From Frank Rich's August 1 New York Times column, Small Beer, Big Hangover:

One of the loudest birther enablers is not at Fox but CNN: Lou Dobbs, who was heretofore best known for trying to link immigrants, especially Hispanics, to civic havoc. Dobbs is one-stop shopping for the excesses of this seismic period of racial transition. And he is following a traditional, if toxic, American playbook. The escalating white fear of newly empowered ethnic groups and blacks is a naked replay of more than a century ago, when large waves of immigration and the northern migration of emancipated blacks, coupled with a tumultuous modernization of the American work force, unleashed a similar storm of racial and nativist panic.

Rich also slams Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich for labeling Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor a racist and Glenn Beck for labeling Obama a racist:

Ground zero for this hysteria is Fox News, where Brit Hume last Sunday lamented how insulting it is “to be labeled a racist” in “contemporary” America. “That fact has placed into the hands of certain people a weapon,” he said, as he condemned Gates for hurling that weapon at a police officer. Gates may well have been unjust -- we don't know that Crowley is a racist - but the professor was provoked by being confronted like a suspect in the privacy of his own home.

What about those far more famous leaders in Hume's own camp who insistently cry “racist” -- and in public forums -- without any credible justification whatsoever? These are the “certain people” Hume conspicuously didn't mention. They include Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, both of whom labeled Sonia Sotomayor a racist. Their ranks were joined last week by Glenn Beck, who on Fox News inexplicably labeled Obama a racist with “a deep-seated hatred for white people,” presumably including his own mother.