This was seen at one of the tea parties and is a perfect foil to liberal condescension.

Throughout the ages there has been of course snobbery--and snobberies have had wonderful signal phrases. The one from M*A*S*H: "He bought his suits off the rack." Or, "She''s the sort who bought her silver." This all translates into, "Not our sort, dear," said with a slight sniff.

But those forms of snobbery were relatively harmless. During the Reagan years the left started to try to criminalize policy differences; this is a blatant attempt to stop debate entirely. The Obama administration continues in this vein, having promised not to, but the left has never been bound by honor. They consider themselves high minded, which to them excuses any behavior, but the end does not justify the means. Think ACORN, Teddy Kennedy, and Bill Ayers.

The British Mail estimated two million tea partiers came to Washington; I've seen the pictures and the crowds were vast. But admitting that these are people with the right to dissent hampers the left because it accords them a voice in the public discussion, and discussion must be stopped at all cost. Because the left cannot win the argument on its merits, only by ignoring dissent, making it illegal, if possible, or sniffing that dissenters are unenlightened Neanderthals.

And the deadliest insult is the charge of racism.

There is no doubt that racism has a long and ugly history in America and everyone ignores the heinous racism against whites, who are damned if they do and damned if they don't. Especially straight, white males. Jim Crow was a monstrosity. The Civil Rights Act was the right thing to do when it was done. And America actually, alone among nations, fought a civil war over race, a civil war which was not one race against another, but whites against whites over a powerless black minority.

For decades the highest-paid performers have been black. And America elected a black president.

All of this was done by white people because it would have been quite simply impossible without them. Do they get any credit for this? No. People who commit voter fraud and steal elections are ignored. People who act honorably, but who do not fall in with the modern liberal tropes, are reviled.

Joe Wilson, the representative who said to President Obama, "You lie!" when Obama did in fact lie through his teeth, is the latest victim of this ideological mugging. Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, who is mostly reliably wrong, wrote that behind Mr Wilson's "shocking disrespect for the office of the president" was the fact that: "Some people just can't believe a black man is president and will never accept it." This makes my teeth fur over until I realize that the woman simply has lost touch with the idea of a fact. So has her boss Pinch, who failed to notice that not enough people cared about the self-righteous bilge the NYT puts out to keep it in the black.

My hope now is some whites will get the courage to remark on this and to tell the bien pensant to either advance an argument, a serious one which is not ad-hominem, or just shut up. There is a bare glimmer of hope that it might happen, since the main-stream media has become the legacy media: we might live to see the day that CBS, NBC and ABC will simply fold their increasingly irrelevant news bureaux. It's way past time.

Then Katie Couric could do something that she is actually qualified to do: open an obedience school for poodles.