Look at this compilation by Media Matters. It's the usual suspects, G. Gordon Liddy, Rush, Glenn Beck, etc. Jesus Christ; if this is what the GOP and the right wing want to rebuild their brand on, they are going to be in a world of hurt. These people are insane.

Over at TPM, here's more documentation that the color-aroused card is irresistable to this crowd and we're only a few precious months into the the tenure of this administration.

• Above all others, the real celebrity here has been Rush Limbaugh. He's done this kind of thing before — remember the "Barack, The Magic Negro" song? But in the wake of the Gates incident, he's managed to become even more hard-edged about it. "Here you have a black president trying to destroy a white policeman," Limbaugh declared this past Friday. Yesterday, he shared a dream he's had about the dangers to capitalism: "I had a dream that I was a slave building a sphinx in a desert that looked like Obama." And he joked that food-safety advocates will go after all the unhealthy foods people like to eat, one by one — but they'll have to wait until Obama is out of office to ban Oreos.

• Glenn Beck said this today on Fox News: "This president, I think, has exposed himself as a guy, over and over and over again, who has a deep-seated hatred for white people, or the white culture. I don't what it is. You can't sit in a pew with Jeremiah Wright for 20 years and not hear some of that stuff, and not have it wash over."

• During his new crusade of Birtherism, Lou Dobbs suggested on his radio show this past Wednesday, right before the Gates flare-up, that Obama could be an illegal immigrant, tying this into his usual preoccupation. "I'm starting to think we have a document issue," Dobbs said. "You suppose he's un– no, I won't even use the word 'undocumented,' it wouldn't be right."

Apparently they can't make any headway on the actual issues of the day that actually affect Americans; they only know how to deal from the bottom of the deck with vile distractions like this.