Bobcat, the businessman who enriched himself on the butts -- literally -- of G-stringed, booty-shaking black women on his Black Entertainment Television network, is castigating the Charlotte business community for not supporting his eponymous basketball team.

Smart move, Bobby. That'll get 'em lined up behind you, dude. Just like attacking Barack Obama with the ferocity of a wolf on a lightly seasoned, medium-well pork chop will make blacks continue loving you for the decades of degradation you heaped upon them.

From the moment Obama proved to be a candidate with a legitimate shot at winning the Democratic Party's presidential nomination, Bobcat assumed the role of Hillary Rodham Clinton's surrogate attack clown.

Campaigning for Clinton in January, Johnson brought up, with a wink, Obama's already-confessed-to youthful drug use. This week, he renewed his attack in a Charlotte Observer interview.

He said, "What I believe Geraldine Ferraro meant is that if you take a freshman senator from Illinois called Jerry Smith, and he says 'I'm going to run for president,' would he start off with 90 percent of the black vote? And the answer is probably not."

'Scuse me, Bobcat, but John Edwards ran for president as a freshman senator, and John F. Kennedy won when he was barely into a second term. Neither benefited from being black, as far as I remember.

As for Obama's black support, much of that came only after his victory over Clinton and Edwards in Iowa. I'm guessing Hillary began losing her black support around the same time -- and after enlisting Bobcat's help.

Nobody with a brain is arguing that all black votes are Obama's by birthright; too many people, white and black, have died or been beaten upside their heads for us to give our votes to someone simply because of the hue of their skin.

Bobcat has every right as an American to support whichever candidate he wants to support, yet he is not content to simply stump for Clinton, he has to attack Obama.

The irony of Bobcat accusing Obama of getting a free pass because he's black shouldn't be lost on anyone. Nobody knows more about that than the ol' polecat himself.

How long would BET -- aptly known to many as "Booties Every Time" -- have survived had Johnson been a white entrepreneur whose fledgling network's sole aim seemed to be the exploitation of callipygian women and the glorification of potty-mouthed black thugs?

How long? Not long. We would have risen up in outrage and pulled the plug before the first booty shook.

Yet, this Obamaphobe used blacks' hope and good will and whites' fear of being labeled racist to make billions peddling the electronic equivalent of crack cocaine to the world.

Despite his moolah, the dude appears now to be nothing more than a pathetic, impotent version of Moby-Dick's Captain Ahab, only Johnson isn't seeking to destroy the great white whale; his quarry is Obama.

How sad. If Johnson knows what's good, he will mend his relationship with Charlotte's money men, draft a center who can stick a 15-foot jumper -- and leave Obama alone.