In possibly the funniest story of the week, Eric Holder, America's first African-American attorney general, has excited serious outrage in certain precincts of the reliably humorous (and reliably outraged) right-wing commentariat. Holder's offense apparently was having had the nerve to say we are "a nation of cowards" when it comes to discussing race.

Of course, Holder's comments are, to coin a phrase, so stunningly self-evident that, if you need any more evidence, just look at the reaction to those comments. (Here's a quote from an editorial in the D.C. Examiner: "Not only were Holder's comments morally bankrupt, demonstrably untrue, and compelling proof of his own outlandish hubris; they also carried distinctly chilling undertones of government coercion.")

Sure, you can feel the cold wind of the chilling undertones of government coercion - as if Holder is advocating that the feds come to your home and force you to watch Black Entertainment Network. One day it's BET, the next day someone's making you watch Nancy Grace, and if that's not torture, I don't know what is.

Not that Holder has it exactly right. We are, in fact, talking a lot about race these days, if in strange and bizarre ways.

For example, there's the shot-dead- mad-chimp-as-stimulus-package-author cartoon controversy. I'm sure you've seen it. In Sean Delonas' cartoon in the New York Post, the cops shoot the ape and then say the next stimulus bill will need a new author. Yes, he did.

When I first saw it, I had two reactions: One, I'm going to give Delonas the benefit of the doubt and assume he was referencing the monkeys-eventually-writing- Shakespeare line and not making a racist commentary about Barack Obama. And two, how stupid can you possibly be?

One argument for newspapers, and possibly even the New York Post, is that we have editors. Editors are supposed to save cartoonists, and columnists, from mistakes like this. I know my editors have saved me from incidentally offending people. If I offend someone, I want it to be intentional. How could anyone have missed the long-held use of apes in the racist's vocabulary? Either the Post editors were stupid and missed it or were stupid and didn't miss it and ran it anyway.

The Post did issue an apology to those who might have been offended, rather than for the, uh, offense itself - and then blamed Al Sharpton for the whole thing. This is what you call circular logic. Sharpton is a serial rabble- rouser. Therefore, if he complains about the cartoon, it must be to draw attention to himself by playing the race card, meaning that the only way someone like Al Sharpton can bring attention to a cartoon like this one is . . . by not bringing attention to it.

But let's not stop here. There's a far bigger story about race - the issue of Sen. Roland Burris, the Blago appointee who seems to have, uh, fudged the facts on his appointment. OK, let's not be cowards. He lied, at least by omission, about his pre-appointment talks with Blago's people and tried to raise money for Blago - but failed.

Burris should resign. And if he doesn't resign and if the Democrats want to be seen as serious about reform, they should kick him out of the caucus. The Illinois governor, a Democrat like Burris, has called for Burris to resign. So have several major newspapers.

And then I read a story about how some black ministers from Chicago are having second thoughts about Burris. And I'm thinking, who cares what the black ministers think? And then I remember that the only reason Burris is in the Senate is Blago's cynical use of the fact that, without Burris, the Senate has exactly zero black members. That's hardly unusual because there have been only three elected black senators since Reconstruction.

Do we talk about that? Do we talk about it enough? Can you offer a reason why there have been so few black senators and black governors? Should we discuss it among ourselves? Or is it enough just to talk about how few black college football coaches there are?

In a column about Holder, my colleague Vincent Carroll pointed out that Obama was just elected in a campaign filled with talk of race. He wonders how Holder could have missed that. He also mentions that Holder's cowardice speech wasn't exactly a profile in courage. Carroll was right about Holder's lack of boldness, which doesn't mean Holder wasn't right, too.

We did talk about race all the time, but in the most uncomfortable terms, even as we elected the first African-American president. Let's think back all the way to last year to the discomfort. When Obama joked about looking different from other presidents, he was accused of playing the race card. And then there was Bill Clinton's Jesse Jackson line. And there was Hillary Clinton's line about hard-working white people. And there was Geraldine Ferraro's, uh, thought that Obama never would have gotten where he was if he had been white. And Michelle Obama's line about being proud of the country. And whether McCain's use of Britney Spears in an Obama ad was subliminally racist.

We can do better. And sometimes we do. At South High, they just dumped the Johnny Reb mascot. South replaced Johnny Reb with a griffin, which is apparently a mythological figure, unlike Johnny Reb, who represents something very real. I went to a school called Jefferson Davis Junior High myself. It was an all-white school. There were no integrated public schools in town. And, for the longest time, almost no one talked about it.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com