Sheila Jackson Lee’s brain freeze was almost comical, but the serious side to this is that if you’re going to impugn others’ motives—if you’re going to talk about “hating,” as the president did—the biblical admonition about noticing the speck in your neighbor’s eye is apropos.

“I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for” wasn’t a sentenced uttered by a leftist talk radio pundit. It was said in 2005 by Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean.

And it wasn’t some unhinged MSNBC host who said that George W. Bush deliberately fabricated the rationale for invading Iraq to help Republican electoral chances. That was Sen. Ted Kennedy, the icon of American liberalism. This didn’t start with Iraq, either. During the Florida recount, Rep. Jerold Nadler New York mentioned “the whiff of fascism in the air.”

The whiff I detected, as I do now, was the scent of demagoguery.

“An overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he’s African-American.” So says Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States.