What just strikes me as offensive about blue-state elitism is that they really don't feel that their own rules about racism, discrimination, how they state opinions, etc., apply to them. Hillary Clinton makes a joke about Mahatma Gandhi running a gas station down in St. Louis and is surprised when the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence asks for an apology. My wife saw editorial cartoons depicting Condi Rice as Prissy from Gone With The Wind (paraphrasing "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies") the day after she was selected as Secretary Of State, the highest political office ever for a black woman. A long-sitting Democrat congressman for my district has made anti-Semitic remarks more than once and keeps getting re-elected because he's just so entrenched that no one can outspend him.
The common thread is that they believe that because they supposedly represent these people more than their conservative opposites do, that they've got a license to use the imagery that they've deemed inappropriate for the rest of us. And they don't understand that that's not fair.