Protesting too much
by digby
I don't know if he's lying or deluded, but either way, Paul Ryan is making as ass of himself:
“You said what you meant,” Alfonso Gardner, a 61-year-old African American man from Racine, told Ryan at a town hall meeting. “[Inner city is] a code word for black.”
Ryan remained defiant though. “There is nothing whatsoever about race in my comments at all,” he said. He admonished Gardner for drawing a connection between his “inner city” remarks and race. “I think when we throw these charges around, it should be based on something.”
It's just ludicrous to deny that these are code words. Everyone knows it, even foreigners. In a former life I used to sell movies in overseas markets and the company I worked for distributed quite a few films written and directed by African Americans. And it was common for foreign distributors to slyly inform us that they had no audience for "urban" and "inner city" films. Those were the terms they used. And when informed that the films didn't necessarily take place in a city they would shrug and say, "you know what I mean." Everybody knows what Paul Ryan was saying --- Republicans have been harping on this for 40 years.
This disgusting racist nonsense about lazy black men goes waaay back:
