William A. Jacobson likes making my points for me.

Which is unfortunate, because I’m about to call him illiterate. He claims that I argued that Sarah Palin and her supporters are “racist because there were so few non-whites pictured in the available photos.” I did nothing of the sort. My claim, as you can tell by the words I used to write it, was that the “images she and her people have decided should represent her mass-appeal on a mock-presidential bid launch” demonstrates that “her own handlers consider her appeal limited to white people.” I even emphasized that first statement in the post, which as we all know is the online equivalent of burying it under a rock behind the fire-pit in someone else’s backyard. (“Officer, you can search my property, absolutely, but I assure you that you won’t find any claims here.”) You would think that a law professor would be able to recognize an argument when he saw one, but apparently not, which is why he provides evidence that bolsters mine. He quotes a reporter from MSNBC:

“I can tell you this crowd today was very, very diverse, a lot of people from different races, ages, all coming to see Palin and wanting get a glimpse of who this lady is that says that she’s going rogue.”

If this is true—and for the moment, I grant that it is—then Palin and her handlers are deliberately not posting pictures of the many non-white people who attend her events. That, Mr. Jacobson, is the sort of evidence that someone like me would use in support of my claim that the pictures posted to her page are designed to appeal to a specific audience. Because I don’t trust you with logic, I will draw the obvious inference for you: Palin’s people are excluding photographs of the non-white people who attend her appearances because those photographs aren’t intended to appeal to a non-white audience.

Which was my original point.

You do realize that you’re helping me out here, Mr. Jacobson, don’t you?

He also claims that I “maliciously and falsely referred to one conservative blogger as a ‘noted racist.'” But—no doubt for some reason other than it demonstrates that Riehl’s a racist—he doesn’t reproduce the link that I included to a post demonstrating that Riehl is, in fact, a racist. He also makes the classic debating mistake of assuming facts not in evidence when he claims that I only did so “because this is the internet, and no one is held accountable,” his assumption being that were I to meet Riehl on the street, I wouldn’t call him a racist. Of course, being that these words are also on the internet, I can’t prove to his satisfaction that I wouldn’t; however, in a different context, he would point out the fact that because I’m an academic who hangs out with folks like this, I spend all day calling everybody I pass on the street a racist, and since Riehl belongs to that category—how about a little freshman logic, Mr. Jacobson?

SEK calls all people who are on the street a racist.
Dan Riehl is a person on the street.
Therefore, SEK calls Dan Riehl a racist.

I would say that syllogism puts him in a bind, but I think we can safely assume that someone who believed my earlier posts were intended “to smear the crowds at Palin book signings” probably never took freshman logic, and thus isn’t even aware that he’s in one.

…Update (from davenoon): We’d be remiss in not pointing out that Jacobson, in a post complaining about the use of “the race card,” approving links to a diaper load in The American Thinker [sic] written by a — cough, cough — “former leftist-feminist Hillary supporter” who describes the treatment of Sarah Palin as a “wilding” and explains that she youstabee a feminist Democrat until she realized that left-wing men never protected her from angry black hoodlums. Well, “Robin from Berkeley” has me convinced!