Now, here’s a very subtle April Fool’s joke by Jonathan Singer, the Berkeley law student who’s launched the Confirm Goodwin Liu website:

In a post titled “Maybe Read What He Actually Said,” Singer writes:

One of the latest hits on Goodwin Liu from the far right is that he supports national reparations. The only problem with this line of attack: Goodwin Liu has never said such a thing, and in fact has said the opposite. Here are Liu’s own words:

[I]nstead of looking for the single national strategy, which is what everybody always looks for, think about what you can do on a much smaller scale in much smaller communities, around specific problems that people face, whether it’s in their schools, in their workplaces, access to health care, in their housing; whatever it may be.

In case you missed it, Singer’s first joke is that the presentation in which Liu made his highly controversial remarks is one for which Liu himself failed to provide any information as to the existence of the online video (or any other record). So if it had been up to Liu, it would have been impossible to “read what he actually said” because no one would have known of the only apparent record of the event. (Just one of several highly improbable—oh, yes, and surely coincidental—omissions by Liu.)

Second, [Strikethrough per this post.]

My post about the event included an extensive transcript of Liu’s remarks. I did “read what he actually said,” and I found his remarks objectionable and controversial for the reasons I spelled out, namely:

Let’s expose the game that Liu is playing. Just as Liu completely ignores the innocent victims of racial preferences when he urges the perpetual imposition of racial quotas as a remedy for “societal discrimination,” so he would make those who were not complicit in slavery pay the price of his grandiose reparations project. Moreover, he continues to use the term “segregated” so expansively that only the imposition of racial quotas will achieve the elimination of what he calls segregation.
Even worse, Liu, far from making any sacrifice himself (he didn’t give up his seats at Stanford and at Yale Law School, or his Rhodes Scholarship, or his clerkship with Justice Ginsburg, or his professorship at Berkeley), is making a career out of benefiting from his grievance-mongering. It’s precisely his hard-edged ideology that has made him a darling of the Left and that explains why he is being nominated to a judicial seat that he craves as a steppingstone to the Supreme Court.

Note that none of my comments turns on the trivial question whether Liu supports a “single national strategy” or a pervasive series of smaller-scale reparations (which could still fairly be characterized in toto as a “grandiose reparations project”). So Singer’s surely joking when he maintains that Liu “has said the opposite” of a proposition that no one, so far as I can tell, is advancing. (If someone somewhere advanced the proposition, why doesn’t Singer link to it? Beware bloggers who don’t link to the charges that they purport to be responding to.) And Singer’s joking when he pretends to have any response to the actual criticisms that I’ve leveled.

4/2 update: In his response, Singer remains utterly clueless.