Now maybe it’s just me, but after reading the detailed stories, penetrating columns and sassy blogs painstakingly detailing how the Tea Party movement could forever alter American politics, all those despicable images depicting President Obama wearing Hitler mustaches re-emerge in all their hateful excess.

So call me skeptical.

I know, I know: These Tea Partiers are all mad as hell and aren’t going to take it anymore. So naturally, this means the normal rules guiding basic public discourse don’t apply to their “revolutionary” movement. That it’s perfectly rational to rant and rave while carrying posters with images portraying the president of the United States sporting a Hitler mustache, or signs stating that the president’s health-care reform plans somehow resemble some horrifying Nazi medical experiment.

Nazis! Really? Americans are supposed to take this movement seriously?

A question: Did the Tea Party protestors carrying these Obama Hitler posters understand the true enormity and scale of Nazi Germany’s unspeakable crimes against humanity? You know – the Holocaust and 12 million dead, including six million Jews!

Did they understand the monstrosity involved in Hitler’s savage atrocities? You know – World War II, slave labor, death camps, the Gestapo.

Now I realize this is the old news, but any attempt to try and take the Tea Party movement seriously begins, and frankly, ends with these images (CNN Panel on Hitler and Obama’s Health Care Reform).

Now obviously this “movement” can’t be ignored. Up against all the Super Bowl weekend revelry, you might have noted that the new grownup Tea Party movement held its first national convention in Nashville highlighted by ex-Alaska governor and 2008 Republican Party vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s saber-rattling Keynote Address (Sarah Palin Keynote Speech at National Tea Party Convention).

It seems senseless to dwell much on Palin’s anti-Obama tirade. The national media took on that responsibility. So anyone willing to buy into Palin’s sound-bite driven Obama attack surely won’t be interested in any fact-checking exercise.

The fact checking, and eventually accountability, will come. Then, like all the other John Edwards-like populists operating on false pretenses, politicians like Palin are ultimately exposed and ruined by their own narcissistic excesses. Or in Palin’s case, clear evidence of an expanding cult of personality taking shape.

It’s already abundantly clear Palin remains damaged goods after resigning her Alaskan governorship last summer 18 months before her only term ended. In a Washington Post-ABC poll conducted during the Tea Party Convention from Feb. 4-8, “55 percent of Americans have unfavorable views of her, while the percentage holding favorable views has dipped to 37, a new low in Post-ABC polling,” according to the Washington Post.

But if Palin, whose instinctive political talents and knack for nailing crowd-pleasing sound bites shouldn’t be underestimated by GOP presidential wannabes, does ultimately attempt to win the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination by riding the great Tea Party wave, she must carry all the negative baggage that comes with all that grassrooty energy.

And that baggage multiplied with potentially radioactive ramifications after the Feb. 4 Tea Party Convention’s opening speech by former Colorado GOP congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (Tom Tancredo opens up Tea Party event).

Tancredo, in his familiar snarky tone, opened his rant by calling President Obama a “socialist ideologue” who was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”

In other words, those millions of ignorant Americans who voted for Obama were somehow duped into voting for a black man?

“People who could not spell the word vote or say it in English put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House – name is Barack Hussein Obama,” Tancredo told a cheering Tea Party convention crowd.

To fully comprehend the hateful, raw racism invoked by Tancredo’s twisted ravings, you must revisit America’s shameful Jim Crow past.

Literacy tests were used primarily by the former southern Confederate states to prevent black Americans from voting for over 80 years. From the late 19^th Century into the early 1970s, a hideously complex system established by state governments prevented the vast majority of black Americans from voting.

According to the Veterans of the Civil Rights website, “prior to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act in 1965, Southern (and some Western) states maintained elaborate voter registration procedures whose primary purpose was to deny the vote to those who were not white. In the South, this process was often called the “literacy test.” In fact, it was much more than a simple test, it was an entire complex system devoted to denying African-Americans (and in some regions, Latinos) the right to vote.

“The registration procedures, and the Registrars who enforced them, were just one part of this interlocking system of racial discrimination and oppression. The various state, county, and local police forces — all white of course — routinely intimidated and harassed blacks who tried to register. They arrested would-be voters on false charges and beat others for imagined transgressions; and often this kind of retribution was directed not only at the man or woman who dared try to register, but against their family members as well, even the children.”

Incredibly, federal courts throughout the South were still enforcing compliance of the 1965 Voting Rights Act on state and county governments into the early 1970s.

So what exactly is Tancredo charging? Nothing less than the 66,862,309 million Americans (53 percent) who elected Barack Obama president on Nov. 4, 2008, were too dim-witted to understand what they were doing. That the American election process needs a new literacy test to weed out unqualified voters out from the electorate.

(Note to Tancredo and racists of his ilk: The majority of Americans who voted for Obama (43 percent) were – gasp – white.

These are the Tea Party coattails Palin will carry if she eventually decides run for president. Racist coattails most Americans – even those who didn’t vote for Obama – won’t look favorably on in the 2012 general election.

Does this mean the Tea Party movement is essentially a political force built around racism? No. But there are millions of Americans who are frightened and hurting as they try to survive in this dreadful economic climate. Anger leads to fear and fear encourages boneheads like Tancredo to spread their racial twaddle that some beleaguered citizens are tempted to accept. And with the first black president taking office during a scary economic calamity, it’s an all too easy racist sale for snake-oil salesmen like Tancredo.

This rubbish is what the Tea Party movement defends or ignores as it attempts to evolve into a credible political movement. This is what Palin and the Republican Party will have to swallow, live with, and ultimately answer for, if they don’t simply state that racism, hateful Hitler imagery and boneheads like Tancredo won’t be tolerated.

Pulitzer-prize winning Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page rightly declared that Tancredo is the “Tea Party crankpot.” But crankpot suggests that Tancredo’s racism is basically a harmless distraction that can be ignored, and even allowed to stand, without condemnation.

There is nothing harmless about Hitler metaphors, racism and literacy tests. These are the ugly fringe elements in the Tea Party movement that Palin and the GOP will either have to accept or denounce and live with the consequences.

This sure seems like an easy call. But Palin and the GOP’s silence is deafening.

‘M*A*S*H’ Finale Meets Its Super Bowl Fate

By the time CBS’ “M*A*S*H” series finale aired on Feb. 28, 1983, the 105.97 million Americans who tuned in watched an exhausted television series taking a last, dying breath after a popular 11-year run. Long gone were the glory days after “M*A*S*H” debuted on Sept. 17, 1972, when series creators faithfully following Robert Altman’s groundbreaking 1970 film.

After the television series’ fifth season, when Larry Linville’s expertly drawn Frank Burns (also played deliciously by Robert Duval in the film) left the series, “M*A*S*H” had already lost its Altman mojo.

So it comes with some relief that the New Orleans Saints’ 31-17 victory over the Indianapolis Colts in the Feb. 7 Super Bowl telecast is now the most-watched television program in history. Some 106.5 Americans at some point watched that CBS telecast (Super Bowl Dethrones ‘M*A*S*H’ as Most-Watched Show in U.S. History.)

In the above New York Times media column, Richard Sandomir quotes an Alda e-mail, stating that, “I’m happy for New Orleans. I want to see that city come out first in every way that it can, even if it means giving up a record that ‘M*A*S*H’ held for a long time.” But, he said, “don’t give me the Magnanimity Medal yet.” He wonders about Nielsen Media’s ability to account for the effect of large groups gathered around TV sets to watch major events.”

Television’s Hawkeye has a point. The rating “M*A*S*H” earned 27 years ago in the pre-cable television era dwarfs what the record CBS Super Bowl telecast achieved in terms of households reached.

But don’t blame Alda for his understandable defensive posture. This multitalented actor, writer and director directed that weepy two-and-half hour series goodbye.

Edwards Fooled Millions into Believing a Lie

John Edwards name popped up earlier, but there won’t by any lengthy dissecting of the Democratic Party’s 2004 vice presidential candidate’s crash-and-burn self-destruction that could still land the former North Carolina U.S. senator in jail.

Let’s just simply say that Edwards represented only the latest Kennedy-lite candidate nostalgic Democrats love to gravitate toward in perennially misguided efforts to find that youthful JFK magic. Edwards became what many Democrats wanted him to be with flimsy supporting evidence.

Edwards was always a woefully inexperienced national party candidate, who provided snappy sound-bites and looked smashing in his expensive Italian suits. I remember back in the early 2008 president primary debates, watching Edwards with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and noting the candidate simply lacked any comparable stage presence. Edwards just seemed painfully diminished standing on stage with the next president and secretary of state.

A non-Democrat who also bought into the Edwards myth is pundit Andrew Sullivan. On his widely-read Atlantic Monthly Daily Dish blog (My John Edwards Failure), Sullivan eloquently examines how Edwards managed to fool even a clever, clear-headed British émigré intellectual like himself.

Sullivan doesn’t stand alone.

Swashbuckling Lefty Won’t Fear Bogeys

The old golf writer in me will dare offer the occasional view from the links.

So after watching Phil Mickelson slop his way through two early 2010 PGA events in San Diego and Los Angeles, I was struck again by a major difference between Mickelson and his legendary nemesis Tiger Woods.

Mickelson, who possesses every bit as much pure golf talent as the world’s No. 1, generally treats bogeys has occupational hazards rather than an odious enemy to avoid at all costs.

By contrast, Woods considers bogeys something akin to a war crime. Woods detests making bogeys while regarding pars as trusted old friends. Mickelson seems to view pars with an indifference that borders on golf defiance. Lefty just doesn’t place the proper value on skating away with safe pars.

Don’t take this as some dumbing-down theory explaining why Woods is likely to end his career as the greatest golfer in history while Mickelson retires as the unlucky, risk-taking left-handed Greg Norman.

Woods is simply a far more engaged and intense competitor than Mickelson, and perhaps the greatest clutch player any sport has ever produced.

Yet, Mickelson could at least cut his losses by finally cultivating a good, old-fashioned hate for bogeys. That is an element in course management Norman never developed. Mickelson, who turns 40 on June 16, doesn’t appear interested in learning percentage golf any time soon.

You Go, Meghan McCain

There is much to find irresistible about John McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain. Not only does she regularly call out her woefully out-of-touch, dear old dad, but she also picks fights with the Ann Coulters and Michelle Malkins out in Punditryland.

But Feb. 8 on ABC’s “The View,” (“The View” : Meghan McCain Blasts Sarah Palin and Tea Party Movement), McCain did what Sarah Palin other Republicans have failed to do. McCain scolded Tea Party leaders for allowing racists like Tom Tancredo to infest their movement.

“It’s innate racism, and I think it’s why young people are turned off by this movement,” McCain said. “And I’m sorry – revolutions start with young people, not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word vote in English. This rhetoric will continue to turn off young voters, and anybody that says different is smoking something – period.”

McCain just might have a bright future in the family business.