Love-ly. Glenn Greenwald links to a just ducky post on a conservative blog which, beneath a wonderful Easter poem and picture of the crucified Christ, goes on to air some rather pungent thoughts about Barack Obama’s proposed national discussion on race:

On the other hand, I am sick to death of black people as a group. The truth. That is part of the conversation Obama is asking for, isn’t it?

…and it gets ugly, or rather uglier, from there.

In comments, though, one of the writers pens what might be the most succint definition of the modern conservative movement I’ve seen. He cites the movement’s “sense of threatened tribalism”; notes Greenwald:

There is no better phrase to describe the animating feature of the modern Limbaugh/Kristol/Fox News conservative faction than “threatened tribalism.” The belief that they are good and pure, yet subjected to unprecedented systematic unfairness and threatened by some lurking Evil Other against whom war must be waged (the Muslim, the Immigrant, the Terrorist, the Communist, the Liberal, the Welfare Queen) is the centerpiece of their ugly worldview.

And as one of Greenwald’s commenters notes, take any of your “thoughtful” movement screeds about Islam, replace the word “Muslim” with the N-word, and it reads pretty much like something out of KKK literature.

Replace “Muslim” with “communist” and you’ve got something from the John Birchers.

Replace “Muslim” with “Jews” and you’ve got something out of Nazi literature.

Replace “Muslim” with “liberals” and you’ve got something out of an Ann Coulter book, or a Sean Hannity broadcast.

“What matters,” notes Greenwald, ”is that there be some scary, malicious group about to harm them and America. The identity of the particular scary group at any given moment is really secondary.”