Last week, Rush Limbaugh made a deal out of black kids beating up a white kid on a bus, suggesting that it was a result of “Obama’s America” in which, apparently, black people now rule supreme and feel like they are entitled to beat the crap out of white people whenever they want. He used this as an excuse to call for segregated busing. Soon after, it became clear that the beating had nothing to do with race, though Limbaugh and others in the right-wing blogosphere deny this is the case.

Not too long before the bus incident, there was another beating. This one was much more serious, and was clearly racially charged. A white man named Troy Dale West Jr. was coming out of a restaurant called the Cracker Barrel (no comment) with his wife when Tashawnea Hill, a black woman and Army reservist was walking in with her 7-year-old daughter. West reportedly opened the door in such a way that it almost struck Hill’s daughter in the face. Hill reportedly then admonished West, telling him what he’d almost done, and, according to Hill, “it just went downhill” from there.

What she means by “downhill” is that West ended up beating Hill severely, injuring Hill and traumatizing her daughter:

Police say Hill stated that “West punched her in the left cheek, forehead, kicked her body in several places, and punched her head in many areas several times.”

As for how we know it was racially charged, West allegedly should the “n-word” and the “b-word” at her during the attack.

West’s justification? “[S]he spit on me and accused me of trying to hit her daughter with a door.” Not only does it sound improbable that Hill spat on him for such a thing, but (a) there is a surveillance video of the event which Hill’s attorney says proves that she did not spit on him, and (b) even if she had, it would not even come close to justify hitting someone, much less punching and kicking a woman in front of her small daughter.

Can’t wait to hear what Rush Limbaugh would have to say about this one. Likely he’ll just ignore it. But maybe he’ll say it was understandable backlash, that the man was just so infuriated by what Obama has done to our country that he simply couldn’t restrain himself, and so we should segregate restaurants now, too.

I’d also love to hear what this says about right-wingers’ claims that we’re in “post-racial” America now, and that racism doesn’t exist anymore. Not that the irrational rage against Obama which just by coincidence is heavily concentrated in the south is connected to race, either–no, I’m sure all the images of Obama as a witch doctor and monkey are completely unrelated to race.