Speaking before a $7500-per-plate dinner to raise funds to help fight the "Evil Rich Unless They're Liberals Like You," Barack Obama announced that in his vision of America, Republicans can "come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back."

Nice.

For people of a certain age, that kind of language brings back memories of a time when racial segregation was an ugly fact of life in the United States...followed by tremendous strife and civil unrest as Americans (many of them Republican) fought to put an end to such practices - not simply to turn the tables on who would be discriminated against.

Of course, the president isn't quite old enough to have first-hand knowledge of this unhappy time in American history, he has no Black American ancestors, and the subject probably wasn't included in his school curriculum in Indonesia, so he may not have been aware how offensive his remark was.

We trust that he won't make the same mistake in the future. And that he'll also ask the Black Panthers not to bring ax handles to the polling places next Tuesday.