Rush Limbaugh revealed the right-wing end game last week, and last night on The O'Reilly Factor, guest Bernie Goldberg pretty much did the same thing.

The GOP Noise Machine's message regarding race, and specifically the allegation of racist behavior in our political discourse? Nobody cares. Nobody cares when somebody (on the right) is accused of being a racist anymore because the charge doesn't mean anything. The claim has been drained of its significance so who cares anymore if you get called a racist?

Here's Limbaugh's take:

It's Limbaugh stressing how the allegation of racism has been “overblown,” and therefore no longer matters.

And here's Godberg:

The charge of racism has been “trivialized.” It doesn't mean anything, says Goldberg.

The reason these comments are significant is because they represent the end game. They represent the ultimate goal for commentators on the right, including incessant race baiters like Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Andrew Breirtbart. The goal is for nobody to care about racist behavior or language. The goal is for there to be no political or professional consequences to naked race baiting. The goal is for the right-wing media, along with whichever politicians want to follow along, to have a clear shot in terms of saying whatever they want to about race in America, no matter how hateful and ugly and divisive it may be.

Those on the far-right fringes have sought out this kind of refuge in the past. But the trend is now being actively mainstreamed within conservative circles by the like of Limbaugh and Fox News.

For instance, in the not-so-distant past, if openly racist elements had emerged with a national political movement, the way they have clearly emerged for more than a year within the Tea Party, the common sense response would have been for participants, as well as those in positions of power, to discourage that kind of behavior and to take constructive steps to weed it out of a movement.

But what has been the general response from supposed leaders of the Tea Party movement, and specifically its media-based leaders? It's been to deny any racist elements exist, to play the role of the victim and the persecuted, and urge the troops on. So the message for people who showed up at Tea Party rallies with posters of Obama as a witch doctor with a bone through his nose, or posters of Obama looking like a monkey, or other obviously racist caricatures of the first black president? The message was there's nothing wrong with what you're doing! It's fine. And even if it is racist it doesn't matter because “racism” has been trivialized so nobody even cares about that stuff any more.

UPDATED: The caramel-thick irony? Limbaugh and Breitbart and the rest of the RW gang keep reassuring the faithful how nobody cares about the charge of “racism” anymore, and then Limbaugh and Breitbart pass their days accusing their political opponents of being racists.

UPDATED: Some Tea Partiers now proudly mock the claim of racism: