Sorry, but I can’t believe the tone-deafness of people of some on the right who see this as much ado about nothing. He’s obnoxious.

But what is also noteworthy about this mess is that it exposes how the Los Angeles office of the NAACP essentially has been a reputation defender for Sterling because of money he gives the group. It’s far from just Jesse Jackson who plays the racial spoils game.

The Sterling-is-a-racist timeline starts in 2003 with the first printed reports about his staff hassling black, Latino and disabled tenants at his 100-plus apartment buildings in Los Angeles, with his biggest holdings in Beverly Hills and West L.A.

The timeline continues in 2005 with Sterling paying a multimillion-dollar fine (specific amount undisclosed) and $5 million in legal fees to settle a lawsuit.

In 2006, it continues with a federal investigation of Sterling’s continuing attempts to hassle black and Latino tenants and his newest target: renters with children.

That culminates in 2009 with a Justice Department-orchestrated settlement of $2.73 million.

Even Sterling realized NAACP honor was absurd

Let’s now bring in an NAACP-Sterling timeline.

2008: Five  years after the initial signs that Sterling really, really didn’t want African-Americans in his apartment buildings, the group gave Sterling its President’s Award.

2009: The L.A. chapter gave Sterling its Lifetime Achievement Award.

2014: The chapter was going to give him another award in May before this weekend’s flap.

Why? Because he gave the NAACP money.

What’s really sick is that even Sterling realizes the absurdity of this. This is from the May 22, 2009, Los Angeles Daily News:

“Do you know why they’re here?” Sterling says in the [magazine article], to a companion, about why an ESPN reporter is attending a May 14 ceremony in his honor at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. “They want to know why the NAACP would give an award to someone with my track record!”

Sterling knows the answer. For the L.A. chapter of the NAACP, gross racism is forgivable — if the price is right.

But in the U-T San Diego, I made the case that another Democratic faction has far more reasons for dissent:

” … if any part of the Democratic coalition should consider bolting over basic calculations of self-interest, it is Latinos. They are poorly served by the state’s public education system — which is dominated by the California Teachers Association and the California Federation of Teachers, the most powerful forces in the state Democratic Party.

“Everywhere around California, there is a cold war playing out between teachers unions and those who want to shake things up to help Latino students.

“In San Diego Unified and elsewhere, we see a renewed assault on charter schools that are often championed by minority parents unhappy with the status quo.

“In Sacramento city schools, an Obama administration-endorsed effort to improve the performance of struggling, largely minority schools is being sandbagged by the local chapter of the CTA — because the program seeks to determine which teachers are most effective in helping students from impoverished families.

“In Los Angeles Unified, this reflexive effort to protect veteran teachers above all else has long since left sanity behind. For the worst of many examples, a teacher who fed semen-laced food to his poor, mostly Latino elementary school students couldn’t be fired because of the immense job protections dictated by the local CTA chapter. Administrators had to pay him $35,000 to get him to resign.”

Teachers blame kids, parents — absolve themselves

“This disconnect between the interests of Latinos and the interests of the teachers unions that dominate California’s Democratic Party is hammered home by these unions’ increasingly open attitude of ‘don’t blame us for not being able to educate these kids.’

“Yes, of course, it’s going to be more difficult to help a student whose parents aren’t English speakers or who have other difficulties related to poverty. Nevertheless, it is a matter of fact that some teachers, schools and districts do objectively better at educating these students than others. Yet instead of supporting a “best practices” approach to help these kids — as Sacramento schools are trying to do — the CTA and CFT try to nuke any change in the status quo that might cost any teacher anywhere her or his job.

“If college admission policies drive a wedge between Asian-Americans and the California Democratic establishment, public education policies should be 100 times more likely to divide Latinos and state Democrats.”

Career comes first. The kids? Bleep ’em

Instead, Latino lawmakers by and large never pick fights with the CTA and CFT. With the gigantic exception of former state Sen. Gloria Romero, D-Los Angeles, Latino Dem electeds want to stay on the career-advancement gravy train. As I detailed in 2012, they’ll even put up with a CTA member feeding semen to Latino elementary-school kids:

“The Berndt case prompted state senator Alex Padilla, a Los Angeles Democrat, to introduce legislation that would have made it easier for districts to fire sexual predators. That bill never made it out of a state assembly committee. Lobbyists from the CFT and CTA portrayed it as an assault on teachers’ due-process rights, and legislators fell right into line with the unions. As for Berndt, instead of firing him, the union-dominated Los Angeles Unified hierarchy paid him $40,000 to resign.

“Siding with classroom sexual predators over Latino students and parents was no big deal for the CTA-affiliated United Teachers Los Angeles. Consider what happened in November 2009 at Gratts Elementary School (94 percent Latino enrollment) in the Pico-Union neighborhood of Los Angeles. Latino parents who wanted to convert the struggling school to a charter and force out poor teachers were warned in Spanish-language fliers that they risked deportation for their efforts. UTLA denied any involvement with the scare tactic, but union members were the sole suspects.

“It might seem remarkable that the California legislature’s powerful Latino caucus tolerates union bullying and intimidation, but then most of the caucus members — including Assembly Speaker John Pérez, a former organizer for the United Food and Commercial Workers — ascended through the labor movement. By allowing the CTA and CFT to dictate the agenda, Latino legislators are keeping the best teachers out of schools where they’re most needed and helping channel the worst teachers to the most troubled schools. They evidently prefer keeping mum to risking teachers’ union support.”

To repeat a point I made in the U-T San Diego’s pages, many Latinos’ assumption that Republicans just don’t like immigrants or minorities or Latinos make it unlikely they would even consider switching parties. But should that anti-GOP view make them blind to the fact that when it comes to public education, California Dems are objectively anti-Latino?

Of course not.