Colbert King has an excellent piece on Mark Penn in today's Washington Post.

He points out what should be obvious: that Mark Penn is what we, in the old days, would have simply called a racist but who is now excused as simply a guy who plays the game.

Nowadays we are not allowed to call people racists. It's as if racism died when LBJ passed Voting Rights. So we can't call Penn a racist for urging the Clinton campaign to paint Obama as foreign. We can't call Mary Matalin a racist for publishing a book full of racist libels. And we can't, God forbid, say that the McCain campaign's ads -- and its ads are the campaign -- are racist ("the uppity Negro who doesn't know his place").

Imagine if in 2000, the Republicans ran ads suggesting that Joe Lieberman would make a good accountant but not a commander-in-chief. Or played off the foreignness of a Second Lady named Hadassah? Or said that he's fine but she's a little pushy? Can you imagine the uproar?

But somehow it's different with African Americans. It always has been.

The question for the next 90 days is this. What do we do about it? The elephant is in the room big time (elephant! nice). Are we just going to ignore it? After all, the Obama campaign knows that nothing stirs up racists even more than talking about racism! What to do?

I'm a pessimist. I admit it.

I always assume that the Republicans have the advantage because they will stop at nothing to win. And because the media (pretty much all Democratic except for Fox) has the desperate need to show balance by screwing our candidate and sucking up to theirs.

So....all things being equal, the GOP wins.

That should not work this year but it looks like it might. As I have written before, I do not believe the polls which show Obama a few points ahead. With a candidate like Obama (black) or Clinton (woman) -- running against a standard white male -- we better be ten points ahead. And we're not. We are not winning.

For Obama, August has been utterly flat.

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Check out this editorial from Ha'aretz today.

It concludes; "Israel must allow diplomatic efforts to move ahead, lower the tone of the military threat and understand that dialogue with Iran is essential to an attempt to reduce its military motivation."

Of course, that is in Israel. In the New York Times of Israel, in fact. But it's not the kind of thing one sees here, where the usual suspects -- the guys who brought us the last war -- are lusting over the next one.

Meanwhile here in the land of the free, Congress is still planning to move The Ackerman/Bayh resolutions to the floor after the recess. The House resolution would blockade Iran, an act of war. The Senate resolution (offered by Evan Bayh) is not nearly as bad but it also eschews diplomacy in favor of belligerence.

Check out this update on the bills (from July but still topical). This issue is not going away.

Here are the two bills, and their co-sponsors.

House Bill
House cosponsors
Senate bill
Senate cosponsors