See the thing about it is there are ARCHIVES on TPM (at least for the reader posts not Election Central which was much worse). Plenty of people called the Clintons racists. You can't undo the accusations made then and pretend they didn't happen.

Hackneyed expressions:

You're a racist.
You're an anti-semite.
You're a sexist.

Do read a fascinating book called "The Race Card," by Stanford University professor Richard Thompson Ford, who posits that Americans naively like to think we live in a world of "racism without racists."

That somehow, in America, far too many people believe, wrongly, that racism thrives without the necessary human element to make it grow. That's why it is so easy to claim "I'm not a racist," in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary. That Americans have created this "bogeyman racist" who looks a certain way, dresses a certain way, says certain things, lives in a certain placem and so if you do not look like your "bogeyman," you are not the bad guy or girl, you are not a racist.

But racism doesn't exist in a vacuum and doesn't exist without a human assist, and those who protest they are not, most likely are.

Mr, Clinton may not believe he is a racist, or that he played the "race card," but more enlightened minds know that he is and did.

American society is highly racialized, which isn't the same thing as "racist", in the common Aermican vernacular (which is not to say that a fair number of Americans aren't "racist").

As a foreign-born American, I find that the very idea of race, as a useful social construct and an informational entity (wrong term, most likely. What I want to say is that most American believe that person's "race" carries useful information content for human interaction), is powerfully ingrained in most native-born Americans from childhood.

This societal racialization rides below the more crude from or race-based emotional response, such as racism. It, however, powerfully informs the way American society views itself and functions - i.e. it forms the very gestalt of America at an important, personal level.

As someone who wasn't looped into this racialization from an early age, I think I was able to observe this dynamic from a more detached perspective. I have concluded, after thinking about this for a while, that the social concept of "race" has stopped carrying useful information for human interaction. In mathematical terms, standard deviation in race-based distributions has become considerably greater than the differences in the means, making them inadequate parameters of differential. If person's race ever told one anything about a person, it certainly doesn't do so today.

Race-based parameters are no longer relevant in the way most Americans habitually use them. This isn't meant to sidestep ethical/moral considerations of racialization, but rather a more factual look at the information. There is always more than one way to get at the truth.

However, most Americans continue accept race-based distinction as inimical to the human condition and interaction. This phenomenon is so ingrained on the American psyche, that it almost impossible to people to even identify it. That's why Clinton, having done a very natural (for America) race-based distinction, is outraged that this may have been interpreted as crudely "racist". He is right - by American standards, he is not "racist", but more and more thinking people see racialization as the problem - something that is obviously new to Bill.

Native-born American's relationship to race is a very glaring, and frankly, weird, thing if you weren't born here.

P.S. I would challenge those adhering to the importance of the construct of "race" to define it in a compact form that isn't self-referential or redundant.

Dear Truth_Seeker:

You are not an idiot.

You are just saying idiotic things.

Which, according to you, is not the same. Whatever, anything to make you feel better about it.

But if you were really seeking truth, you would admit that all Obama supporters share the same primal instinct - defensive, pre-emptive parsing of anyone's words, magnifying any potential danger or slight and then crying wolf through a megaphone.

It's a defense tactic, there is nothing wrong with it and I understand that it's difficult to use it sensibly and responsibly against an opponent whose husband is the most successful Democrat in recent history.

Yes, maybe Bill Clinton should have known by then that only the potentially explosive words he had used would be reported and not all the other ones.

Maybe he should have figured out by then that there is nothing racist when 90% of AA voters back an AA candidate - it's only racist to point it out.

Any perceived slight, however small and however intended, will be punished as capital murder.

So the truth is that the Obama camp went into a frenzy and over-reacted in a way that was so hysterical, myopical and short-sighted, that not only it has now blown up in your own candidate's face last week and open him up to "Race Card" charges, but also caused a major rift within the party at the worst possible time.

I guess Bill Clinton insists he's not a racist because he thinks that typically it's idiots who say idiotic things?

Yes - it makes him MORE of a scoundrel. Correct indeed. *Intent* matters.