Idiotic Headline of the Day: 'Can the 'black Jesus' escape an assassin's bullet? '

Geez, you'd think the United States was overrun by Klansman judging by this hysterical item from the Daily Mail. Two delusional losers threaten Obama we get nonsense like this.

Of still greater concern is the certainty that there are plenty more disaffected young white men out there who harbour the same depth of resentment towards him, and might be considerably more resourceful.

For it is one of the great ironies of this election campaign that, for all his powers to unite America's disparate racial and ethnic groups, Obama has polarised some sections of the public like no candidate before.

Travelling through many states, particularly in the South, it is uncomfortably easy to see why.

The Jim Crow Laws, which kept schools and public buildings segregated until as late as 1965, might have been consigned to a shameful chapter of America's past, yet it remains rare outside the big cities to see mixed-race marriages or mixed-race friendships.

Even among economically hard-pressed and war-weary voters who prefer Obama's promise of 'change' to McCain's own-brand conservatism, the reluctance to see a black man in the White House is palpable.

This intangible feeling of mistrust was summed up in one excruciating vignette when a pollster called on a Virginian family and inquired of the wife whom they would be supporting.

'Who we rootin' for?' the woman shouted to her husband.

'We're backing the n***er,' came the matter-of-fact reply.

In the face of such deeply entrenched prejudice, is it any wonder Obama is routinely - and quite groundlessly - described as a 'Muslim', simply because his middle name is Hussein and he attended an Islamic school for a while as a child, while living with his mother and her second husband in Indonesia?

Or that some believe he plans to run the country with covert advice from black-power extremists such as Nation Of Islam leaders Elijah Muhammad (a near neighbour in Hyde Park) and Louis Farrakhan.

Such rumours - from which McCain has distanced himself, but his running mate Sarah Palin has shamelessly stirred up - play into the hands of a white supremacist movement, which has enjoyed significant support in America since the early 20th century, when the Ku Klux Klan boasted more than four million members.

Of course none of these 'vignettes' of claims about Sarah Palin have any basis in truth, but why bother with the facts when we have hysteria to push?