BUT I THOUGHT MUSLIMS DIDN'T DRINK MARTINIS

I really should ignore this nonsense -- by rising to the bait and helping to spread it, I'm doing just what the GOP wants -- but, well, here's Jake Tapper reporting on Karl Rove's latest attempt to create a meme:

ABC News' Christianne Klein reports that at a breakfast with Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club this morning, former White House senior aide Karl Rove referred to Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, as "coolly arrogant."

"Even if you never met him, you know this guy," Rove said, per Christianne Klein. "He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone who passes by." ...

This isn't just bizarrely offensive, for a reason so obvious even Tapper grasps it:

Interesting that Mr. Rove would use a country club metaphor to describe the first major party African-American presidential candidate, whom I'm sure wouldn't be admitted into many country clubs that members of the Capitol Hill Club frequent.

It directly conflicts, at the reptile-brain level, with the other meme Obama's enemies are trying to spead: that he's a secret Muslim, a scary brown non-Western foreigner, a one-man vanguard army of "them."

Maybe this is why Rove proclaimed a few months ago that Republicans shouldn't stress Obama's middle name. It wasn't that Rove disapproved of trying to make Obama seem distasteful to certain voters -- it was that he didn't want other people's way of making Obama seem distasteful to interfere with his way of making Obama seem distasteful.