Even celebrities who are normally hilarious are not immune to the siren call of unoriginal musings on the GOP’s latent evil:

The above is a tweet by the usually very funny Seth Rogen. (The next day he tweeted, “Your pinky is the smallest finger but is capable of holding the biggest secrets.” Now that’s funny.)

The KKK line soon made the rounds on Facebook, gaining surely smirking “likes”. The only problem is that “Keep America American” is not Romney’s slogan. According to snopes.com (the only honest fact-checker left), Romney never even used those words. A NY Times blog (which was forced to issue a correction) misquoted him regarding a point about not following Europe into a fiscal apocalypse.

These sorts of phony trends don’t just emerge from celebrities. Obama has criticized Republicans as the party better fit for the last century, yet his campaign and their acolytes in the media consistently reopen 50-year-old wounds over racism and women’s rights. Joe Biden claims Republicans would “put ya’ll back in chains” if Romney is elected. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell insanely asserts that Mitch McConnell’s mention of the PGA tour is an insidious attempt to link Obama to Tiger Woods’ philandering. One begins to wonder why, if Republicans are truly such savagely racist beasts, liberals so often resort to phony stories to prove it.

What’s the harm in riling up a few partisans during the political silly season? When the AP parrots Democrat demagoguery and paints all Republicans as vile racists, no matter how fraudulent the evidence, the stream of filth produces a human cost. Reopening those old racist wounds can be devastating to those still bearing the scars.

Liz Wills remembers the unbelievable feeling when Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009. Now she looks fearfully at the specter of his defeat by a Republican candidate she sees as gripped by the racist right.

“I’m old enough to have seen the ‘black’ and ‘white’ signs for bathrooms, schools segregated, you couldn’t ride in the front of the bus or the train. I saw all of that. I lived through that,” Wills, 73, of Durham, North Carolina, told AFP.

“It’s not supposed to be segregated now but there’s a lot like that still. Racism is alive and well and thriving,”… “I would be depressed if Mitt Romney was elected. I have to be honest with you, I would be depressed,” she said. “A lot of it’s racism, we have to be truthful, a lot of it would be racism.”

Ms. Wills still bears the scars of her racially segregated past, but those scars don’t make her accusations true. Where is racism “thriving,” and what evidence puts Mitt Romney in its grasp? What part of the Republican platform would lead to resegregation? These irrational fears are the result of a systematic effort by the left to paint the right as driven by hatred of the “other.” So congratulations Bidens, O’Donnells, and Sharptons of the world, you’ve managed to exploit the insecurities of a 73 year-old woman, feeding off her resulting depression to increase your own power. You fellas stay classy.

The AP story continues:

Wills was overcome with emotion when a nation struggling to turn the hard-won gains of the civil rights era into real economic change for poor African Americans elected its first black president.

The common re-election question, “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?” has flustered Democrats in the age of Obama. Blacks in particular would have to answer “no”, with the black unemployment rate dramatically higher.

But since the War on Poverty kicked off in the 1960s under Lyndon B. Johnson, a more relevant question might be, “Are you better off than you were 40 years ago?” The truly racist LBJ (see: The Dependency Agenda by Kevin Williamson) cynically laid the foundation of dependency, ensuring that 90% of blacks see big government, and by extension the Democratic Party, as a racial equalizer deserving of their vote. Billions upon billions of dollars have since been spent on poverty programs, with “real economic change” nowhere to be found, and family breakdown the most notable result.

Republicans continue to reject the big government assumptions that have disproportionately shattered black communities. For that, they get this:

The whiteness of the audience as Romney picked up the Republican nod in Tampa last week was staggering, as is polling data that shows anywhere between 90 and 100 percent of blacks prefer Obama over his rival.

While I contemplate my own staggering whiteness, consider this….

Unlike Romney, the Obama campaign’s slogan actually does have a distasteful past. “Forward” has a long association with Marxism, an ideology whose adherents murdered and starved millions of government-owned citizens. Where you at, Seth? Nothing funny about that?