Three cheers for Alfonso Gardner, the Paul Ryan constituent in Wisconsin who stood up at the failed 2012 VP nominee's recent town hall meeting and pushed back.
It takes a lot of guts to do what Gardner did: Confront a leading Republican on his party's incessant racial dog whistles — and do it calmly, thoughtfully and unswervingly. Ryan continued his charade of insisting that when he disparaged "inner-city" Americans for "not working" and "not even thinking about working," his statements had "nothing to do with race." To which Gardner replied, “If you didn’t mean this, you wouldn’t have said it, OK? People don’t say something that they don’t mean.”
The only regrettable thing was that Gardner wasn't given the chance to ask Ryan why he prefaced his "inner city" remarks by referencing a white supremacist named Charles Murray — who spends his career at the American Enterprise Institute arguing that science proves blacks and Hispanics genetically inferior.
Murray apparently is a role model for lots of Republicans — like that "Southern Avenger" guy Rand Paul was forced to fire, or Jason Richwine, who wrote the Heritage Foundation's laughable "immigration study." Birds of a feather and all that, you know?
We cats can't look inside Paul Ryan's heart and mind. So we can't say whether he's actually a racist. But he sure talks like one.
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