I DVR’d Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” last week, specifically because a promo mentioned that Dennis Miller was going to have some choice words for Barack Obama on that episode. I was intrigued. And Miller didn’t disappoint. He even admitted that he took the initiative and contacted the O’Reilly folks himself, since he was so unhappy with some of Obama’s recent comments.

When I finally found the time to watch that segment, which was just last night, I got a large dose of Miller railing against Obama for being “tedious” and hypocritical — and all in Miller’s idiosyncratically high-octane and metaphor-riddled way: “[Obama] went back on that public funding promise more quickly than a Chinese acrobat checking themselves for cellulite.”

Miller was most angry at Obama for “Playing ‘The Race Card’ Card” in a June 20th speech at a campaign fund raiser in Jacksonville, Fla., where the presidential candidate said the following:

“We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. … He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

I have to admit, I don’t buy the easy dismissal of Obama’s statement as yet another example of someone “playing the race card.”

Are there ever legitimate ways to bring up race? Obama is invoking the fact that Internet rumor-mongering has already begun to circulate claims about him being a Muslim double-agent for Al Qaeda. And there is an obvious history of pre-Swift-boat media campaigns that have deployed African-American difference as a naturalized proxy for assumed categorical criminality (in the hopes of persuading white Americans to vote for Republicans out of racially inflected fear). That controversial 1988 Willie Horton TV ad mounted against Dukakis is only the most famous — and blatant — recent example. A subtler hinting at the threat of racial miscegenation organized the 2006 ad against a non-white senatorial candidate from Tennessee who allegedly met a white woman at the Playboy mansion. In the ad, she winks and tells him to call her.

Is it really unfair to ask voters to be wary of any potentially similar political tricks this campaign season? Is it playing the race card to tell people that you are worried others will play the race card? Or that you think it might be coming, especially given some of the aforementioned campaign history?

Every time someone brings up race/racism isn’t necessarily an example of playing of the race card. Is it? Obama didn’t call McCain a racist. He didn’t say Republicans are trying to defeat him because of his race. He’s just marking the fact that racial identity still gets mobilized to define some people as outside of the legitimate and law-abiding body politic.

If we are ever going to get around to having some serious conversations about these issues, I’ll have to be willing to hear Miller make his case for why Obama is wallowing in something that, according to Miller, stinks to high heaven of race-based insincerity. But Miller also can’t get livid every single time race/racism is ever invoked. When he does, it implies that race can be mentioned only in direct response to a blatant act of unabashed racism. As a last-ditch counterpunch — if that. Otherwise, any invocation of race is just another example of the disingenuous race card. If that is the case, should we simply never, ever talk about race (except, say, when Don Imus says something else semi-controversial)? And for some people, even those Imusian moments hardly merit any serious need to discuss race/racism.

Every white person who talks honestly about race isn’t necessarily a racist. And every time racism gets invoked (as part of America’s past or present) isn’t just another instance of disingenuous demagoguery.

Aren’t there better and worse ways to invoke race/racism? Or does any mention at all mean that one is trafficking in race cardology?