You knew it was coming, now here it is. I don’t know what Zo could have said or done to get under Charles Blow’s skin — I’m guessing that the, gasp, lack of formal education might have something to do with it — but he was the only speaker at the Dallas tea party specifically named in the now infamous “minstrel show” hit piece. Come for the nasty racial cracks, stay for the gratuitous reference to prior drug abuse:

They saved the best for last, however: Alfonzo “Zo” Rachel. According to his Web site, Zo, who is black and performs skits as “Zo-bama,” allowed drugs to cost him “his graduation.” Before ripping into the president for unconstitutional behavior, he cautioned, “I don’t have the education that our president has, so if I misinterpret some things in the founding documents I kind of have an excuse.” That was the understatement of the evening.

I found the imagery surreal and a bit sad: the minorities trying desperately to prove that they were “one of the good ones”; the organizers trying desperately to resolve any racial guilt among the crowd. The message was clear: How could we be intolerant if these multicolored faces feel the same way we do?

Nowhere in the piece are Zo’s alleged misinterpretations of the founding documents described, natch. An excellent point raised in the clip by the man himself: Does anyone not think Blow set off on his Dallas adventure thinking/hoping he’d find a bunch of racist signs at the rally, only to fall back on the “minstrel show” narrative when he didn’t? Surely if he’d found any he would have mentioned them as part of his unified field theory of minority conservatives cozying up to people who despise them. The silence on that point is deafening.

Exit question: As righteously angry as he is, wasn’t it nice of Zo not to name a certain president-turned-global-messiah as another person who managed to pull himself together after dabbling with drugs in his youth?