JAMES TARANTO: Political Correctness and Racial Tension: Less of the former might help relieve the latter. “Seventy-four years later, Matt Taibbi has discovered an invidious racial subtext in this economic truism. Of course, finding implausible racial subtexts has been a favorite pastime of the left since Barack Obama rose to prominence. In the past four years we have learned that all manner of innocuous words, from ‘skinny’ to ‘professor’–even ‘European’!–are also racial slurs. . . . This column has argued that the Obama presidency poses a deep political and psychological challenge to the Democratic left, which relies on the perception that racism remains prevalent in America, and that the GOP is racist, both to motivate black voters and to maintain its own self-identity as morally superior. That explains the desperate need to stereotype Obama critics, and conservatives more generally, as racist. Of all of the examples of this phenomenon, Taibbi’s may well be the most recent.”

When everything is a racial slur, nothing is a racial slur.