RACE TO THE BOTTOM.

Quin Hillyer, whose buffoonery at the American Spectator helps fill my Voice columns, declares himself a victim because Jonathan Chait almost sorta-kinda called him a racist. (Chait suggests Hillyer's weird obsession with Obama's alleged "haughtiness" comports with  classic "uppity" characterizations of blacks who are thought to get above themselves.)

Hillyer thinks Chait has provided him such a large opening that he can muscle his fellow conservatives through it into racial absolution. Here are his talking points, removed from the weak broth of his prose:

Hillyer is no racist
Hillyer resisted the campaigns of racist David Duke. (Chait acknowledged this; Hillyer pretends not to notice.) He also turned on Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond when everyone else did, and has said some nice things about black people.
Hillyer does not believe blacks are "inherently racist or ill-motivated," but merely "unprepared" for the advantages of white life "when race-based government edicts stack the deck in education or access to employment."
Hillyer's father applauded Brown v. Board of Education and loved Louis Armstrong.

Liberals are the real racists
"It is leftists, not conservatives, who are obsessed with race."
Liberals pick on definitely not-racist conservatives like Jeff Sessions just because some things he said and did may look racist to the untrained eye.
Liberals think it's racist when conservatives make "Obamaphones" their new T-bone/Cadillac/welfare queen shtick (notwithstanding that the program dates back to the Bush era*), so obviously they don't know what racism is.
Liberals are in fact racist against whites because they are racist for blacks and  "see and hear no evil from their favored groups or policies even when the evils are blindingly obvious." As to what those blindingly obvious evils are, see below:

Blacks are also the real racists
Blacks vote for black people. They are arrested for most of the "hate crimes" in the United States. "At least some polls" show blacks think they're racist too, so who's the racist now?

In other words, Hillyer advances ancient arguments that will be accepted by everyone who already believes such horseshit, like Matt K. Lewis at The Daily Caller. Lewis too has some killer talking points -- like, how can conservatives be racist when they also smear white people? ("Conservatives were happy to accuse Bill Clinton off all sorts of things — of dodging the draft and [for some, at least] of having Vince Foster murdered. Was race the cause of all of that?") Oh, and Lewis is also a victim of racist liberal smears -- a black guy accused him of "deploy[ing] the very principles of white privilege" once! Him, Matt K. Lewis, who has "spoken out" against racism! It's like when hyperleftist Dave Weigel suggested resistance to gay marriage had something to do with bigotry against gays. Where do these liberals get that stuff?

Bottom line, it's 2013 and white people are still the ones who suffer the most, or at least the most publicly, from racism.

*UPDATE. Some commenters remind me that these phones come out of the Lifeline program established in the Reagan era. I'd forgotten this point has frequently been brought up to counter the racist gibberings of Obamaphone obsessives -- and missed this awesome bad-faithfest in response by W.A. Beatty at American Thinker:

The only defense offered by Lifeline Program supporters is that it was begun during Ronald Reagan's term, and expanded to include cell phones during George W. Bush's term. But so what? Circumstances change -- even Democrats are not immune. The Jeffersonian Republicans-Democrats represented those who visualized an agrarian future. Then, as the 20th century began, progressives with socialist-Marxist doctrine began to infest the Democrat Party. The result is what we have today.

Which is an elevated way of saying that when a Democrat gives you a phone it's intrinsically bad because Democrat. The whole thing is so poorly reasoned, I feel a duty to preserve it so those who come after will understand why were so easier conquered and enslaved by sentient pigs.