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. If Paul Ryan is a racist for criticizing those conditions, what shall we call the people who run New York City’s public schools or those who govern Detroit — the people who help create those conditions? But you have to admit that he’s a very articulate guy, an expert at sounding as if he knows what he’s talking about. 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.
– Paul Ryan knew exactly what he was doing in a radio interview last week when he said that the US had a "tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working," Paul Krugman argues in the New York Times today, in the most prominent of several pieces debating the comments. Several Democrats have denounced the comments as racist. Ryan says he was simply being "inarticulate." Here's what people are saying: Ryan was simply "speaking of a true thing that must never be said," write the editors of the National Review. And who's more racist, Ryan "for criticizing those conditions," or "the people who run New York City’s public schools or those who govern Detroit—the people who help create those conditions?" "Paul Ryan was just telling the truth," agrees John Hinderaker at Power Line, pointing out that labor force participation among African Americans is at a record low. "It is impossible to overstate not just how dishonest, but how vicious" these attacks are, he writes. Ryan just expressed concern about "very real human problems" and urged action to fix them. "There's a history here that the Republican Party can't ignore," argues Ian Haney Lopez on Bill Moyers' site. The GOP has used coded racial language for years—two different RNC chairs have even apologized for it. Ryan either "uncritically adopted the charged rhetoric of his party without understanding its racial undertones," or deployed that rhetoric tactically to stoke racial tensions. Krugman agrees, and takes it further, using Ryan's comments as an example of racism he sees baked into GOP rhetoric. "Race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of US politics," he writes. Why does the GOP block spending on Medicaid while opposing cuts to Medicare? "Well, what do many Medicaid recipients look like … and how does that compare with the typical Medicare beneficiary? Mystery solved." Many have denounced Ryan for citing Charles Murray, author of the controversial book, The Bell Curve, which argued that black people have lower average IQs than white people, and that the difference was partially genetic. But Andrew Sullivan calls that, and the attacks on Ryan, a "smear." Murray, he argues, is an unfairly maligned "intellectual adventurer," willing to "speak things we only talk about in our own heads." Ryan, for his part, seems eager to smooth the incident over; he's promised to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus soon to discuss it, a spokesman told Reuters on Friday.