Roger Simon wrote a...thing today for Politico in which he revealed highly embarrassing details about GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan's contempt for Mitt Romney: Ryan has "gone rogue," openly referring to Romney as "the Stench" on the campaign trail and refusing to follow the campaign's direction. EXCEPT TOTALLY NOT! Jokes on you, suckers. 
 
 Simon's column is completely inscrutable. The substance is that Ryan believes that Romney is a failed candidate, and is more concerned with preserving his own political reputation than trying to pull out a win against all hope: 
 
 Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, "If Stench calls, take a message" and "Tell Stench I'm having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later." 
 
 That just sounds weird, right? But because it was published in Politico, which is an actual news outlet employing actual reporters, of which Simon is one, several other news outlets (this one included) took it at face value and repeated it. Stupid idiots! Because, lol, it wasn't real! It was a joke, dummies. From BuzzFeed: 
 
 When Roger Simon wrote in Politico Wednesday that reported Paul Ryan's new nickname for Mitt Romney is "Stench," a number of news outlets - from MSNBC to Mediaite - took it seriously. Simon told BuzzFeed: "Some people always don't get something, but I figured describing PowerPoint as having been invented to euthanize cattle would make the satire clear. I guess people hate PowerPoint more than I thought." 
 
 Indeed, why on earth would anyone take anything you write seriously? BuzzFeed's Ben Smith and reporter Rosie Gray both refer to the column as a "satire" on Twitter, which mangles the meaning of that word pretty badly. Satire requires an object—a thing being satirized. What was Simon's point? Who was he making fun of? Ryan, for too slavishly following Romney's script? Political reporters, for...what? I don't know. I can't think of anyone who could conceivably read Simon's column and be angry about what it says about them. Ryan, maybe? You tell me. 
 
 Simon's "I made a funny" moment—too be sure, he often writes stuff that actually announces its intention to be humorous—comes just a couple weeks after the New York Times' David Brooks wrote an equally dumb and opaque column excoriating Romney as a robotic, heartless, creepy plutocrat. It was interpreted as an announcement that Brooks had turned on Romney. But no—it was an attempt to make fun of people who don't like Romney by...making fun of the way they make fun of Romney! Trouble is, a "satirical" version of Romney haters making fun of Romney is indistinguishable from actual Romney haters making fun of Romney. 
 
 To wit: Romney haters like to make fun of the fact that Mitt Romney tied his dog to the top of his car. So, for comedy, they will exaggerate his purported willingness to be casually cruel to animals. So when he wondered aloud why you can't roll down windows on an airplane, Comedy Central wrote: 
 
 If airplane windows don't roll down, how does the pilot stick his head out the window to make sure his dog is okay? on.cc.com/Qee0T1 — Indecision (@indecision) September 24, 2012 
 
 When David Brooks decided to make fun of people who make fun of Romney for tying his dog to the roof, he wrote this: 
 
 The Romneys had a special family tradition. The most cherished member got to spend road trips on the roof of the car. Mitt spent many happy hours up there, applying face lotion to combat windburn. 
 
 Who is being mocked here? Are people who poke fun at Romney supposed to read that and feel like they've been attacked by Brooks? It's a funny joke. People who mock Romney would be proud to tell it. Employing it as a a fictive example of excess in the anti-Romney camp just...isn't funny. 
 
 (What is funny—uproariously so—is the fact that Romney's subsequent "47%" comments retroactively rendered Brooks' lame attempt at satirizing Romney-haters literally true.) 
 
 Politico quickly updated Simon's column with a note comparing him to Jonathan Swift and George Orwell, and pointing out that he had described PowerPoint as something "released by Microsoft in 1990 as a way to euthanize cattle using a method less cruel than hitting them over the head with iron mallets," which apparently ought to have been a dead giveaway. But all sorts of actual people who report real things—Dana Milbank and Roger Simon come to mind—routinely make little jokey-jokes like that in between clearly factual statements. One comical aside does not a wholesale satire make. 
 
 Anyway the point is stop trying to be funny and if you must write a "satire" to be cool, please think hard and analytically about precisely what it is you are hoping to satirize and whether the words you are actually writing accomplish the task you have set for yourself. ||||| Editor’s note: Some readers were confused that this Roger Simon column was satire. Please see Roger’s note at the end … . 
 
 Paul Ryan has gone rogue. He is unleashed, unchained, off the hook. 
 
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 “I hate to say this, but if Ryan wants to run for national office again, he’ll probably have to wash the stench of Romney off of him,” Craig Robinson, a former political director of the Republican Party of Iowa, told The New York Times on Sunday. 
 
 Coming from a resident of Iowa, a state where people are polite even to soybeans, this was a powerful condemnation of the Republican nominee. 
 
 Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.” 
 
 Even before the stench article appeared, there was a strong sign that Ryan was freeing himself from the grips of the Romney campaign. It began after his disastrous appearance on Friday before AARP in New Orleans. Ryan delivered his remarks in the style dictated by his Romney handlers: Stand behind the lectern, read the speech as written and don’t stray from the script. 
 
 Ryan brought his 78-year-old mother with him and introduced her to the audience, which is usually a sure crowd pleaser. 
 
 But when Ryan began talking about repealing “Obamacare” because he said it would harm seniors, one woman in the crowd shouted, “Lie!” Another shouted “Liar!” and the crowd booed Ryan lustily. 
 
 Who boos a guy in front of his 78-year-old mother? Other 78-year-old mothers. 
 
 That was Friday, and that was the end of Ryan following the game plan. At a certain point, all running mates on failing campaigns feel they must break free from the manacles placed on them by the top of the ticket. Sarah Palin began pursuing her own path once she learned that John McCain was having strategy sessions with his morning bowl of Farina. 
 
 Dan Senor, one of Romney’s closest advisers, has kept a tight grip on Ryan, traveling with him everywhere and making sure he hews to the directions of the Romney “brain trust” in Boston. (A brain trust, rumor has it, that refers to Ryan as “Gilligan.”) 
 
 But on Saturday, the day after he was booed, Ryan broke free. Appearing at a town hall meeting at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Ryan showed the glitz, the glamour, the razzle-dazzle that he was supposed to bring to the campaign in the first place. ||||| This post first appeared on Politico.com. Author and legal scholar Ian Haney López recently appeared on Moyers & Company to talk with Bill about his book, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class. 
 
 Paul Ryan triggered a firestorm of recrimination this week. Speaking recently on Bill Bennett’s Morning in America radio program, the Wisconsin Republican and self-styled budget wonk linked poverty to “this tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work.” 
 
 Setting aside the factual claim — the notion that poverty is especially concentrated in America’s inner cities is an increasingly antiquated one — these comments elicited a quick and forceful rebuke from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), who decried them as “a thinly veiled racial attack.” She explained: “[W]hen Mr. Ryan says ‘inner city,’ when he says, ‘culture,’ these are simply code words for what he really means: ‘black.’” 
 
 Ryan has since backpedaled, protesting that race was nowhere in his thoughts: “This has nothing to do whatsoever with race. It never even occurred to me. This has nothing to do with race whatsoever.” 
 
 Maybe so, but there’s a history here that the Republican Party can’t ignore — one that explains why Lee was so quick to jump on his comments, why the Congressional Black Caucus announced themselves “deeply troubled” by remarks they described as “highly offensive” and why so many others have sharply criticized Ryan. 
 
 By calling out his use of “code words,” Lee put Ryan in the company of past politicians who have blown the proverbial dog whistle — using surreptitious references to race to garner support from anxious voters. Examples of dog whistling include Barry Goldwater’s endorsement of “states’ rights”; Richard Nixon’s opposition to “forced busing”; Ronald Reagan’s blasts against “welfare queens”; and George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton ad. 
 
 These instances of racial pandering typically have been treated as disconnected eruptions, when in fact the GOP has made a concerted effort to win support through racial appeals. This pattern is so entrenched — and so well known — that two different chairs of the Republican National Committee have acknowledged and apologized for this strategy. 
 
 “By the seventies and into the eighties and nineties,” RNC chair Ken Mehlman said in a 2005 speech before the NAACP, “Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.” Five years later, his successor Michael Steele similarly acknowledged that “for the last 40-plus years we had a ‘Southern Strategy’ that alienated many minority voters by focusing on the white male vote in the South.” 
 
 Despite the mea culpas, race baiting has continued: recall New Gingrich’s 2012 tarring of Barack Obama as “the best food-stamp president in American history.” Or consider another Gingrich jibe from the last election: “Really poor children in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works,” he claimed. “So they literally have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day. They have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it’s illegal.” 
 
 What, then, of Paul Ryan? Was he dog whistling? To many, his strong echoing of Gingrich, coupled with the larger GOP history of racial pandering, suggested so. Nor did Ryan help himself by invoking the conservative scholar Charles Murray — a man who co-wrote a controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve, tying intelligence to race, and who in 2000 explained that genetics will likely show, “One reason that we still have poverty in the United States is that a lot of poor people are born lazy.” 
 
 But what of Ryan’s insistence he did not consider race whatsoever, or his later explanation that he had been “inarticulate” in his comments? Perhaps Ryan genuinely did not recognize the racial narrative embedded in his remarks about an inner city culture that devalues work. But at best, this suggests that Ryan has uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones. 
 
 Less charitably, in weighing Ryan’s protestations of innocence, 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. 
 
 Another defense is to insist that Ryan is no bigot. Here’s one version, from Republican political strategist Ron Christie: “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is not racist nor did he blow a ‘dog whistle’ to launch a thinly veiled racist attack against black people. I offer this from the perspective of someone who has known Paul for more than 20 years: there is not a racist bone in his body.” The fact that Christie is black no doubt lends credibility to his testimony. 
 
 Ian Haney López on Dog Whistle Politics 
 
 But this retort misses the point. Dog whistling is not rooted in fiery hatred but rather in cool calculation — it’s the strategic, carefully considered decision to win votes by stirring racial fears in society. Suppose we stipulate that Ryan is no bigot. So what? The question is not one of animus on Ryan’s part, but of whether — as a tactical matter — he sought to garner support by indirectly stimulating racial passions. 
 
 Of course, an individual’s mindset in any particular instance is almost impossible to know. We cannot be certain what Ryan intended. Nevertheless, there’s no doubt that Ryan employed rhetoric closely connected to a dismal history of Republican racial demagoguery. 
 
 Barbara Lee was correct to respond forcefully. In our political culture, dog whistling all too often takes the form of warnings about a “tailspin of culture” in the “inner cities” and “generations of men not even thinking about working.” Sharply rebuked, hopefully Ryan and others will think twice — or, if Ryan is to be believed, then think for the first time — about using political rhetoric imbued with ugly racial stereotypes.
– The most-talked-about political story today ended up being the story about a story. If you heard references to the "stench" today, here's the tale: Politico columnist Roger Simon wrote a piece about Romney-Ryan with this line: (Ryan) "has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, 'If Stench calls, take a message” and 'Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.'" He was joking, playing off a quote that appeared in this New York Times story over the weekend, saying Ryan would "have to wash the stench of Romney off of him" if he planned to run for national office again. The problem is that several big media outlets didn't read Simon's line as a joke, reports BuzzFeed, which rounds up examples of reports that Ryan had a new nickname of "Stench" for his running mate. It also got confirmation of the joke from Simon himself: "Some people always don't get something, but I figured describing PowerPoint as having been invented to euthanize cattle would make the satire clear. I guess people hate PowerPoint more than I thought." At Gawker, one of the sites that initially reported on the nickname, John Cook critiques Simon's "completely inscrutable" column and concludes that he doesn't understand what satire actually is.