Over the weekend we saw Newsweek do it's best to trash the Republican party in an effort to minimize their ability to attack Barack Obama's weaknesses. Now someone else has decided to carry the ball.

According to Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson, John McCain's version of America is..well..a racist one.

Here's some of the highlights of his column entitled "McCains America."

His take on the only way Senator McCain and Republicans can defeat Obama.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year. That is why McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president -- because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing.

Gee, should I change the name of this site to "Blogs For John McCain Americans"? Nah, too long.

On how us evil Republicans view "our America."

That's not the America, though, that the Republicans refer to in proclaiming their own Americanness. For them, "American" is a term to be used as a wedge issue, a way to distinguish their more racially and religiously homogeneous party from the historically more polyglot Democrats. Such separation has a long pedigree: Campaigning for GOP presidential nominee Alf Landon in 1936, Republican leader Frank Knox said that the Democratic Party under President Franklin Roosevelt "has been seized by alien and un-American elements. Next November, you will choose the American way."

How ironic! There he is trying to do his own "wedge" maneuver with voters by trying to label us as being folks with warped views, while clearly displaying how warped and misguided his own truly are!

Finally, what all us Republicans are really about when bright minds like Harold Meyerson break us down.

There are good reasons Republicans are focusing on identity rather than issues this year: In poll after poll, there's not a single major issue on which the public agrees with them or their presumptive nominee. Not Iraq, certainly. Not the economy. Should the election turn on the question of "What are you going to do for America?" rather than "Are you a real American?" Republicans are doomed. They offer no solutions for the stagnation (or decline) of American living standards, or for the weakening of America's economic power. They offer no resolution to America's war of choice in Iraq. Their party leader, the incumbent president, let a great American city drown. They are the American party, and McCain the American nominee, that hasn't a clue about how to help America in its (prolonged, I fear) moment of need.

What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which "American" is synonymous with "white" and "Christian," than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write "American" when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, "American" is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend.

Wow. Truly amazing isn't it folks? According to Harold Meyerson, John McCain's vision of America is in line with that of the Klan. All of us Republicans who blog or opine in various venues might as well be card carrying members of the Aryan nation if we dare to attack Obama on any legitimate issue. Our only hope for a McCain victory according to Meyerson, is to rally around all those racist white Christian voters, you know, the "only real Americans" out there in America.

Is this guy nuts or what?

Why are we all of a sudden seeing such pathetic pieces from what should be respected media outlets?

In my opinion, what's really going on here is an attempt by the far left, MoveOn media to provide covering fire for Obama in advance. Their hope is to head off what happened to John Kerry with the Swift Boat Veterans by creating a premise in the minds of voters that any attack on Obama is nothing more than the last resort of white racist Republicans who know they can't beat Obama without stooping to low down dirty tricks.

Watching the results of this years primary polls, they know all too well that the potential for Reagan Democrats to sink Obama's campaign is far too great to sit around this time and let Republicans unload on him. Now they are clearly launching an offensive in hopes of minimizing anything that Republicans say or do.

The next question is, where will the next piece like this one come from and when?