One of the recurrent themes that contribute to right-wing paranoia is the fantasy that white people suffer from discrimination in Obama's America. This conceit erupted on the talk shows during the Sotomayor hearings and after Henry Louis Gates' arrest, when Rush Limbaugh said, "President Obama is black, and I think he's got a chip on his shoulder," and Glenn Beck exclaimed that Obama "has a deep seated hatred for white people."

Yesterday, the "white persecution" theme bubbled up again when Drudge reported, "WHITE STUDENT BEATEN ON SCHOOL BUS; CROWD CHEERS." The police officer who described the assault as racially motivated later retracted the characterization, but it was too late to stop Rush Limbaugh from representing the incident as an example of "Obama's America":

You put your kids on a school bus, you expect safety, but in Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, "Yeah, right on, right on, right on!" And of course, everybody says, "Oh, the white kid deserved it, he was born a racist, he's white."

The fact that black politicians make up 7.5% of U.S. Representatives, 1% of U.S. Senators, and 2% of state governors does not register in the fantasy of white persecution. Nor does the persistent income gap between whites and blacks: $49K to $30K. The overwhelmingly white right-wing desperately wants to represent itself as persecuted, the facts be damned. Hence Limbaugh's enthusiasm to report the purported race bias on the school-bus. As blogger John Rogers cannily explains:

One of the great secrets of human nature is that the one thing people want more than love, security, sex, chocolate or big-screen TV's is to feel hard done by. Because being hard done by is the shit. Feeling hard done by is the sweetest of drugs. If you’re being persecuted - it must mean you're doing the right thing, right? You get the mellow buzz of the moral high ground, but without arrogantly claiming it as your own. You get an instant, supportive community in a big dark scary world of such scope it may well literally be beyond rational human processing. When you are hard done by, you get purpose in a life where otherwise, you’d have to find your own. And when you ride that high, then no amount of logic, no pointing out that in actuality you and your beliefs are at a high point of popularity and influence for the last hundred years - is going to pry that sweet crack-pipe of moral indignation from your hands.

Stay tuned for more black-on-white action in my Persecution Politics series at dagblog.com.