Anyone having any doubts about which particular political party is the target of all this talk about incivility and vitriol need only heed Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik. "The anger that is being purveyed by people in radio and on TV," Clueless Clarence told MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, "is done deliberately because it benefits one particular party."
That quote will guarantee Dupnik's appearance as a keynote speaker at next year's Democratic National Convention. Perhaps the Republicans will respond by having a speaker run down the following timeline, one that proves black conservatives have, for years, been fair game for all manner of uncivil and vitriolic comments, most of which have benefited "one particular party."
November 1994: Julianne Malveaux, then a columnist, expressed her hope that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' wife feed him plenty of foods containing cholesterol, the better for him to have a heart attack and die.
November 1996: Thomas is depicted on the cover of the now-defunct Emerge magazine as a "lawn jockey for the far right."
October 2000: The NAACP Voter Education Fund -- technically, a completely different organization from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, but for all practical purposes just a nearby pew in the same church -- runs an "issue ad" supposedly about the need for hate crimes legislation but that was really an endorsement of then-presidential candidate Al Gore.
The ad featured the daughter of Texas lynching victim James Byrd. Republican Texas Gov. George W. Bush's refusal to support hate crimes legislation, Byrd's daughter said, "was like seeing my father lynched all over again."
December 2000: The Baltimore Afro-American, a black-owned newspaper, ran an op-ed piece with this headline about Thomas: "Get That N***** Off The U.S. Supreme Court!"
July 2001: Julian Bond, then the NAACP board chairman, accused Bush of appointing judges and Cabinet members "from the Taliban wing of American politics."
October 2001: Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr., president of the Maryland Senate, called then-state Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele "the personification of an Uncle Tom."
August 2002: New York City Council member Charles Barron, black and a Democrat, announced at the "Millions For Reparations" rally in the nation's capital that he'd "like to slap a white person for my mental health."
March 2003: Left-wing activist Amiri Baraka appeared at Baltimore's Coppin State University and read a poem that called then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice a "skeeza," a slang term referring to a woman with morals so low she'd make the average prostitute look like Mother Teresa.
The crowd listening to Baraka's vitriolic, uncivil screed erupted with applause, laughter, howls of delight and foot stomping. You'd have thought the Baltimore Ravens had just scored the winning touchdown in the Super Bowl.
November 2003: Thomas makes the cover of Emerge magazine a second time, with a handkerchief tied around his head, implying he was what Miller called Steele.
March 2005: A group of black Detroiters gave Dave Bing, then a businessman but now that troubled city's mayor, a "Sambo Sellout Award." Bing's offense? He supported charter schools.
July 2008: Jesse Jackson is caught off mike telling someone what he'd like to do with then-Sen. Barack Obama's genitalia. Obama's offense? He wasn't toeing the line about black Americans being innocent and perpetual victims of white racism.
All the above incidents and remarks have at least two things in common.
1. They are uncivil and vitriolic.
2. Not one of the people who are now presuming to preach to conservatives, Republicans and members of the Tea Party movement about "civility and vitriol," raised his or her voice to condemn the remarks or incidents.
They can start preaching to us when they do.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.