Michael Steele, head of the Republican party, is in hot water because he refused to sign on to a civility pledge cooked up by Democrats.  Good for you, Mr. Steele. Regardless of your motive or your reasoning for refusing to lend your party's imprimatur to farcical, feel-good hypocrisy, your stand is laudable.

For months now, lefty pundits have been sounding a call to civility. There's nothing wrong with that, is there? Civility is a concept we can all get our arms around, not a plot perpetrated on the American people by an "effete core of impudent snobs."  Who among us does not want to live in a please-and-thank-you kind of world?  Who among us, save our esteemed Vice President, does not agree that keeping a civil tongue in public discourse is a good thing? 

But it seems pretty plain that civil, let alone honest, debate will be impossible to achieve unless and until the demagogues are called out for what they are, and the powers that be adopt a zero-tolerance policy for unexamined assumptions, unsubstantiated assertions, and unprincipled exaggerations.  Unfortunately, nowhere are these unsavory rhetorical tactics more on display than in the writing of racial polemicists, who even in the aftermath of a battle they won-health care reform-are still firing off bunker-busting broadsides to ensure it'll be a long time before their challengers resurface.

Take, for example, two columns that appeared on the same day in the New York Times and the Washington Post.  The authors are different-Charles Blow and Colbert King, respectively-and the words they use are somewhat different.  The hate and lies they spew are exactly the same.

Blow and King begin their poison pen essays with an identical assumption: those who opposed health care reform are "far-right extremists" (Blow) or "Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers" (King).  Each then goes on to draw invidious, unfounded comparisons between the so-called extremists (i.e., opponents of the recently signed health care reform legislation) and domestic terrorists.  Here's Charles Blow:

According to a report entitled "Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism" recently released by the Southern Poverty Law Center, "nativist extremist" groups that confront and harass suspected immigrants have increased nearly 80 percent since President Obama took office, and antigovernment "patriot" groups more than tripled over that period.

Politically, this frustration is epitomized by the Tea Party movement.

The angry faces at Tea Party rallies are eerily familiar. They resemble faces of protesters lining the street at the University of Alabama in 1956 as Autherine Lucy, the school's first black student, bravely tried to walk to class.

Those same jeering faces could be seen gathered around the Arkansas National Guard troopers who blocked nine black children from entering Little Rock's Central High School in 1957.

Those angry faces won't go away. But neither can they stand in the way of progress.

The mobs of yesteryear were on the wrong side of history. Tea Party supporters and their right-wing fellow travelers are on the wrong side now. It shows up in their faces.

The Tea Party, my friends, is not the future.

You may want "your country back," but you can't have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.