DRUNK AS A...

Jeffrey Lord is having a bravura breakdown at The American Spectator. He's attacking Joe Scarborough in an essay of over a thousand words, which is rather like using anti-aircraft guns on Howdy Doody.

According to Lord, Scarborough's crimes are 1.) accusing Sean Hannity and Mark Levin of birtherism -- not quite accurate, as these esteemed broadcasters merely promoted birthers rather than birtherism; and 2.) siding with Colin Powell, who thinks the GOP might be a tad racist, which is itself the worst kind of racism (i.e., the kind that makes the GOP look racist).

Lord's fugue includes abusive statements from Hannity and Levin, dudgeony characterizations from Lord himself (e.g. MSNBC is "a network that spews racism and bigotry"), and several single sentence-fragment paragraphs, including "Disgraceful," "Say again: despicable," "To which I would add: Period," "The progressive card," and "Potrzebie." (Kidding about that last one.) It's like hearing Larry Kudlow teach rhetoric to kindergarteners.

Much of it is about how Democrats are the real racists. ("Race and Progressives," says Lord, "have been... the ham and eggs of the Democratic Party," with a side of mendacity and a garnish of deceit.) Did Powell question Sarah Palin's use of "shuck and jive" in relation to President Obama? Why, sir, Chris Matthews said to Rachel Maddow, "What has it been like, as you shuck and jive, hang out with the men over there, the women over there, in uniform risking their lives every day?” which I guess makes Chris Matthews racist against Rachel Maddow -- and, Lord quavers with outrage, not only that:

The “men over there,” the “women over there” were American troops serving in Afghanistan. The New Pittsburgh Courier (whose owner describes the paper as part of America’s “black press”) did a little research on the number of blacks in the American military — including “over there” where Maddow had spent her time, according to Matthews, “shucking and jiving” with said troops. It seems that a full 9% of Americans killed in both Afghanistan and Iraq were black. 

Some shuck. Some jive.

Potrzebie. Walnuts!

No wait, it gets better: In answer to Powell's complaint about Republicans calling Obama lazy, Lord retorts that Obama called himself lazy, making Obama racist against himself. But not as racist as those old-timey Democrats.

Now, any lunatic can talk about Copperheads or the Democratic hegemony in the South until for some unexplained reason all the good ol' boys became Republicans, but the following of Lord's indictments are, in my experience, unique:

How many times has Scarborough talked about the Federal Reserve on his show? Social Security? The federal school lunch program? No idea, but I bet lots.

But one can Google away and never find ole Joe talking about the racist formula used to create these programs...

• Social Security? Why, Joe never quite gets round to talking about all those racist progressives who scared the hell out of white voters with race so they could stay in office and pass Social Security. A prominent example being old Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, a card-carrying Klan member and deeply proud of creating a program for the old folks. 

• School lunches? That would be a program from the great Southern Manifesto Senator Richard Russell, the segregationist Senator from Georgia, who singlehandedly got what is known today as the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act passed in 1946.

Social Security and school lunches as racist plots -- I swear you could comb Free Republic all day long and not find anything like this. Good Lord!