I say, let the sign-erector trumpet his ignorance to the world. And let the rightbloggers who think calling Obama a nigger is an indictment of liberalism do the same. Sane men and women will know what to make of it.