PETER KING'S QUEST FOR DEMONIZATION CONVERGENCE

I had forgotten that this was still going on, but Fox Nation reminds me:

A key US House of Representatives committee next week will hold the second in a controversial series of hearings on Muslim radicalization in the United States, the panel's chairman announced Thursday.

House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King, a Republican whose first session on the issue in March drew angry charges he was carrying out a religiously-based witch hunt, said the new hearing would take place June 15.

"At this hearing, we will look specifically at the extent of the dangerous problem of radicalization in US prisons," King said in a statement.

I don't know if it can possibly work, but this is certainly designed to hit a couple of the Fox News/talk radio/wingnut blog audience's pleasure-and-terror centers simultaneously. Yes, the two best-known American converts to Islam who are identified with terrorism are white (Adam Gadahn and John Walker Lindh) -- but if we're taling about American prisons, given the country's incarceration demographics, and given the fact that whites who turn extremist in prison are most likely to wind up sporting Aryan Brotherhood tattoos, it's safe to say that the subtext of King's hearing will be BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK BLACK. Which means the hearing combines two of the crazies' top obsessions/delusions: the notion that the West is undergoing Islamic radicalization and the idea that there's a rising black radical menace.

You remember the black radical menace. It pretty much consisted of these two guys, who were so intimidating that the white person on the cellphone in the background doesn't even give a crap that they're there:

Well, now they're back and they're jihadists! Hide the babies!

If you doubt that race is the subtext to this -- or, rather, the text -- please note what site Fox Nation directs you to if you want to read more: why, it's Breitbart.com!

I know, I know: Peter King's first round of hearings was an epic fail. This could very well be more of the same -- but the righties continue to try it out, hoping they'll somehow hit pay dirt and devise a way to use this in the 2012 campaign.

That might be especially tough now that the president they want to unseat is the guy who offed bin Laden. And it might seem particularly odd to pursue a racial line of attack if their presidential nominee is under as much pressure to put Herman Cain on the ticket as Dukakis was to run with Jesse Jackson in '88, which doesn't seem inconceivable. So we'll see. But give this to the righties: they try everything until something works.