Salon’s Joan Walsh has
responded to my
post yesterday that took issue with her contention that “the
real story of the shutdown” is “50
years of GOP race-baiting.” With the classic
musta-touched-a-nerve! formulation popular with juvenile
polemicists everywhere, her new piece is titled “Angry
right gets mad when you accuse it of race-baiting!“

I’m neither “angry” nor “right,” but I’m in the lede, so I
thought it may be illustrative to point at Walsh’s typical sleight
of hand when casually insinuating racism among those who disagree
with her politics. She writes:

Unfortunately, he’s still mad at me for calling him out on a
really dumb column he wrote three years ago. Oops: “Calling him
out;” I shouldn’t have said that. Because according to Welch,
that’s gangsta rap talk.

Two things here: 1) I’m not “still mad,” bro. Curiosity and
wonder are not anger. And 2) it’s ludicrous to suggest that I would
think even for a second that the phrase “Calling him out” is
“gangsta rap talk.” Why?

For one, you can search through a quarter-century of my work,
and you will never find a phrase or sentiment remotely like
“gangsta rap talk.” This is just not what I write or care about,
except very occasionally to mock curmudgeons who
get upset about people “walking on their pants with the cap on
backwards listening to the enema man and Snoopy Snoopy Poop
Dogg.” About the only time I’ve ever written about “gangsta
rap,” period, was in an optimistic piece about how “gangsta
rap and pop culture are driving out corrupt post-Soviet
thugs“ in Romania.

Secondly, her whole case for
suggesting, falsely, that I’m the kind of guy who is constantly
hearing (and presumably fearing) “gangsta rap talk” in casual
conversation rests on exactly one piece of evidence: That in
September 2009, when President Barack Obama said to his
truth-stretching Obamacare opponents “we will call you out,” I
described it as “a nearly Snoop Doggesque display,” linking to
a then-hot-of-the-presses Snoop video whose chorus was
“we will shut you down.”

This sent Walsh’s racism-dar on high alert. “Is ‘We will call
you out’ a black phrase? Kind of a black phrase? Urban? Street? Or
Snoop Doggesque? (Someone called it that.),” she asked on
Twitter. “What in God’s name does Snoop Dogg have to do with Barack
Obama, (besides the obvious),” she asked in
Salon. “I think that line in your piece will go down in
history as one of the dumbest white-boy outbursts in the history of
covering Obama,” she wrote
me.

She
apparently could not accept my answer: I just found the phrases
we will shut you down and we will call you out to
be similar, and so made a throwaway link and reference in a blog
post whose substance was about the president’s veracity,
not cadence. And as I suggested to her at the time, the only
negative association within this non-noteworthy side-comment came
from people who read one into it:

I’m from Long Beach, Joan; Snoop Dogg is a hero of mine. I like
— not dislike, but like — that the president of the United States
occasionally talks like people my age, and where I’m from.

Such is the absurdly low bar in some allegedly journalistic
circles for associating the most toxic modern label to people who
have different ideas about health care policy. Something to keep in
mind this week as an entire swath of the political spectrum gets
tarred as
irredeemably racist.

And now, as your reward for reading this much drivel, please
enjoy the Reason.tv classic, “Social Security, Snoopy Snoopy Poop
Dogg, Alan Simpson“: