What comes next is even more bizarre. Even as Steyn complains that liberals are always bringing race into conversations where it doesn't belong, he proceeds to emphasize, more than anything else, the fact that George Zimmerman is half-Hispanic, and media coverage of same, writing as if Zimmerman's non-white status tells us something about whether there was anti-black racism. Do you see what's happened? Some conservatives are so obsessed with the notion that the media is obsessed with race that they themselves discuss everything through a racial lens. (Hence Rush Limbaugh reacting to poor Donovan McNabb performances with unprompted musings about how the media just wanted him to be successful because he was black).

Perhaps conservatives would be better off if, when asked questions like, "Do you think civil rights were implicated when the unarmed black kid was shot and killed," they answered, "it's worth investigating, but we can't tell until all the facts are in and shouldn't make any presumptions." Instead, we get a rant about how Al Sharpton is a huckster and The New York Times sucks because they tried to obscure the race of the shooter. And no attempt to grapple with the underlying question in any satisfying or rigorous way. Steyn allows his analysis of race in America to be shaped largely by his impression of what Sharpton and the Times are saying. But why?

As Kevin Drum put it, "the problem conservatives have is that this is pretty much the sum total of their take on racial issues: that liberals bring it up too often."