Ian Haney Lopez is "a law professor at UC Berkeley, a Senior Fellow at Demos, and the author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class."

He offers "Is Paul Ryan Racist?" ( peekURL.com/zCBeqhw ), which is subtitled "He insists not, but I hope he’s learned his lesson." Among other faults it contains this completely un-self-aware and ironic paragraph:

"...we should be clear that denying racial intent is par for the course in dog whistling. The whole point of speaking in coded terms is to transmit racial messages that can be defended as not about race at all. Today’s broadly shared anti-racist ethos condemns naked appeals to racial solidarity; those politicians who nevertheless seek to trade on racial provocations must do so in ways that maintain plausible deniability."

It should go without saying that much of the Democratic Party's outreach consists of "naked appeals to racial solidarity". There are countless far-left racial power or at least ethnocentric groups such as NCLR, LULAC, NALEO, and NAACP. Watch MSNBC for five minutes and you'll see some form of a naked appeal to racial solidarity or its relatives: appeals to white guilt, playing the race card, and so on. Haney's own article cheers the response to Ryan's comments from the Congressional Black Caucus. Haney is either blind to all that, or chooses not to discuss it with his readers. In either case, does that tend to make you want to trust the opinions he states elsewhere in the article?

Note: this post is just about Haney's claim, not about Ryan's remarks. Ryan is a strong amnesty supporter ( http://24ahead.com/s/paul-ryan ) so defending him isn't something I want to do. However, the mindset of those like Ian Haney Lopez - combined with the platforms they're given - is a problem that has impacts far beyond Ryan and his supporters. Ryan and his major supporters compound what those like Ian Haney Lopez do by not being competent enough to strike back against their opponents.