Yesterday, he “defended” Obama critics like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh against Jimmy Carter’s assertion that their criticism was fueled by racism.  Here’s Colbert responding to Beck and Limbaugh’s claims that health care reform would amount to reparations for black people:

Those guys aren’t racist.  They’re just saying a program that helps the poor is actually a secret plot by African-Americans to steal white people’s money.  A racist would say it’s a secret plot to steal white people’s women.

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When you see it like that, you realize how insane it is that the White House gave people like Beck and Limbaugh cover by insisting that their criticism was not fueled by racism.  Like, what exactly do they have to say to qualify?  Saying that Obama wants to steal white people’s money and give it to black people isn’t enough?  Calling Obama a “racist” who has “a deep-seated hatred for white people” isn’t enough?

This brings to mind a post Andrew Sullivan made yesterday, an e-mail sent to him by a reader of his blog about what the right-wing hysteria about SOCIALISM! and COMMUNISM! actually means and why they never complained about it under Bush or Clinton.  It’s worth printing in its entirety:

Of course they are screaming ’socialism’. They’ve been doing that since the 50s at least. They’re not talking about economic redistribution of wealth – they never have been. They’ve been talking about redistribution of privilege this whole time. They called MLK a communist because he wanted blacks to have the same rights as whites, and to them that was a redistribution of the privilege that whites had ‘earned’.

In their view, white, Christian, heterosexuals have earned something that gays, non-Christians, and non-heteros have failed to work hard enough at. It’s been a class war from the outset, just not one based around income or net worth – mostly because the whites in the south were economically pretty bad off and blacks in the north were catching up to them.

This picture shows they were pushing the same buttons half a century ago that they are today. Anti-christ, communism – it’s all the same as it is today and is well known code. It’s why the protesters will decry socialism today but wouldn’t have under Bush – it’s all tied to race and other social objectives and has nothing really to do with taxation, deficits, and big government. You probably missed it when you came to the US, but this is pretty old game – particularly to guys like Carter that grew up around it.

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After scouring job lists for hours, I still never found the Katie Perry boob holder job.

Los Angeles will have a football team by next year, right? Uh, no.

Bruce Johnson gets the pick six against the Cowboys.  Not to be outdone, Jerry Jones picks for at least 7 seconds. Wonder where he wiped it?

Chuck Liddell…dancing. Watch at your own risk.

Wonder how Trevor Ariza ended up on the Rockets and not the Lakers?  Probably because the Lakers never made him an offer.

Signs of the apocalypse: T-Pain abandons Auto-Tune on his new single.

Rihanna and Justin Timberlake might be secretly hooking up.

Conservatives can’t figure out Glenn Beck either, and some are starting to turn on him.

New word alert: beck v. trans. beck-ing, beck-ed, to be baselessly attacked by an idiot with a megaphone, then have those accusations alter your life for the worse because it’s politically expedient for your spineless superiors to demote or fire you.

And really stupid laws are turning our kids into sex offenders.

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So…what’s worse, the fact that he’s wearing a bra, or the fact that the cups are mismatched?

Rush Limbaugh — setting America back 50 years. We might have to do more on this later.

You think Facebook is awkward for you? check out these awkward moments.

The good news? the 2010 Winter Olympics will be bi-lingual. The bad news? the airports suck, and everyone might not get there anyway.

Who says bloggers don’t track down sources and investigate?  The best story about former Chicago Cubs star Mark Grace that you’ll ever read.

Jay-Z is officially bigger than Elvis.

Glenn Beck thinks that Jimmy Carter calling conservatives racist is “the same kind of tactic” as turning children into suicide bombers.  That would be the same Glenn Beck who less than two months ago called Obama racist.

The Tea Party crowd who marched on Washington D.C. last weekend to protest government spending and services is now protesting the lack of adequate government-run (public) transportation at the march.

LeBron James will make his acting debut in a comedy flick called Fantasy Basketball Camp.

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spotted at Wwtdd.com

All jokes and Kanye West coonery aside, what can you say about Patrick Swazye?  I never heard anything bad about him while he was living, so that makes all the praise that will now be heaped upon him now that he’s died all that more deserving.  Diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer in January of 2008, Swayze went on to live another 19 months before passing away.  Incredible.  Nobody puts Swayze in a corner. Rest In Peace.

Teenage fantasy coming to fruition:  Hilary Duff and Amanda Bynes are spotted out together.

Holy Crap, Roger Federer lost.

The kind of stuff you never want to see: Martin Luther King Jr’s kids are in court arguing over his estate.

Thank God for the internet. Why? you couldn’t plagiarize this bad once everyone knew how to use a computer.

The days of TMZ breaking news may be coming to a very quick end.

From the Department of Stuff You Strongly Suspected: Megan Fox is “dumb as a rock.”

Indiana Jones 5 is a go.

Right-wing idiot Glenn Beck is so busy warning us about our Communist/Socialist president that he doesn’t realize his new logo strongly resembles Cold War era Communist/Socialist designs.

And if you hear any sucking sounds? That’s just ESPN. Tom Brady played last night.

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The Post-Gazette reported today that a hacker made his way into George Sodini’s Gmail account and from there was able to recover Sodini’s entire online history:

Shortly after George Sodini killed himself following his shooting of 12 women in a fitness club, his diary describing his hatred of women and plans to someday carry out such a tragedy showed up online.  Within a day of the shooting, Web surfers could find benign YouTube videos and Mr. Sodini’s musings about underage girls on online forums.

Finally, someone posted links on the Internet to Mr. Sodini’s receipts from purchases he made online of ammunition and large-capacity magazines for his guns, as well as records of his Google search history — including queries like “mass murderer profiles,” “murder suicide statistics,” and “going to die anyway.”

Sodini’s private thoughts are especially interesting in light of the fact that certain left-leaning bloggers are attempting to politicize this tragedy– quickly labeling Sodini as a white supremacist and a right-wing extremist, and lumping him in with everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Holocaust Museum shooter.  But his online history tells a different story.

This isn’t a man who spent his time at political rallies or posting to right-wing forums or reading racist literature.  This is a man who spent the overwhelming majority of his time obsessing over his search for female companionship.  The YouTube videos he posted last year, where he tours his house, were exercises for a three-day dating seminar he attended.  The books seen on his coffee table are about dating.

His online search history is mostly about meeting women (with specific searches for white women, black women, Latino women, and teenage girls).  He seems especially concerned about the age of consent in Pennsylvania.  His occasional searches on politics are about where he can find conservative T-shirts and bumper stickers.  I’d be surprised if he ever attended a political function in his life; he just doesn’t seem to be that into it.  The remainder of his searches are about guns, mass shootings, and mental illness.

The online forums he posted to are mostly about dating, with interests in technology, cats, and car repair sprinkled in.  In one forum, he asks other users whether it’s normal for a 48-year-old man to been seen with a teenage girl.  His personal photos are of him, alone, posing next to a bulldozer and around his house.  His personal website has Bible quotes, blonde jokes, and pictures of his cat.

This simply is not the profile of a white supremacist, a right-wing extremist, or a man looking to make a political statement.  This guy isn’t Stormfront.org, he’s Match.com.

Again, I’m not in the business of defending mass murderers.  And I have no problem calling out racism when I see it.  I just want to make sure we’re not squandering our credibility by turning every lunatic into a neo-Nazi Teabagging Ku Klux Birther and turning every tragedy into something that’s somehow Glenn Beck’s fault.  Sodini’s rampage was about mental illness and isolation, not race and politics.  Let’s not pound this square peg into a round hole to fit our own political agendas.

But don’t take my word for it (courtesy of reddit):

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By far, one of the most entertaining aspects of Barack Obama becoming the first black president is the way certain white folks are losing their minds:

This morning on Fox and Friends, Fox host Glenn Beck accused President Obama of being “a racist.”

The group was discussing the recent Gates controversy, and Beck exclaimed that Obama has “over and over again” exposed himself as “a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture. I don’t know what it is…”

When Fox’s Brian Kilmeadeon pointed out that many people in Obama’s administration are white, so “you can’t say he doesn’t like white people,” Beck pressed on. “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem,” Beck said. “This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

What’s hilarious about this argument is that, black president or not, white people still overwhelmingly hold the balance of power in America.  To illustrate this point, here’s a picture of the cast of this summer’s hit show The Bachelorette.

The fact that there are no black, Latino, Asian or Native American men appearing in your picture, and that ABC’s most popular reality franchise has a strict no miscegenation policy straight out of the 1940s isn’t what’s important.  What’s important is that this could be a picture of pretty much anything in America– the 30 richest CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, 30 members of Congress selected at random, 30 owners of NFL teams.  So tell us, Barack Obama, why aren’t you giving white men the same benefits and privileges and preferential treatment that they’ve received in this country for over 230 years?

For the sake of argument, let’s say we replaced one of the men in the picture above with a black man in order to add some diversity.  Glenn Beck’s worldview ignores the fact that 29 of the 30 cast members are still white men, but is instead outraged at the one white man who lost his place on the show to the equally qualified black guy.  Suddenly, a show that is 29/30ths white is racist against white people.  Apply the same philosophy to everything else in America– like, say, the Supreme Court– and suddenly the most pressing issue our country faces is racism.  Against white people.

To be fair, most white folks are chill about the New Colored World Order.  In fact, they helped usher it in.  But it’s the few who are losing their minds at the American presidency becoming 1/44th black, the few who think the definition of racism is “the absence of special treatment,” the few like Glenn Beck who drive an Escalade to their eight-figure jobs where they complain that white men just can’t catch a break in this country that are making television worth watching these days.

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