Since Oct. 20, the Republican National Committee’s Facebook page has had a picture of President Obama with a caption reading “Miscegenation is a crime against American values. Repeal Loving v. Virginia.”

[mjh: That’s right: repeal the ruling that allowed an interracial couple to marry. Rather reminiscent of the judge down south who recently said he wouldn’t marry an interracial couple because it’s bad for the kids. Tell it to Obama, jackass.]

As Raw Story notes, the RNC finally took the photo down today, after readers at Democratic Underground first began discussing it on Sunday. While it’s likely that the RNC “wasn’t aware the racist photo was on their page and it wasn’t produced or posted by anyone at the RNC,” the group had attacked MoveOn.org for a similar incident in 2004. As Chris Harris at Media Matters Action Network notes, when “a web user posted a self-produced web video that compared President Bush to Hitler as part of a MoveOn.org video contest, the RNC acted as if the video had been produced by MoveOn itself.” According to the National Journal:

“This [Bush as Hitler] is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech,” Republican National Committee spokesman Ed Gillespie proclaimed. “MoveOn.org should apologize.”

Boyd did just that, expressing “deep regret” that the ads made it through MoveOn’s filtering process, and promising to scrutinize such material in the future. Pariser emphasized that MoveOn had not produced the ads, not aired them, not endorsed them in the voting, and had removed them from the Web site –adding that the RNC had put them on its Web site to score points. Still, the damage had been done.

Will the RNC now issue a public apology?

Think Progress » Will the RNC apologize for racist Facebook photo?