It’s pretty bad when even the lefty media is getting sick and tired of the left’s pathetic, disingenuous tactics. The wire service rightly points out that by labeling simple opponents racists, you degrade the power of the term against, you know, actual racists.

[I]f everybody’s racist, is anyone?

The word is being sprayed in all directions, creating a hall of mirrors that is draining the scarlet R of its meaning and its power, turning it into more of a spitball than a stigma.

“It gets to the point where we don’t have a word that we use to call people racist who actually are,” said John McWhorter, who studies race and language at the conservative Manhattan Institute…

[It's] an easy charge to make against the rare individual carrying an “Obamacare” sign depicting the president as an African witch doctor with a bone through his nose. But it’s almost impossible to prove — or refute — assertions that bias, and not raw politics, fuels opposition to Obama.

“You have to be very careful about going down that road. You’ve cried wolf,” said Sean Wilentz, a Princeton University professor who studies U.S. political and social history.

And rather than take the accusation against actual racists seriously, Americans will begin to take for granted that the accused is simply someone who disagrees politically with the accuser. That doesn’t benefit minorities in any way, shape, or form.