Christine M. Flowers: Going down a dangerous path

WE ALL know the story about the Boy Who Cried Wolf, falsely claiming several times that he had been attacked. Finally, when the danger was real, no one believed him. And he ended up as an hors d'oeuvre.

If they're not careful, the race-baiters among us might also find themselves on a canapé tray, and I pity the person who gets stuck nibbling on Maureen Dowd. As appetizers go, she's more sour than sweet.

The New York Times' institutional redhead seems still to be having trouble coming up with original ideas after her brush with plagiarism this summer, so she's had to riffle through her bag of tricks to find the deck of race cards.

On Sunday, the Pulitzer Princess accused South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson of being a racist, likening his "You lie!" cry to the rebel yell of a bigot who couldn't deal with being "lectured to" by a black man. Making as good a use of stereotypes as "The Sopranos," Dowd implied that this white Southerner was less upset about "illegals" getting free health care than about the fact that his manhood was being challenged by the "First Boy."

And Miss Scarlett-O'Hair-a wasn't the only one making that parallel.

Take Jimmy Carter. (Please!) The ex-president has read our minds and discovered that we who have qualms about the president's specific policies and performance, and express those opinions, are motivated by racism, and not sensible doubts (or even mere hysteria).

This is par for the course. Ever since Barack Obama emerged as a serious contender for the Oval Office, many supporters have tried to turn every criticism into a racial Rorschach test.

Instead of looking at the substance of the attack, many Obama supporters have first considered whether it has a racial angle. In some cases, it clearly does, as with the yahoos who believe our president is a terrorist-sympathizing Muslim because of his funny first name. (By that reasoning, Abraham Lincoln was a Jew.)

But in way too many other cases, the Maureen Dowds and Jimmy Carters keep stretching it to offensive levels.

Of course, context is everything. While we can't expect complete civility, we do need to be careful when lampooning the first black president. Depicting former President George W. Bush as a chimp is typical of what passes for juvenile liberal humor these days, but doing the same to a black man would surely be racially insensitive. Our history demands extra care, which is why the New Yorker had so much trouble explaining its "fist bump" cover during last year's election. (I thought it was clever. But what do I know?)

Still, being careful doesn't mean we have to censor ourselves out of the fear that some syndicated polemicist or other political opportunist will seize on the chance to deflect attention from real issues, like will undocumented aliens get public-health coverage or will the stimulus cause an economic collapse.

And that isn't even the worst part.

There seems to be some feeling in the black community that this president's life is in danger. As Juan Williams stated on "The O'Reilly Factor" this week, many African-Americans believe that President Obama is walking around with a target on his back and that some of his more strident (read "conservative yahoo") critics at town-hall meetings would be very happy to cause him physical harm.

They point to a much-disputed report by the Department of Homeland Security that warned about a rise in right-wing hate groups, thereby making a bridge between racists and assassins.

It would have been honest if DHS had acknowledged that there have been as many left-wing terror or "hate" groups as ones on the other end of the spectrum, including Italy's Red Brigade, Red Peru's Shining Path, Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang and our own Weather Underground, Bill Ayers' alma mater. And don't forget the those two notorious U.S. "Liberation Fronts" - Earth and Animal.

BUT TO BRAND "terror" and "hate" as a specialty only of the right is a twisted way of saying that his country should be in fear of conservatives. And that's just a corollary of the fallacy that criticism of this administration is primarily the work of right-wing zealots.

Do racists exist? Yes. Are politicians targets? Of course, although I doubt most Irish Catholics in the U.S. feared for the life of JFK after his election.

People exaggerate racism to advance their own political agendas. They find threats where there aren't any. And like the Boy Who Cried Wolf, they're making a big mistake. Because one day, when they do have a legitimate gripe, they might discover everyone's stopped listening.

Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer.

E-mail cflowers1961@yahoo.com.