Why does Frank Rich still have a job?  Not only is Rich the last and least interesting of the Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times — and, given that his competition includes Maureen Dowd and Paul “The End is Near!” Krugman, that is really saying something — he’s also the Times’s worst drama critic, whose judgments have not stood the test of even two decades, a non-bestselling author and a failed showbiz wannabee.

Stung by all the criticism of a recent, utterly ludicrous essay in the once-august pages of the Times, which has now degenerated in a haven for lazy moral-equivalence desperate non-housewives, and former Enron advisers, the old “Butcher of Broadway” was back over the weekend with the following enormity:

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Take it from the louder voices on the right. Because no tape has surfaced of anyone yelling racial slurs at the civil rights icon and Georgia Congressman John Lewis, it’s now a blogosphere “fact” that Lewis is a liar and the “lamestream media” concocted the entire incident. The same camp maintains as well that the spit landing on the Missouri Congressman Emanuel Cleaver was inadvertent spillover saliva from an over-frothing screamer — spittle, not spit, as it were. True, there is video evidence of the homophobic venom directed at Barney Frank — but, hey, Frank is white, so no racism there!

… I would be more than happy to stand corrected. But the story of race and the right did not, alas, end with the health care bill. Hardly had we been told that all that ugliness was a fantasy than we learned back in the material world that the new Republican governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, had issued a state proclamation celebrating April as Confederate History Month.

That would be the “Solid South” Confederacy of Dunces – excuse me! of Democrats! — the party of slavery, segregation and sedition. For modern liberal Democrats like Rich, however, nothing about the history of the Civil War matters, and nothing about the South matters, except slavery. The contradiction of his position never seems to occur to him:

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McDonnell was asked to explain why there was no mention of slavery in his declaration honoring “the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens.” After acknowledging that slavery was among “any number of aspects to that conflict between the states,” the governor went on to say that he had focused on the issues “I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Only when some of his own black supporters joined editorialists in observing that slavery was significant to some Virginians too — a fifth of the state’s population is black — did he beat a retreat and apologize.

But his original point had been successfully volleyed, and it was not an innocent mistake. McDonnell’s words have a well-worn provenance. In “Race and Reunion,” the definitive study of Civil War revisionism, the historian David W. Blight documents the long trajectory of the insidious campaign to erase slavery from the war’s history and reconfigure the lost Southern cause as a noble battle for states’ rights against an oppressive federal government. In its very first editorial upon resuming publication in postwar 1865, The Richmond Dispatch characterized the Civil War as a struggle for the South’s “sense of rights under the Constitution.” The editorial contained not “a single mention of slavery or black freedom,” Blight writes. That evasion would be a critical fixture of the myth-making to follow ever since.

It’s a classic Rich/New York Times form of argumentation, to posit an unassailable truth — “the definitive study” — and then argue its conclusions from authority without ever having to prove them.  Never mind that the bloodiest conflict in American history, which ended 145 years ago this month in a Virginia courthouse, is an enormously complex subject that has elicited thousands and thousands of books examining its causes, origins and conduct from every conceivable angle. What it all boils down to for Frank Rich is this: conservatives and Republicans hate black people.

No cheesy off-off-off-Broadway production by the former drama critic would be complete without the big Final Reprise. Go ahead — hum along with Frank.  You know how this tune goes:

How our current spike in neo-Confederate rebellion will end is unknown. It’s unnerving that Tea Party leaders and conservatives in the Oklahoma Legislature now aim to create a new volunteer militia that, as The Associated Press described it, would use as yet mysterious means to “help defend against what they believe are improper federal infringements on state sovereignty.” This is the same ideology that animated Timothy McVeigh, whose strike against the tyrannical federal government will reach its 15th anniversary on Monday in the same city where the Oklahoma Legislature meets.

What is known is that the nearly all-white G.O.P. is so traumatized by race it has now morphed into a bizarre paragon of both liberal and conservative racial political correctness. For irrefutable proof, look no further than the peculiar case of its chairman, Steele, whose reckless spending and incompetence would cost him his job at any other professional organization, let alone a political operation during an election year. Steele has job security only because he is the sole black man in a white party hierarchy. That hierarchy is as fearful of crossing him as it is of calling out the extreme Obama haters in its ranks.

At least we can take solace in the news that there’s no documentary evidence proving that Tea Party demonstrators hurled racist epithets at John Lewis. They were, it seems, only whistling “Dixie.”

Over to you for comment, correction and general merriment.