There they go again.

The American left, caught in the act of brandishing their electronic rope for yet another conservative black man, is busy dodging their long and horrendous history of racism.

Mother Jones tries to turn attention from the left’s abysmal record on lynchings — high tech or with a rope — by re-visiting my criticism of ex-Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod. My point back then, of course, was that Ms. Sherrod cited a Supreme Court case in which she claimed the Court said her relative was lynched. I read the case. The words “lynch” or “lynching” appeared exactly nowhere in the case. Ms. Sherrod, surprise, finally emerged as just another standard left-winger who, sadly, employs race and state to push a progressive agenda. That was my criticism and it stands.

But the Sherrod incident highlights exactly why leftist publications are so wildly excitable on the subject of lynching, as Media Matters is here as it foams about (the list is long) Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Matt Drudge, Monica Crowley, Peter Johnson Jr., Greg Gutfeld, Brent Bozell, Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit and yours truly. All of us having in our individual fashion called them out on their wretched history. (Note to Media Matters: You missed Mark Levin. Get on the stick over there.)

The American left has a brutal and vivid centuries-long history on race, as we have previously detailed at length here and here. This is a political faith that has historically exhibited a mind-bending addiction to judging their fellow Americans by skin color. The point the left didn’t want to go anywhere near in the Sherrod case is that Sherrod’s relative was beaten to death — brutally — by the local sheriff, and in 1940s Georgia sheriffs were part of the Democratic political machinery. And the Supreme Court case was judged by a lifetime Klan member — Justice Hugo Black. So whether it was the sheriff on the bottom rung of justice or the Supreme Court at the top rung, the long hand of the progressive/racism tie was operating. That tie literally beat a black man to death — and then sat favorably in judgment of his killers. Progressives are well on record as having supported slavery, segregation, lynching, the Ku Klux Klan (which actually ran the 1924 Democratic Convention known to history as the “Klan Bake”) and every race-based approach to life right on down to today’s belief in racial quotas and refusing to prosecute the Black Panther voting rights case in Philadelphia for racial reasons. (See J. Christian Adams book Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.)

To cite one of a gazillion examples, here is the Republican view of lynching as expressed all the way back in 1924 in its platform of that year:

We urge the Congress to enact at the earliest possible date a federal anti-lynching law so that the full influence of the federal government may be wielded to exterminate this hideous crime.

And the Democrats? How did they stand on the lynching issue?

We condemn the efforts of the Republican Party to nationalize the functions and duties of the states.

Get that? This was the left’s response to the GOP on lynching. In other words: buzz off. We’re busy lynching black men, particularly if we catch them associating with white women. Take your anti-lynching law platform and stuff it.

And, but of course, this anti-anti-lynching plank was seamlessly tied together with every progressive nostrum of the day, right down to assailing the GOP for taking campaign funds from “predatory interests.” The same blather promoted by today’s progressives in the Citizens United case.

In short?

This is what the left does. Today with Herman Cain, yesterday with Clarence Thomas, long yesterdays ago with a 1924 platform that essentially issued a coded endorsement of their right to lynch the uppity black men of their day. And with Shirley Sherrod’s relative Bobby Hall — who, by the way, was a black man from Georgia just like Herman Cain.

Nothing has changed this tie between progressives and racism. The latter is used to drive the policies of the former.

It was true in 1924. It was true in the 1940s’ Bobby Hall case. It is true today.

And all you have to do to see the modern version of this at work is keep your eye on the double-standard being used with the black Herman Cain and that used to ferociously defend the white liberal Bill Clinton, the latter accused by three women successively of rape (Juanita Broaddrick), groping (Kathleen Willey), and dropping his pants with a request to “kiss it” (Paula Jones).

What’s unfolding here is a dramatic stripping bare of the progressive double standard on race and sex. Why? Precisely because conservatives are fed up with letting these people get away with the double game. The spotlight is now on.

Make my day: read Mother Jones and Media Matters.

Where the 21st century version of the sentiments of 1924 progressive/racism ties are carefully updated and skillfully presented for all to see.

Herman Cain may be President of the United States. He may never be President of the United States.

But he damn well isn’t going to be lynched for trying to be President of the United States.