Right Co-opts Language Of Grievance

These are fighters against racism?

You keep waiting for someone to break up laughing. You keep looking for Ashton Kutcher to say you've been punk'd. But they are in earnest, and there is a pattern here: the forces of intolerance seeking to redefine the parameters of a debate they can win in no other way.

Read the treatises that attempt to make the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. an icon of conservatism. Read the ones that claim the relative handful of black-on-white violent crimes occurring annually in this country constitutes "genocide." Read the mewling of white victimization that rises any time blacks or browns are perceived as having won some victory over discrimination.

There is to it a breathtaking cynicism and a willingness to manipulate for political gain one of the rawest places in the psyche of a nation. The goal is not to persuade. It is to muddy the water, confuse the debate. Because when you can't win the argument, confusing it works almost as well.

Based on one foolish quote, we have spent more than a week asking if Sonia Sotomayor is a racist. I'd call that mission accomplished. And I wish Mr. Kutcher would come out already.

It's not funny anymore.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for The Miami Herald. His column appears regularly in The Baltimore Sun. His e-mail is [e-mail].