Former AP Man Ron Fournier Plays the Race Card

In light of today’s #Obamacare column, a little background: “How and Why Romney is Playing the Race Card.” http://t.co/bizWmTfCgj

— Ron Fournier (@ron_fournier) February 6, 2014

Ron Fournier, longtime AP political reporter, now with the National Journal, seeks to cultivate an “objective” image. He also seems to be cultivating a future gig at MSNBC based on his current column and his hyping it on Twitter via the race card, Mollie Hemingway writes at the Federalist today, quoting a series of tweets from Fournier, including the example above:

Le sigh. It’s not that some people think creating disincentives to work is unhealthy or unethical. It’s that they’re racist. It’s so easy to call people racist. In fact, Fournier doesn’t bother in any way to substantiate the slur. It’s pretty simple: If you show the slightest bit of skepticism about government programs that take the earnings of one person and use them to pay for the existence of another, you’re racist. If you think that increasing subsidization is bad for the American individual and the family, you’re racist. Hell, if you provide raw numbers like Elmendorf, you’re racist! Some might note that these claims say so much about the racial assumptions of people like Fournier and so little about people who care about basic economics or liberty-based governance. But that’s probably, somehow, racist too. Here’s where Fournier really showed the laziness of casual slurs about racism.

After embedding the above tweet, Hemingway adds:

If you go to that link, you get a discussion of an advertisement Mitt Romney made about how Obama gutted welfare reform (which, I hasten to add, was a wildly popular bipartisan program signed into law by President Bill Clinton). There you also get to see how Fournier associates certain terms with racial slurs and how this means, somehow, both that his racist translation of other people’s words is not racist but that other people are racist.

Yet another reminder, to borrow from James Taranto’s great line in 2012: If you’re hearing dog whistles — you’re the dog. And/or the potential MSNBC host.

In 2011, National Journal called for, as the Daily Caller paraphrased at the time, “a moral sanction against gun metaphors similar to the ‘N’ word.'” Having violated their pledge this week by returning to using gun metaphors themselves with headlines such as “The Obama Administration Is on T-Mobile’s Porch With a Shotgun,” it’s not surprising that they’re also concurrently playing the race card, as well.