Is Barack Obama not black enough for the right-wingnuts?!

Now that Senator Barack Obama has announced a presidential exploratory committee for a possible 2008 run, the right-wing pundits are launching new and creative attack strategies.

But apparently it's too much trouble to try to criticize Obama on the actual issues. So instead they're resorting to schoolyard tactics, and focusing on his racial makeup, as if it matters.

According to the watchdog group Media Matters for America:

On the January 16 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh called Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) a "half-minority" and said that "the media ... are in the midst of Obama-gasms" because "Barack Hussein Obama" has formed a presidential exploratory committee. Limbaugh called Obama "a half-minority" in the context of criticizing Obama for supporting his hometown Chicago Bears over the New Orleans Saints in the upcoming January 21 National Football Conference championship game.

Limbaugh presumably referred to Obama as a "half-minority" because of Obama's lineage: his father was black and born in Kenya, while his mother was white, born in Kansas. Similarly, conservative talk-radio host Brian Sussman previously characterized Obama as "Halfrican."

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In a way, it seems as though they're trying to make trouble based on the fact that Obama's black father hooked up with his white mother, because that kind of interracial hanky-panky might stir up the rednecks.

And this is supposed to be the 21st century. Amazing.