Eric Holder, the nation’s first black attorney general, today blasted America as “a nation of cowards” because her people purposefully avoid “frank discussions” about race.

On the same day, infamous race-baiter Al Sharpton decried the following editorial cartoon in the New York Post as racist because it features a monkey:

The media blog FishbowlNY added its liberal voice to the conversation by saying the cartoon has “unmistakable racial undertones.”

That strange confluence of events may help explain the exasperation of folks like Jim Geraghty, a former co-worker of mine, and his boss, Jonah Goldberg. “[W]hatever ‘cowardice’ or reluctance [Holder] diagnoses would appear to be justified,” Geraghty wrote, “as ‘frank conversations’ usually result in accusations of racism, and pretty severe repercussions for those deemed by society at large as racist.”

The problem with race relations in America isn’t that an editorial cartoonist was trying to make a subtle comment about President Obama’s race by drawing a dead monkey; the problem is that the Al Sharptons and the liberal blogs of the country see the visage of Obama in a dead monkey when it isn’t there. They have injected a conversation about race into a cartoon that isn’t racial.

Their conclusion isn’t even logical. For starters, Obama didn’t write the stimulus law being mocked in the cartoon. He vowed to keep earmarks out of it, but Democrats in Congress steamrolled him and created a monument to pork-barrel spending. They are the monkeys who wrote the stimulus bill.

Obama isn’t physically or even politically dead, either, as the cartoon would have to imply were it about him. Congress, on the other hand, has an approval rating of 31 percent, down 6 percent from what it was at the start of the previous Congress.

Sean Delonas’ cartoon isn’t particularly amusing, but neither is it racist. “Do you really think I’m saying Obama should be shot? I didn’t see that in the cartoon,” Delonas told CNN. “It’s about the economic stimulus bill. If you’re going to make that about anybody, it would be [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, which it’s not.”

Furthermore, had either Delonas or his editors thought someone might misinterpret their play on the news of a rampaging chimpanzee killed by police, odds are good that the cartoon would not have been published for the reason stated so well by Geraghty and Goldberg.

At the risk of provoking new charges of racism for unmistakable racial undertones, I’m going to repeat what I said in the headline: Race is the 800-pound gorilla in America today. It is, as Merriam-Webster Online says, the “dominating or uncontrollable” force in our culture, and we do need to talk about it.

That is tough to do when every innocent action (read: political cartoon) triggers a knee-jerk, unequal reaction. But consider this blog post one enlightened redneck’s invitation to have another of those frank discussions about race that apparently have escaped Holder’s notice.

UPDATE, 2/19: Even Jonathan Chait of the liberal blog The Plank has the good sense to realize that “Sometimes A Monkey Is Just A Monkey.”

And this from Hot Air: “This isn’t about genuine outrage; it’s about manufactured outrage for political advantage. Which is why we’re all going to remain ‘cowards’ on this subject.”

UPDATE, 2/20: The New York Post has apologized for the cartoon, sort of, which has Michelle Malkin wondering whether these other cliches are now banned from American discourse: “went ape,” “going bananas,” “monkeying around,” “it’s a jungle out there,” “it’s a zoo” and “get the monkey off your back.” Or how about words like “beastly”?

Think Malkin is overreacting? Then you obviously don’t recall the controversies over the use of the word “niggardly,” which has no racial connotation whatsoever but which people now use at their own risk.

John Hinderaker of Power Line puts this whole controversy into context: “If the president is a Republican, it’s fine to call him a “chimp.” In fact, it’s morally superior. But if the president is a Democrat, you can’t call a chimpanzee a chimp lest someone think you might have been referring to the president. It all makes perfect sense.”

It’s also apparently OK to fantasize about having a chimp defecate on the head of a Republican presidential candidate. These are the “cowardly” times we live in.