As some of my relatives say, for the love.  Timothy Noah often excels at embarrassing himself, but he joins a select crowd of overreacting liberals with his latest item, which declares that this silly “Is Obama too skinny for his own good?” article also has a racial subtext.  This is very much like the overheated response to “Celeb” or “The One”–rather than simply laughing off these ads and articles as ridiculous, Obama’s supporters and many media figures seem to be deadly serious about stressing the cunning, super-secret deployment of racial messages in both.  Whether it is Perlstein hallucinating Nazi propaganda film homages or Gergen detecting racist tropes or Noah discerning skinniness as the latest one of these tropes, the responses have managed to make the various targets of their criticism seem sane, well-balanced and serious by comparison.  Meanwhile, looking back over recent episodes of The Daily Show, I was amused to find that Jon Stewart and his crew had made the exact same comparison between Obama and Moses that supposedly implied (according to Gergen) that the McCain campaign was accusing Obama of not knowing his place.  The response to these things is very simple: mock them for their stupidity, and stop investing them with the importance that their creators want you to give them.