A drawling Ford dealer who's really named O.C. Welch in a place that's really called Hardeeville, S.C., bought a bunch of radio spots last week so he could rant about Japanese cars.

From elsewhere in the South, a cabal of spiteful senators joined forces to keep Chrysler and GM from getting industry-saving loans.

Welch went after Toyotas, growling among other things that they're "rice ready. They're not road ready."

The senators, most visibly Republican Richard Shelby of Alabama, tried to put a last-minute choke hold on the UAW. In one of those we're-for-a-free-market-except-when-we're-not moments, they wanted to make sure no Northern auto workers would earn more money than non-union workers at the foreign car plants in their home states.

If you're looking for a villain, I give you Mr. Shelby, who railed about the foolhardy American 3 designing unwanted SUVs while the Mercedes SUV factory in Alabama was offering buyouts and the Hyundai and Honda SUV factories were cutting production.

I do not give you Toyota, no matter how red O.C. Welch's face gets.

There's been a dangerous drift toward 1982 these past few months as the Detroit carmakers have gasped for oxygen. Callers and e-mailers have railed about the lousy Japanese and their lousy cars, as though it's Nissan's fault that gamblers, nitwits and swindlers crashed the stock market and crushed the credit market.

They're missing the point. It's too late for domestic-vs.-foreign hostility, and it's silly to attack Asian products as bad cars, because they're not. What our guys need to make the country realize is that their cars are just as strong.

As for Toyota, it's a nice company to have around. Ask Sparky Anderson.

Jim Hughes serves as executive director of CATCH, the children's medical care charity Anderson founded in 1987 when he managed the Detroit Tigers.

Ford has been CATCH's greatest benefactor, Hughes says. "Second would be Toyota Motor Sales USA, and I would emphasize the USA."

That's not a call to peel the Buy American sticker off your bumper. It's just a reminder that no matter what you drive, you can appreciate what some of the Camry profits have done for Detroit.

Toyota has a small communications office in the city and a new tech center in Ann Arbor that employs 700 people, with 400 more to follow. The company regularly supports Think Detroit/PAL and the local American Cancer Society, it endowed a chair at the Center for Creative Studies for $1 million, and it wrote $2 million checks for the Detroit Riverwalk and an engineering theater due to open soon at the New Detroit Science Center.

"It's just kind of a natural thing to do," says John McCandless, Toyota's Midwest corporate communications manager.

As he's quick to point out, the Detroit carmakers have done more. They should; their presence here is huge. But Toyota, with 36,000 employees in the U.S., can be an admirable neighbor.

It's also a useful competitor. Whatever the contributions of foreign companies to their communities, their contribution to the improvement in American cars is incalculable.

They're also sharing the pain of the recession. Their sales are down, and if a GM death spiral takes out its top suppliers, the factories Sen. Shelby and his running buddies short-sightedly tried to protect will quickly find themselves starved for parts.

"We thought it would be a good idea for the loans to go through," McCandless says. "Disruption of the industry is not good for anybody."

Things are too intertwined. They're black and white sometimes, but they're also gray.

Heck, just run that by O.C. Welch, the angry Ford dealer.

He also has a dealership in Brunswick, Ga. It sells Mazdas.