The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.

News of the Tautological
“Consultant Firm Suggests Chattanooga Airport Be Renamed ‘Chattanooga Airport’ “–headline, Chattanooga (Tenn.) Times Free Press, Sept. 27

It’s Always in the Last Place You Look
“George W. Bush Finds Friendly Crowd at Pa. Dinner”–headline, Associated Press, Sept. 26

Out on a Limb
“Redistricting Changes Can Help/Hurt Mid-Columbia”–headline, Tri-City Herald (Kennewick, Wash.), Sept. 26

Progressives Disagree
Yesterday we noted that The Nation’s Melissa Harris-Perry was accusing white liberals of abandoning President Obama for racially invidious reasons. This prompted a defensive and very long response from one white liberal, Joan Walsh, who began by stipulating that she and Harris-Perry are friends:

When I say Melissa Harris-Perry is my friend, I don’t say that rhetorically, or ironically; we are professional friends, we have socialized together; she has included me on political round tables; I like and respect her enormously. That’s why I think it’s important to engage her argument, and I’ve invited her to reply.

And reply she did:

I was taken aback that Walsh emphasized the extent of our friendship. Walsh and I have been professionally friendly. We’ve eaten a few meals. I invited her to speak at Princeton and I introduced her to my literary agent. We are not friends. Friendship is a deep and lasting relationship based on shared sacrifice and joys. We are not intimates in that way.

Take that, Joan! Note that Walsh and Harris-Perry are in agreement about the facts of their association, they disagree only over what to call it.

It seems to us that Walsh merely meant to suggest that she meant her criticisms of Harris-Perry in a spirit of goodwill. But Harris-Perry doesn’t stop at renouncing friendship with Walsh. She accuses Walsh of employing a “common strategy of argument about one’s racial innocence: the ‘I have black friends’ claim.” Harris-Perry has twisted Walsh’s olive branch into a racially invidious provocation. With friends like these . . .

If you read all the way through Walsh’s interminable piece, you also come upon this gem:

We could probably find racial crosscurrents beneath every group’s disappointment with the president, even the CBC’s [Congressional Black Caucus]. The legacy of racism, and the historic developmental path of African-American leadership, factor into black politicians’ complex responses to the first black president. How could it not?

We wrote yesterday: “To bring this to the ultimate level of absurdity, we need someone to find a way of accusing Obama’s black critics on the left, like [Congressional Black Caucus  member Maxine] Waters . . ., of racism.” Despite her dainty language, it seems to us Walsh has managed to do just that.

For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for the “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”