Obama’s widely reported and admired speech on race and religion has drawn not only praise. The worms are showing on the woodwork. Glenn Greenwald reports, citing “Instapunck,” a much linked to blog on the farrrrrrrr right.

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn’t it?

Greenwald goes on:

This is just a slightly more explicit version of what one hears on so much right-wing talk radio, beginning with conservative hero Rush Limbaugh. Why is there so much hatred and extremism in black churches? Let’s talk more and more about all the racism and radicalism among isolated black people and ignore the endless bile that has long spewed forth from the far more powerful appendages of the right-wing noise-machine, exemplified by Instapunk’s Easter meditation on race.

While the dominant political faction in the United States built itself and continues to feed and nourish itself with this sort of endless exploitation of racial resentments and grievances — and while it openly embraces far more powerful religious fanatics who espouse ideas at least as radical and repugnant as anything Jeremiah Wright has ever said — let’s spend the next eight months talking about the controversial comments of a single, comparatively powerless black preacher and have our presidential election decided by that.

And asks:

What explains the media’s Obama/Wright fixation while virtually ignoring McCain’s embrace of people like Rod Parsley and John Hagee is the assumption that the controversial behavior of any one black person is easily attributed to black people generally, while white political leaders aren’t held accountable for the views of others solely by virtue of shared race.

Dave Niewert at Orcinus links to Greenwald and adds his own views, coming from decades of reporting on the racialist right.

I’ve been calling this “the new racism”, which really is just a slightly modified version of the truly vicious belief system that has been lying, like a cancer waiting to metastasize, from the body of movement conservatism for the many years since it was forced into semi-dormancy some 40 years ago. With folks like Rush Limbaugh leading the way, I describe it thus:

[It is] a trend in right-wing comentary, staking out positions that, if not overtly racist, at least seek to resurrect some of the hoary mythology of the era of white supremacy. As with most of right-wing race rhetoric of the past twenty years, it’s all done with a certain level of plausible deniability, couched in “jokes” or abstrations that let the speakers feign indignation when the racism is pointed out; the current trend is only slightly more overt in its racism, but the underlying sentiments aren’t hard to read.

It’s a step beyond wink-and-nudge racism — or, perhaps, more like that point in the winking and nudging when the winker begins nudging harder and harder.

Of course, it’s not just Limbaugh, but rather something systemic within the body of conservatism generally:

[E]merging from behind a mask of genteel conservatism, it openly calls for a revival of ole-time white supremacism, having found that the “liberal social experiment” with racial equality has failed. Already, we’ve seen Patrick Buchanan drop all pretense and adopt a position that shifts from simple white nationalism to outright supremacism. Michael Savage airs denunciations of the Civil Rights movement. TV talkers like Glenn Beck pretend that blind bigotry toward Muslims is a “normal” perspective.