By David Weigel
Mike Burns wraps up the story that mostly serves to prove that the Osama bin Laden news cycle is over; we are back to this. The Fox Nation story on the affair gives us the basics:
is quite controversial, in part because his poetry includes threats to shoot police and at least one passage calling for the "burn" of then-President George W. Bush.
The "threats to shoot police" aren't exactly explicit. "Cop Killer," in which Ice-T describes the implements he'll use to, well, kill a cop. Explicit. "A Letter to the Law," the poem in question here? We have "Tell the law, my Uzi weighs a ton/ I walk like a warrior, from them I won’t run." I'm not even sure "burn a Bush" is a call to set the 43rd president on fire, because "burn" can just mean "diss."
Adam Serwer makes the pretty obvious point that a first-person rap lyric isn't the same thing as a pure expression of beliefs. True enough, just as putting a target on a political map doesn't mean you want people to see the map and fire bullets at politicians. But Big Government goes deeper, finding a 2008 poem at Jeremiah Wright's church and a 2005 interview in which Common says black men should date black women. And at that point, the story/scandal becomes "Should you be permitted to perform at the White House if you've said something racist or hobnobbed with someone who does that?"
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http://www.slate.com/blogs/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/05/11/common-the-greatest-living-threat-to-american-freedom.aspx