Blanket charges of racism have become the stock-in-trade of the liberal media in reporting on Town-Hall protesters. For converging to petition their representatives about the administration’s profligate policies, independent-minded, patriotic constitutionalists have been savaged by rabid reporters who see signs of the divine in Obama and the devil in his detractors.

One apropos sign at a tea party captured this state of affairs: “It doesn”t matter what my sign says, the press will call it racist.”

In fairness, members of the media are more inclusive in their reprimands about racial exclusion. The general, (alleged) racial backwardness of the American people is a repeated refrain in the popular press. This non-stop, relentless propaganda, enforced by the tyranny of political correctness, helps explain why most Americans”who themselves harbor no racial animus, and, if anything, are remarkably naÃ¯ve about human differences, cultural or racial”believe racism saturates their society.

It is one thing for a starlet like Janeane Garofalo to defame tea party attendees as “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and accuse men and women she knows nothing about of “hating a black man in the White House” and harboring unadulterated racism. It’s quite another for cable-network anchors to parrot the loopy lady’s lines.

Nevertheless, ape they did.

So it was that thought-crime investigator Keith Olbermann broke news on his MSNBC nightly show. With his most solemn, commissar-like countenance, Keith informed his viewers, matter-of-fact, that the intensity of the animosity toward Barack Obama is based on his being a black man.

Instead of arguing their “case” with reference to facts and reason, Keith and Company chose to impugn their disputants based on assumptions about their motives. Still worse: this balderdash, framed as breaking-news, was bolstered by another logical fallacy: an argument from authority.

The feeble-minded Jimmy Carter had seconded Garofalo the histrion. By Keith’s journalistic standards, this was all the proof he needed to pronounce the libel true, and apply the pejorative liberally.

Olbermann proceeded to “debate” this ad hominem with the effeminate, bug-eyed blogger Markos Moulitsas, and before him with politician-turned-pundit, Lawrence O”Donnell.

The shifty and shameless O”Donnell asserted in all seriousness that because Carter had claimed that conservative and independent tea-party goers were guilty of harboring and acting on racially impure thoughts, this was indeed so. After all, the former president was from the dreaded South! He ought to know!

At the time Obama ascended to the throne his approval ratings ran to 70 percent. Carter, Keith, Chris (Matthews), and Contessa (Brewer) were asking their viewers to believe that between March and September of 2009, the aforementioned Americans had developed a bad case of racism rather than buyer’s remorse.

No wonder, then, that the malign men and women of MSNBC pointedly failed to report conclusive findings to the contrary.

A progressive research group “ among whose stars is Democratic political consultant and prominent clintonista (now Obamaniac) James Carville “ discovered that when it comes to their assumptions about older, white, Southern Republicans, the cable quislings had been wrong all along.

As the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner research group recently, and reluctantly, reported, the Americans whom the liberal media had been righteously denouncing were not racists.

Although the research group had done its darnedest to disparage the conservative base of the Republican Party, its racism spotters were forced to exempt this “mocked minority” from the media’s charges for lack of evidence.

The Group’s Key Findings leap off the pixelated page:

Instead of focusing on [the] intense ideological divisions, the press and elites continue to look for a racial element that drives these voters” beliefs “ but they need to get over it. Conducted on the heels of Joe Wilson’s incendiary comments at the president’s joint session address, we gave these groups of older, white Republican base voters in Georgia full opportunity to bring race into their discussion “ but it did not ever become a central element, and indeed, was almost beside the point.

The “rubes” were given a clean bill of racial health by an organ of the rulers. But the fraudulent zealots at the intellectual hinterland that is MSNBC have yet to come clean.