Nick Confessore — who I respect — jumps into the fray. His defense of the American Prospect on the staff photo thing works for me. Or at least, I don’t think it’s worth arguing about. However he sums up his larger position thus:

To recap, for Jonah’s benefit: Pictures of white people: Fine. Pictures of white people paired with tag lines that seem to hearken back to the “good old days” of de facto school segregation: Questionable, at best.

And there it is. Even a school which has virtually no history of segregation — unlike all the of the wonderful Ivy Leagues which churn out so many white liberals — can never, ever, show pictures of white kids and speak of the good old days without it being a reference to segregation. Even when they provide a couple hundred words defining explicitly what they mean by “good old days.” In other words, Tapped’s position is just so much PC nonsense. And, according to them, if you break the PC language — or in this case symbollic code — you get no benefit of the doubt and are immediately assumed to be racist or at least practicing such poor judgement as to make racism a reasonable conclusion.

This is the sort of Catch-22 the left loves to create for conservatives. Remember when the GOP served a rich ethnic cocktail at the 2000 convention? They were lampooned as hypocrites across the liberal media spectrum. However, if they’d just trotted out white folks, they’d have been condemned as a bastion of white privilege. Next we’re going to hear that we need an “honest dialogue” on race and the first conservative guy who opens his mouth will be denounced as a racist.

Well, I’m not buying it. I think Just should admit he was venting a knee jerk response and apologize. People sometimes speak too quickly when blogging. Lord knows I have. It seems to me at least that circling the wagons around a wrong and nasty jab is the wrong way to go.