John McCain and his loser friends are all racists, whichwe know because they made an ad with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton but not Brad Pitt, Tiger Woods, David Beckham or The Police. Can you even believe it. Back here on Planet Earth, however, there actually was some pretty clear racial shit coming out of the McCain campaign yesterday -- not necessarily in their accusing Obama of playing the Race Card, but in the cleverly chosen words they used to accuse him of this. Horrible subliminal racist anger over O.J. Simpson, meet the candidacy of Barack Obama.

Ha ha, the venerable New York Times Editorial Board was so pissed at McCain yesterday that they threw together one of their late-afternoon emergency blog freak-outs:

But Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, had a snappy answer. “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck,” he said. “It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.’’

The retort was, we must say, not only contemptible, but shrewd. It puts the sin for the racial attack not on those who made it, but on the victim of the attack.

It also — and we wish this were coincidence, but we doubt it — conjurs up another loaded racial image.

The phrase dealing the race card “from the bottom of the deck” entered the national lexicon during the O.J. Simpson saga. Robert Shapiro, one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, famously declared of himself, Johnny Cochran and the rest of the Simpson defense team, “Not only did we play the race card, we dealt it from the bottom of the deck.”

Your associate editor was like -7 years old during the O.J. Trial and doesn't remember much about it beyond our teachers canceling recess so they could watch the verdict announcement while we sat in the hall. Did any of you old people get the connotation?

What does Tiger Woods think about all of this?

Say What? John McCain, Barack Obama, and the “Race Card” [NYT/The Board]