Man, overt right-wing racism is all the rage all of a sudden. AllSports.com reports:

Air Force football coach Fisher DeBerry apologized Wednesday for racial remarks he made a day earlier.

DeBerry, 67, who has been the coach of Air Force for 22 years, was reprimanded but not fired by the service academy....

During his weekly media briefing Tuesday, which followed Air Force's 48-10 Mountain West Conference loss to TCU over the weekend, DeBerry mentioned that the Horned Frogs "had a lot more Afro-American players than we did and they ran a lot faster than we did."

"It just seems to me to be that way," he continued. "Afro-American kids can run very well. That doesn't mean that Caucasian kids and other descents can't run, but it's very obvious to me that they run extremely well." ...

As USA Today notes:

DeBerry was forced last November to remove a banner in the team's locker room that read in part, "I am a member of Team Jesus Christ."

Meanwhile, as I mentioned briefly last night, Chris Craddock, a GOP candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates, made a few rather startling comments to a high school government class, according to students in the class:

... Craddock told the class he had a friend who'd studied in Africa and told him the reason there's an AIDS epidemic there is because "Africans will have sex with anything that has a pulse."

Craddock went on to assert that he was misquoted:

Regarding his comments about African sex, Craddock said, "Sex runs wild in Africa. One of my best friends went to Africa and got her doctorate from Johns Hopkins [University] studying the AIDS culture in Zimbabwe. And she said one of the main reasons [there's so much AIDS there] is that sex is just rampant in Zimbabwe."

"Read any study that deals with the problems of AIDS in Africa and you'll see that," he said.

In teacher Cynthia Szwajkowski['s] class, said Craddock, "I said sex runs rampant over there and that insane amounts of unprotected sex produces HIV." Furthermore, he stressed, "I was not talking about anybody here or black people [in general]. I was talking about a specific circumstance. If you have sex with anything with a pulse, AIDS is going to spread."

Oh -- that clears that up.

And from beyond the grave:

Former president Richard Nixon considered Ugandan dictator Idi Amin an "ape" and mistrusted his own State Department as "always on the side of the blacks," according to documents made public this week....

The pair [Nixon and Henry Kissinger] were also left fulminating and frustrated by the 1972 slaughter of an estimated 150,000-200,000 Hutus in an outbreak of tribal violence in Burundi.

"I'm getting tired of this business of letting these Africans eat a hundred thousand people and do nothing about it," Nixon fumed in the September 24 phone call....

(Links via Democratic Underground and AMERICAblog.)

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UPDATE: I should also have noted another element of Chris Craddock's worldview:

"When we asked him about gay marriage, he said he believes nobody's born gay — they turn gay," said senior Natalie McLarty, 17. "He said, in his experience, from the gay males he's known, there are three ways to become gay: You don't have a father figure in your life, you have an abusive father figure or you have no loving support in your family."

"I was extremely offended because one of my relatives is gay, so that's an assumption he's making about my family," she said. "I don't know where he's getting his statistics, but I know a ton of people who are gay, and they have father figures and love and support in their family. He's young, and I don't know where he's getting these old-fashioned concepts."

SoCalPundit highlights this quote in a post headlined "The New Thought Police Get Younger All The Time" SoCalPundit adds this brilliant gloss:

I fail to see how having a gay relative is something to get offended over. Everyone is allowed to have their opinion and the students did ask for his.

We need to undo the speech codes that have been woven into the scene lest it one day become illegal to have an opinion that varies from that of the liberal line.

You may not agree with Craddock and you may even hate what he said, but in a free country you do not have the right to stop him from saying it. The students that brought this matter to the media clearly want Craddock punished for his opinion. It is a horrible civics lesson to teach these young minds to lash out at people who do not share their opinion on a given matter.

Problem is, there's no evidence whatsoever in the linked article or the follow-up that the students "want Craddock punished for his opinion." (The follow-up does note, however, that Craddock supporters "called and tried to prevent" the first article "from being published.")

Craddock is running for office; if people choose not to vote for him after reading these comments, is that SoCalPundit's idea of "thought police"-style "punishment"? SoCalPundit, you're the thought police wannabe -- you don't think those kids have a right to disagree openly with Craddock.