In a Friday blog post on yet another MSNBC controversy in which the network made biracial families the punch line of awkward joke, Pete asked an interesting question–and received something of an answer during the Super Bowl. Pete’s subject was the MSNBC tweet noting a Cheerios ad that featured a biracial family; the MSNBC Twitter feed snarked that the “rightwing” would hate the ad. This had come on the heels of an MSNBC television segment that ridiculed black children adopted by white families, which itself had been preceded by numerous troublesome race-related moments on MSNBC.

So Pete asked why the controversy over the Cheerios ad prompted an apology from station President Phil Griffin, and not any number of others. One explanation is that in this case an apology was demanded of him by the RNC, which threatened to boycott the network, working under the questionable assumption that people watch MSNBC. (The evidence suggests otherwise.) But another answer could be found in a different ad controversy during the Super Bowl, and what it says about the mindset of today’s leftists.

A major difference between the Cheerios tweet and, say, the bizarre outburst on Melissa Harris-Perry’s political talk show is that the latter at least had a tangential connection to politics. Harris-Perry and her guests were mocking Mitt Romney’s adopted grandson, and so could at least claim they had a political target in sight when firing away at the innocent youngster. It is still appalling and inexcusable, but it could plausibly be portrayed as a political segment gone awry.

The same cannot be said for the tweet about the Cheerios ad. That tweet was much more revealing about MSNBC and the American left today. It’s true that, as Pete notes, MSNBC created an atmosphere in which it’s easy to imagine the tweeter (who was fired, apparently) following suit. But it was indeed a new low. When an MSNBC host like Chris Matthews accuses Newt Gingrich of racist word pronunciation, he’s trying to delegitimize an opponent of the president, to whom Matthews and his network are disturbingly loyal.

Behind the Cheerios tweet, however, was the assumption that conservative Americans–not Republican presidential candidates taking advantage of a wedge issue, but citizens throughout the country–are inherently bigoted people. Not only does this display the disdain leftists have for their fellow Americans, but it shows they can’t look at a biracial couple without thinking about the intersection of race and politics. If that’s the case, we’ve reached a troubling level of politicization of breakfast cereals, to say the least.

And that dynamic was again on display last night during the Super Bowl broadcast. Though the Cheerios ad went off without a hitch, there was another “controversial” ad: a Coca-Cola commercial presented a mash-up of people singing America the Beautiful in various languages, to emphasize the U.S. as a melting pot of immigrants who embraced their new country while retaining their cultural roots. Considering the pessimism at home and the anti-Americanism abroad, the ad was subtly uplifting without being too saccharine.

Allen West disagreed. The former congressman thought it “disturbing” and insufficiently pro-assimilation. West was not representative of the broader conservative political movements such as the Tea Party. News organizations that tried to push a conservative backlash story relied on unknown Twitter commenters–though by such a standard the entire left can also be painted as racist, misogynistic, etc.

But the more interesting reason the left pushed those stories was not because they found a genuine Tea Party backlash but because they predicted one. Twitter lit up in the moments during and after the ad with leftists proclaiming this to be yet another ad conservatives wouldn’t like, with the Tea Party specifically named. That is, the left cannot hear foreign languages or look at immigrants without being filled with politically-based revulsion.

This trend is yet another example of what Sonny Bunch has been calling the “emptiness of a politicized life.” It’s worth reading through Bunch’s various discussions of the phenomenon, because he pulls together a broad array of examples that get at the depth of the problem. But how obsessed by politics do you have to be to see a cereal or soda commercial during the Super Bowl and immediately think about what Tea Partiers might say? It’s unhealthy, and–as Phil Griffin seems to understand–it’s a far more problematic iteration of the ever-deteriorating political rationality of the left.