You’re not supposed to display a sense of humor in response to the 793 billionth instance of a complete ass of a leftist senator puling out the ol’ race card. You’re supposed to take the bait, get angry, and display your righteous indignation.

Seriously though, when I get called names by New England communists named “Sheldon” I just grin.

‘Cause that’s how bad Chafee was — I don’t even regret that he lost to this jerk.

Even if he’d won his ’06 race, making the Senate 50-50 +Cheney, he’d have pulled a Jim Jeffords before the 110th Congress even convened. Harry Reid would have given Chafee the moon, not that he would have to have given him very much.

As for Whitehouse, I prefer to treat him the way Rush treated Rhode Island’s other illustrious senator when he made some asinine remark not too long ago: “Who?” And you’d have a hard time finding very many people who could answer.

Sheldon Whitehouse can flap his worthless mouth all day long for all I care. He’s marginal and irrelevant. Senator Sheldon’s frustrated enough to call us Nazis? Good. I like knowing we keep him up at night.

I’m more worried about what these people do. Lincoln Chafee was a de facto Democrat. He was a problem for us and if he’d stayed around he’d have been a bigger problem for us than ol’ Sheldon here. Now he’s gone. I liked that in 2006 and I like it now.

So yeah, I do think differently when I hear that being given a rhetorical kick by an absolute nobody means I have to fall down. I just laugh.

This “Aryan support groups” stuff is a sideshow. The nutroots will jump up and down and cheer, we’ll get angry and indignant, and the 70% of the American public that pays scant to no attention to politics will never even hear about it. The net practical result of all of this is zero — except that we’ve expended time and energy getting angry at a nobody, at a cost of emotional energy that which we have precious little to spare. All this tells me is that Sheldon Whitehouse is an angry little man and that the supermajority-Democrats are frustrated at their huge problems in holding this mess of a health-care bill together. Frustrated people lash out when they don’t know what else to do.

They think we’re white supremacist Nazis? Yeah, what else is new? They’d love for us for us to take that bait! To play on their terms, on their field; to accept the whole premise of the remarks by jumping up and screaming “hey wait a minute, we’re not Nazis!” thereby diverting the entire health-care debate onto an ideological off-ramp that takes the focus away from the issues of unsustainable costs, the degradation of options and care, and the obscene individual mandates that have turned public opinion so heavily against ObamaCare. Harry Reid has already tried to distract everybody by invoking Jim Crow; that didn’t work and neither will this.

No, screw Sheldon. He’s already voting to nationalize health-care; I’m not going to let him ice that particular cake by ticking me off with an empty insult. I think the poor guy just wants to get noticed and sees that this kind of looney-tunes stuff boosted Alan Grayson’s profile. Next Sheldon will show up on the Senate floor in a pinstripe suit.

…at a personal level, after the last few days of fury and anguish, I simply don’t have the emotional energy to allocate to a guy like this, and if I did I’d be wasting it. For me that translates into a grin, a shake of the head, and a whaddya-gonna-do remark involving Lincoln Chafee. We’re down to the wire and we can still win, and I’m saving my anger for the Democrats who matter. And they’re gonna hear it.