Only to an addled mind could the McCain advertisement below, which compares Barack Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in terms of experience, qualification to lead, and sheer celebrity, be conceived as race-baiting.

Unfortunately, the New York Times and their fellow Obama-at-any-cost diehards are just addled enough to try to make that argument. Today the Times‘ editorial board wrote:

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — suggesting to voters that he’s nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

The Ford claim, of course, refers to a Bob Corker ad that reflected Ford’s reputation as an extremely eligible bachelor, and the racist “assault” on Ford made in that ad was the inclusion of (*gasp!*) a white woman in the spot. The claim of racism there rings every bit as hollow as the current ludicrous gripe.

Obama seized on the opportunity that an ad daring to question his fitness to lead presented him, and spent the bulk of his Wednesday claiming the McCain campaign (and “Bush,” whom Obama loves to try to rope into discussions despite the fact the two-term Republican president is not — some popular lefty conspiracy theories notwithstanding — running for an unconstitutional third term) is:

going to try to say that I’m a risky guy, they’re going to try to say, ‘Well, you know, he’s got a funny name, and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills,’ and they’re going to send out nasty e-mails.

(As an aside, Obama has spent far more time claiming he knows what “they” are “going” to do to him this campaign — silly me, I thought the campaign was already ongoing — and talking about how McCain spends too much time talking about him and not enough time talking about his policies, than he has spent talking about his own policies — something he clearly hopes to milk all the way to the election.)

The ridiculously indignant NYT editorial board continued:

Mr. Obama called Mr. McCain on the ploy, saying, quite rightly, that the Republicans are trying to scare voters by pointing out that he “doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills.”

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

Of course, just because the editorial board of the New York Times says so does not make racial attacks suddenly exist out of thin air. As ABC’s Jake Tapper correctly observes:

There’s a lot of racist xenophobic crap out there. But not only has McCain not peddled any of it, he’s condemned it.

Back in February, McCain apologized for some questionable comments made by a local radio host. In April, he condemned the North Carolina Republican Party’s ad featuring images of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

With one possible exception, I’ve never seen McCain or those under his control playing the race card or making fun of Obama’s name — or even mentioning Obama’s full name, for that matter!

(The one exception was in March when McCain suspended a low-level campaign staffer for sending out to a small group of friends a link to a video that attempts to tie Obama not only to Wright but to the black power movement, rappers Public Enemy and Malcolm X.)

[...]

What I have not seen is it come from McCain or his campaign in such a way to merit the language Obama used today. Pretty inflammatory.

First, it seems more than a bit rich for a candidate who garnered 90% of the vote from his own race in the primaries to be lashing out at anyone for a race-based candidate evaluation.

Second, despite the fact the New York Times claims Obama was the “victim” of a racial “attack,” and that the McCain campaign’s discussion of this as a case of “playing the race card from the bottom of the deck,” the Times has failed miserably to tell us just what that phantom attack on Obama’s race actually was.

There is, of course, a simple reason for that fact: thre wasn’t one — and claiming otherwise, especially with no evidence on their side, simply makes the Times, and Barack Obama, look like arrogant race-baiters who (a) think they can berate America into voting for the Democrat candidate by threatening them with the R-word, or (b) actually think that Obama is so flawless and infallible that the only possible reason anyone could fail to acknowledge his supremacy, and resist the call to help measure the drapes for his imminent move into the White House, is a deep-seated hatred of black people. Unfortunately for both the Times and Obama, neither argument holds even the slightest bit of water.

As my friend and colleague Dan McLaughlin wrote earlier today:

[Obama] has crossed the final line since winning the nomination, not only positively touting his race but repeatedly suggesting – including at three separate stops yesterday in Missouri – that the McCain campaign was being racist for suggesting that there was any risk or danger in voting for Obama to be Commander-in-Chief in wartime and chief executive during perilous times for the economy.

He continued:

[T]his response by Obama is not just revealing of his willingness to play the most brutal sort of racial politics. It’s also a symptom of his ever-increasing hubris and his resultingly thin skin.

The man, an obscure state legislator five years ago and unaccustomed to the mantle of national leadership, has so surrounded himself with fawning acolytes and cheering crowds at home and abroad that it has clearly gone to his head, making him progressively more full of himself as the campaign has worn on, to the point of declaring himself “a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” at “the moment … that the world is waiting for”.

As I have explained previously, Obama is uniquely lacking, by historic standards, in any of the kinds of experience we generally demand from presidential candidates.

As I noted the other day, the disparity between his claims of being a great figure of history and his extremely modest accomplishments itself relies on the assumption that voters will grade him more leniently than the usual candidate because of his race. But rather than accept that a man of humble accomplishments and qualifications can fairly be criticized for such and must prove his merit, rather than accept that a man submitting himself for election must suffer the slings and arrows of the democratic process – a process that is, after all, designed in part to remind the head of state who he works for – Obama is willing to casually slander anyone who comments on the absence of the emperor’s trousers.

His regard for himself has now reached the point where maybe he can’t even imagine any basis but racism for criticizing his thin qualifications and accomplishments, his disastrous national security ideas and economic proposals, or his left-wing extremism on social issues.

It’s always the same with Obama: it can’t be him; it must be us.

That’s one heck of a losing view to take for a man who claims to be able to bring people together — unless, of course, those who are not automatically inclined to follow him are not to be counted as “people” at all. Now that is a disturbing thought, isn’t it?