Now that the Michael Vick episode seems temporarily superseded by the Petraeus Report, Senator Craig’s shoe dances and the despicable West Virginia torture party, I have a couple of thoughts.

The blacklash in support of Vick had just begun when current events became, well, current. They began with the NAACP and liberal columnists decrying the “volume” of negativity towards the Atlanta quarterback, as if acknowledging that while the music being played was crap the problem is that it’s too loud. One (white) columnist wrote that blacks think the outcry against Vick was “too much” and as white people we can’t appreciate how they feel with all these Caucasian-led networks and organizations vilifying Vick so strongly.

Someone even mentioned that Oprah Winfrey, should she decide to do so, could rehabilitate Vick with an appearance on her show, where he would display deep remorse, contrition and finding Jesus.

Yes, the spin plane took off and the destination was race. Piloting the bullshit craft were mostly white liberals who couldn’t bear the sight of a black man being the target of so much hate. These liberals are okay with the perpetual vilification of someone like Susan Smith for drowning her children. She’s white and there’s the added bonus of her being from the South, which as every progressive knows is racist cabbage patch country. And she’s probably professed to be religious as well, giving liberals the hanging hypocrisy curve to smack out of the park. Susan Smith and her ilk are safe targets. But targeting a black man so intensely for any crime makes white liberals squirm in their Armani’s and spill their chardonnay’s.

Some tortured analysts even tried to find parallels to the Duke Lacrosse case as an example of … what? I don’t know. I couldn’t figure it out, yet two articles I read found a nugget of nonsense that justified bringing Vick and D.A. Nifong together for a last dance. Other articles are equally demented and I point out one in particular, by Kathy Rudy, an animal loving ethicist teaching at Duke University. Her contention is that Vick is being singled out because he is black.

Seems to me that there are two, maybe three issues operating in this whole Vick affair and they’re being conflated through the issue of race.

The first is the connection of dog fighting to drug dealers at the field level. There’s the perception that those who fight dogs are involved in the drug culture and that many, if not most in that world, are black. This perception is attacked as being racist. It’s criminal profiling, blacks=drug dealers and vice versa. So there’s the first “unfair” racial assumption about Michael Vick and his friends.

Second is the “horror” of dog fighting. Animal lovers go apoplectic about it and don’t care who did it.

White liberals admit their horror of dog fighting, but “nuance” their disgust with the observation that had Vick been white, the outrage against him wouldn’t have been so intense. Maybe, but so what! If you hate dog fighting you should hate it, no matter who fights the dogs.

My guess is that many in this country and in the world have no problem with dog fighting, or cock fighting or lizard fighting as long as they don’t know about it and don’t have to watch it. People have been pitting animal against animal for centuries and if that’s what fills their socks, so be it. Many of the same people tune in the mayhem of televised cage fights between two men, where truly punishing blows are par for the course. Humans, yes; dogs, no.

The fact is, the planet is a monstrously big place with billions of people. We can’t control or approve of what some of those people do or like or get their kicks from, although liberals would love that power. Dog fighting exists, people will fight dogs, so deal with it. Make it illegal if you can, but if it continues, it continues, just as people continue using drugs even though they’re illegal. Everyone, especially liberals, grow up about the world we live in.

The third and, to me, most important issue, is what happened to Vick’s dogs after the battle. Here is where the disgust and outrage is most justified by anyone who considers himself to be a decent human being.

I’m one of those who say that if people want to fight dogs, there’s little I can do to stop them, and they’ll find a way whether I like it or not. But to take the losing dogs, the weaker dogs, the dogs who didn’t perform and destroy them in ways too horrible to imagine is a sign of inhumanity, not race, inhumanity.

Electrocution, drowning, hanging, slamming against the ground — it’s as if these people were experimenting with different ways to kill these animals. I could understand a swift bullet in the head. It seems merciful at least, efficient at best. But these guys went the extra mile in deciding how to eliminate these dogs in the most cruel way imaginable.

That was the tipping point for me and, I imagine, for most people, and should be considered independently of the dog fighting, which I might shrug off. Other ills of the world demand my attention. But electrocuting the dogs and the other techniques used in killing them, I can’t abide. It’s inhuman. Savage, even. Not racial.

But this is where the guilty white liberal antenna sounds the danger alarm — savagery. Historically, one of the justifications for slavery was that blacks were less than human, were, indeed, savages. Blacks were barely one step removed from the jungle. What Vick’s friends, and maybe Vick himself, did to those dogs resonated as being savage, but to declare it in those terms would ring the bells of slavery. It is like using the word “crusade” in the war on terror.

Rather than call those killings by its rightful name, then, liberals and black spokespeople started playing the race card. And they might have had a point, mistaken though I think it is. Using the word “savagery” is a justifiable concern. Our society has been trying for years to eliminate prejudices and preconceptions about all kinds of people. The last thing we need is a reinforcement of a specific preconception that might remain in the hearts of those prejudiced against blacks.

But that doesn’t mean we should fold that into an accusation of racism when assessing the actions of Vick and his friends. It WAS and it would be a sign of our collective racial maturity to openly acknowledge it. It would be healthy to recognize savagery for what it is, regardless of race. Just as it would have been healthier had we acknowledged that the Don Imus’ sin was not because he called the Rutgers’ girls “ho’s,” but for describing them as “nappy headed.” Why would Sharpton or the Sort-Of-Reverend Jackson give a damn whether someone is called a “ho?” But “nappy headed ….?”

We’re not being racist if we say, simply, one doesn’t torture dogs to death, whatever your color. We’re not being racist if we think it’s uncivilized or savage. We’re being human. And there are plenty of us around, black and white.