Not long after Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama, folks on the right suddenly remembered something they'd forgotten for two long decades. Colin Powell is black!

Rush Limbaugh wasted no time deriding Powell's endorsement as the worst racially motivated incident since Reginald Denny got pulled out of his truck (we're paraphrasing). Pat Buchanan and George Will also questioned the extent to which Powell was just trying to help a brother out.

Funny how the GOP can forget a guy's black for a couple of decades then all of a sudden it hits them like a ton of bricks! So if Powell's endorsement is "just a black thing," what does that say about when he lied to the UN about WMD's? Was that a "black thing" too? Or was he not that black back then? What about when he was Reagan's National Security Advisor? What was the blackness factor there?

To get a grasp on the GOP's perception of Powell's blackness, we put together a little chart from the perspective of the die-hard right, indicating just how black Powell has been perceived by his party, on a scale from Scarlett Johannsen to Lil Wayne:

As you can see from the graph, under Reagan and Geroge H. W. Bush, Powell's blackness remained in the non-threatening area of Terrence Howard and Thandie Newton. Then under Bush II, when Powell sold the UN on the Iraq invasion, conservatives considered him to be about as black as Scarlett Johansson. When Powell left the Bush administration and referred to U.N. incident as a "blot" on his record, he started heading up into the territory of tiny yet fun-loving pimp comedian Katt Williams. But after this past Sunday, as far as Rush Limbaugh is concerned, Colin Powell might as well be Lil Wayne with a bunch of stars on his chest.

Posted by: Bob Powers      I’m a fan of Bob Powers