but I'm curious how you arrived at "racist" as the sin which taints by association, rather than, say, "short-sighted" or "libertarian" or whatever.

Because calling someone "racist" tends to be perceived as implying that they're not just mistaken but morally deficient if not out right evil. Something that's less true for "short-sighted" or "libertarian".

It's non-obvious how saying "'No more bailouts' is racist!" might be defended.

Something like this:

• Some of the bailout money went to help blacks.
• Therefore, the people arguing against more bailouts want to hurt blacks.
• Therefore, they're racist.

Note, the above argument is by no means the most absurd argument I've seen for why something is racist.

Also, incidentally, you might receive fewer downvotes if you avoided blanket statements like "It is always safe to love the left, and always safe to hate the right". In particular, I live in an area of the country where the reverse is true.

I find this hard to believe. Name this area: Does this area have a newspaper? If it does, please compare how that newspaper treated the former Rhodesia with how it treats North Korea, compare how it treats Sarah Palin with how it treats Governor Romney.

How come I have to produce citations proving stuff that every educated person should know, but you do not have to produce citations proving stuff that no one can know?

I predict that your newspaper will have told us that the famine in North Korea is caused by the umpteenth consecutive year of bad weather, run the notoriously doctored images of Arab Israeli conflict without retracting them when they were discovered to be doctored, and that every time Sarah Palin says something that differs from what gets taught in the schools, it implies that this is evidence she is an idiot, and does not tell us this is evidence that not everyone believes what is taught in the schools.