Well it looks like the cat who took "30 days or less" in the How Long After The Inauguration Until The Race Card Is Played office pool can pocket the kitty. A confluence of two unrelated yet equally loaded-with-tragic/horrific/comic-irony events is transformed into allegory surrounding a misfit chimp dying for Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid's sins. Or something. As insulting as linking the noble chimpanzee to Congress' plunder of $1 trillion dollars might seem, what's apparently really insulting is insinuating the POTUS might be a chimp.

That's just not cool now that the President is black.

"Your dad used to be smart as a monkey, but then his mind started gettin' lazy, and now he's dumb as a chimp" - Grampa Simpson

It's bad enough the massive supplemental spending bill just passed isn't universally popular. Even the thought that someone, somewhere laughed at President Obama depicted as a flinging-stimulus-cash-like-it-was-poo chimp would just just break the man's heart. And America needs a strong, respected leader in these troubled times.

Again in an unrelated confluence, newly-minted Attorney General Eric Holder decided to weigh in on the never-touchy subject of race. We're a nation of cowards when it comes to discussing race relations. Quite silly, really, until he explains to whom it's directed.

What does he want from white people in the discussion? And what topics are whites prohibited from discussing? When will we know we've had a suitable number of discussions on race with our black acquaintances? What's the end game for whites?

Or is it a message to people who reflexively hide behind the race card when data and facts run afoul of perception and desired outcomes? A call for dialog on race rather than soliloquies about racism? Without calm, rational assessment and discussion from both sides what's the point? Once the race card is played it's a death card for reasoned conversation.

My old bird dog ate off the table twice. The first time she was corrected firmly, yet fairly. The second time I whupped the tar out of her. She was pretty much a coward when it came to eating off the table after that. Years of drawing the race card has a similar effect - any potential reward isn't worth the beat down.

I get it. White folks can never get it. Blacks know whites will never get it and won't let whites live down the fact they'll never get it. And white folks know blacks know white folks will never get it and don't want blacks to know they know. It's all such a sorted affair.

Which is shameful. America just elected its first black President. We need a dialog on race now more than ever. Just leave our noble kinfolk the great apes out of it. They're too hilarious as secret agents and Clint Eastwood sidekicks in their own right to sully with comparisons to the braying jackasses and lazy grasshoppers in Washington.

Does anyone have strong feelings for pigs, skunks, weasels, buzzards, locusts, or termites? It shouldn't be difficult to proactively identify some loathsome - yet non-racially charged - non-humans suitable for association with Congress and the President to help circumvent any future allegorical confusion. My contribution to furthering the conversation on race - let's insult everyone equally regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and religion.

Save your race card for someone who's obsessed over race.