Go watch the clip again. There’s nothing jokey or witty or clever about it. It’s a straightforward accusation of racism and callousness, and of course one of the other schmucks there laughs because he’s a nasty liberal hack too who’s thinking the same thing. It’s a laugh of recognition, and maybe a bit of surprise that Chalian would be willing to say that with mics around.

So here’s his attempt to make himself employable again:

I am profoundly sorry for making an inappropriate and thoughtless joke. I was commenting on the challenge of staging a convention during a hurricane and about campaign optics. I have apologized to the Romney campaign, and I want to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Gov. and Mrs. Romney. I also regret causing any distraction from the exceptional coverage of the Republican convention by Yahoo News and ABC News.

If you believe that he was making a neutral comment about convention optics, you also need to believe that he would have said the same thing if Democrats had been holding their convention this week. Show of hands: Anybody?

I need to make way for MKH, Erika, and Jazz as tonight’s convention live-blogging begins, but in honor of the media’s “all racism, all the time” strategy to distract from what’s happening at the podium, I’ll leave you with this (via the Washington Free Beacon). Are you one of those millions of voters who find Obama irritatingly professorial and aloof, an Ivory Tower liberal if ever there was one? Well, turns out the GOP’s got a master plan to convince you that he’s not that guy at all but rather some sort of sex-crazed wildman, per archaic racial stereotypes. And the way they’re going to do this is to compare him to Tiger Woods. But rather than directly compare him to Woods, they’re simply to going to mention that he golfs a lot and let you draw the necessary connecting lines. Obama –> golf –> Tiger –> lots of sex –> racism. Two things to watch here. One: At the start, at least, Martin Bashir is actually the voice of reason. Think about that. Turn that idea over in your mind for a few seconds. Martin Bashir is now the sane, sober guy on MSNBC. Two: By the end of the clip, it sounds like O’Donnell thinks there’s an explicit reference to Woods in McConnell’s speech, to the point where he’s talking about speechwriters brainstorming over it. But Bashir never quotes anything about Woods. He only quotes a reference to the PGA tour. It’s O’Donnell who supplies the Woods reference and then convicts McConnell of racism for it. You’ll never find a better microcosm of left-wing “dog whistle” analysis.

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