Gloria Borger faux-scandal-mongering about the Ron Paul newsletters of twenty years ago.

It seems decades old comments are more important than what the candidates actually say and do on pressing contemporary matters. That’s the essence of gotcha journalism. Manufacture fake outrage (Rude words in America? Pass the smelling salts!) to distract from really outrageous things (like the National Defense Authorization Act).

We are not post-racial, whatever that means. We never will be. Thank god.

Race consciousness is not racial ignorance. It is fundamentally benign, part of being a healthy human being.

We all like “our own kind” better. Good for us.

Besides, sometimes “our own kind” means Spanish or Nigerian….at other times, it means Austrian-speaking or Tamil-speaking. Our own kind could be “we Jews”…or “we tall and lean men”…or “we Sumo wrestlers” or  “we high-powered feminist lawyers”….

Why isn’t generalizing about political groups or cultural groups (say, right-wing Christians) denounced as sharply as generalizing about white skins? They’re both misleading ways of thinking. And they’re both things we all do.

We all generalize about race and culture and religion and gender and national identity. So what?  All of us harbor forms of exceptionalism, modes of affiliation, things and people we prefer…. some more dangerously than others.

Focus on the dangerous part, forget the rest.

We can’t afford not to.

We have reached the point where reporters hack the phone messages of people who just died, where the government can read every electronic message you write and tap every conversation, where politicians think you can spend more than you have because you can always print it up, where the main moral drawback of killing more than a million foreigners found guilty of living in the wrong country seems to be that it ruined our reputation.

We have far, far bigger problems than someone’s less-than-politic phrasing in some dead and gone newsletter. Far bigger problems.

And the fact that we let unscrupulous journalists, fully embedded with the crony capitalist oligarchy, set the moral and intellectual tone of the most serious political debate in at least half-a-century may turn out to be the biggest of them all.