For months now, the GOP has been affixing the label "arrogant" to Barack Obama. "I will say yes, I do think Barack Obama is arrogant," Karl Rove said not too long ago. Earlier, weighing in on a Clinton-Obama spat, Rove told Sean Hannity, "the message that America saw was an angry and I think a little bit arrogant Barack Obama being so dismissive." And today, in a pure-opinion dispatch for the AP, Ron Fournier takes a bunch of obviously-self-deprecating Obama remarks and writes that both Barack and Michelle Obama "ooze a sense of entitlement." And for what?

If arrogance is a display of self-importance and superiority, Obama earns the pejorative every time he calls his pre-invasion opposition to the war in Iraq an act of courage.

How dare Obama point out that he was right about the war! We wouldn't want a president who recognizes he got a huge strategic question, you know, right or anything!

But look. What's going on here is simple. They're saying, sotto voce: Obama may have talent, but he's too loud, too brash, too obvious, too vulgar. Does he have to rub our faces in it? Why is he in such a hurry? What, he thinks he's better than we are, now? That elitist, that swell, that n--

Yes, that's right. As John Ridley recently wrote at Huffington Post, "Arrogant" is the new "Uppity."

The only arrogance Obama is guilty of is the same "Unforgivable Blackness" so many exceptional people of color have demonstrated throughout the history of this country: a refusal to bend to the will of the Retro Guard. To Rove, to the neocons such attitude is wholly unacceptable. Back in the day such "arrogance" was met with a strong rope and tall branch, and anyone who believes that analogy to be too harsh, read here how Roy Bryant and J.W.Milam dealt with the arrogance of 13 year old Emmett Till.

But in this day and age Karl Rove is reduced to making statements which he does not even have the meat to own up to.

This is Nixonland we're living in. So damn it, play by its rules. The right does not want a black man to be president. Say it again and again. Take Mick Jones' advice: If I get aggression, I give it two times back.