WE'RE TERRIBLE!

Posted at 7:52 a.m. ET

Indeed we are.  How do we know?  Why, the AP tells us so.  They're so used to telling it to us that they just can't stop.  I guess it's an emotional thing.

As the AP has it, America, since the election, is awash in racial incidents.  Our terribleness is out of control.

Cross burnings. Schoolchildren chanting ''Assassinate Obama.'' Black figures hung from nooses. Racial epithets scrawled on homes and cars.

Incidents around the country referring to President-elect Barack Obama are dampening the postelection glow of racial progress and harmony, highlighting the stubborn racism that remains in America.

We've all noticed.  Why, the riots, the burning cities, the millions piling onto old Liberty ships to escape the U.S.  You saw it, didn't you?  Are you not ashamed to be an American?

There have been ''hundreds'' of incidents since the election, many more than usual, said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate crimes.

I have no doubt that there have been some despicable incidents.  But is this panic time?

Potok, who is white, said he believes there is ''a large subset of white people in this country who feel that they are losing everything they know, that the country their forefathers built has somehow been stolen from them.''

Yes, I saw them with their Obama buttons.  They were in disguise.  I knew it at the time.

Change in whatever form does not come easy, and a black president is ''the most profound change in the field of race this country has experienced since the Civil War,'' said William Ferris, senior associate director of the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina. ''It's shaking the foundations on which the country has existed for centuries.''

Do you feel the shaking?  Do you feel the country coming down?  Why, all the print on the Constitution in the National Archives faded away just yesterday, I'm told.

''Someone once said racism is like cancer,'' Ferris said. ''It's never totally wiped out, it's in remission.''

If so, America's remission lasted until the morning of Nov. 5.

Oh please!  Another clown with a Ph.D. heard from.  And this from a...a sociologist:

''We saw the same thing happen after the 9-11 attacks, as a wave of anti-Muslim violence swept the country."

Really?  Do you remember it?  Why can't I remember it?  I looked at newspapers?  I saw TV?  Maybe my channel didn't cover the anti-Muslim riots.

Come on, enough of this!

Look, there are going to be some incidents.  But this is a nation of 305 million people, and I don't think I've ever been more proud of the way Americans have conducted themselves than in the days following this history-making election.  Mr. Obama - and we did not support him in this space - has been welcomed and accepted as the next president.  There have been no mass demonstrations, Americans are not flooding into Australia, and the airwaves have been remarkably free of paranoia. 

One of President Bush's first acts after 9-11 was to visit a mosque to tell parishioners that we were not engaged in a war on Islam.  He set the tone.  There was no wave of anti-Muslim violence, despite what some sociologist says.

There seems to be an element in the press and in academia that is reflexively anti-American.  They wallow in national shame.  They look for confirmation of what they teach, or have been taught - that this is a racist, evil society.  They must throw examples, however small, in our faces, week after week.  The election of Barack Obama is not a great moment to this crowd, is a moment to re-tool their anti-American rhetoric.

We should shame them, and then ignore them.

I have no problem with AP running a story on racial incidents.  I have a big problem with the lack of proportion or context.  Welcome to journalism, 2008.  The authors of the First Amendment would be so proud.

November 17, 2008.