Last week, right-wing radio host Barbara Espinosa of Arizona took to the airwaves and declared that she won't call Barack Obama “the first black president,” explaining: “I voted for the white guy myself. I call him a monkey.” And then she defended that statement, saying it was “prompted” by a cartoon someone sent her of Obama as a monkey. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it: “One thing I've never seen is a bigot cite actual racism as a defense against their own racism.”

Espinosa's naked bigotry brought to mind something ABC's Sam Donaldson wrote after the Daily Caller's Neil Munro shouted nativist idiocies disguised as questions during the president's immigration statement last week. Tucker Carlson defended his heckler-cum-reporter by comparing him to Donaldson, which irked the ABC newsman, who wrote to Huffington Post's Michael Calderone: “Never once did I interrupt a president in any way while he was making a formal statement.”

Donaldson also made a larger point about the “incivility of the times:”

There is one more factor, let's face it: Many on the political right believe this president ought not to be there -- they oppose him not for his polices and political view but for who he is, an African American! These people and perhaps even certain news organizations (certainly the right wing talkers like Limbaugh) encourage disrespect for this president.

Conservatives tend not to like it when you point out the right's glaringly obvious racial attacks on President Obama. Rush Limbaugh was not at all amused, and responded to Donaldson in an email to the terrible NewsBusters blog: “Sam's premise, sadly, is ignorant, simplistic, clichéd, predictable and wrong. The President's ideas are what I oppose, not his skin color, which I couldn't care less about.” That's the same Rush Limbaugh, incidentally, who refers to Obama as "Or-Bam-eo" and an "angry black guy," and says everything Obama does is "reparations."

Seemingly as if to prove Donaldson correct and the Limbaughs of the world wrong, Espinosa let fly with her unguarded racism. Her remarks sit at the top of a pile of racist cartoons and bigoted newsletters from conservative groups about the president and his family. Talk radio, the conservative movement's signature medium, all too often traffics in code words and innuendo about Obama, the intent of which is unmistakable.

Donaldson is right; a not insignificant portion of the president's right-wing critics attack him on racial terms. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh downplay and deny it, but with each passing day it just gets louder and uglier and harder to dismiss.