“It’s just insane,” Fox News analyst and Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers tells a Fox audience after watching the clip of Ed Schultz accusing Rick Perry of being a racist for using the phrase “big black cloud,” by which Schultz claimed Perry meant Barack Obama.  Schultz later apologized for the selective editing of the clip, but Powers isn’t satisfied with Schultz’ selective retreat that pointedly didn’t walk back the allegation of racism.  Powers offers a dog-whistle argument right back at the MSNBC host, saying that Schultz’ assumption that “big black cloud” referred to Obama shows that it’s Schultz who’s the real racist, not Perry.

It’s on (via The Right Scoop):

I think Powers is onto something here, and not necessarily the status of Schultz’ racism quotient. The only way that we put this racism meme into its well-deserved and long-overdue grave is to point out that these assumptions themselves are built on prejudicial thinking.  Schultz took a perfectly benign and even somewhat overused turn of phrase (“black cloud”) and immediately associated it with a black man?  Obama himself has used a similar phrase, “dark cloud,” in at least one speech about Afghanistan and Pakistan in December 2009, and no one accused Obama of sending a dog-whistle message about either himself or the Pakistanis.  Janeane Garofalo assumed that a black man (Herman Cain) couldn’t possibly be thinking for himself if he championed conservative values, and therefore must either be psychologically damaged or paid off.  What is that if not a racist point of view — that all black people must have a single ideology just because of the color of their skin?

Allahpundit has lamented the fact that we are going to get this kind of nonsense for the next 15 months.  If the Left thinks that they can label every single benign turn of phrase as a dog whistle and every voter turned off by Barack Obama’s terrible performance as a racist, then in 15 months they will be finished as a political force.  Kirsten Powers won’t be the last commentator drawing the obvious conclusion from those attacks.