Egghead, heal thyself.... Concerning the anvil-tongued remarks of Senator Obama on the connection between chronic unemployment and various pathologies of small-town white Pennsylvanians, Mickey Kaus requests that Obama should:

Rather than trying to spin his way out, wouldn't it be better for Obama to forthrightly admit his identity? Let's have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!

Fair enough, I say. Liberals have had a bad habit of explaining away such things in the past as rooted in the negative environment of the subject, and it ends up giving us a tone deafness to issues like crime. Chronic unemployment should no more be an excuse for anti-immigrant sentiments than it is for gang violence.

But no sooner does he make that sensible point, then Kaus lobs this back at his readers:

Ann Coulter is reading Obama's autobiography and comes up with a not-implausible interpretation of the famous Racist Grandma incident:

As recounted in Obama's autobiography, the only evidence that his grandmother feared black men comes from Obama's good-for-nothing, chronically unemployed white grandfather, who accuses Grandma of racism as his third excuse not to get dressed and drive her to work.

Obama's full quote about his grandmother, above, described her as "a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe." So Coulter's excuse, which Kaus finds "not-implausible," for grandma having palpitations everytime a black man walked by, or for her using the word "jew" as a verb, was the behavior of her unemployed husband? Sounds like "egghead condescension" to me....