MSNBC’s Touré: Why Don’t Conservatives Applaud Common’s Support Of The Second Amendment?

The Common hip-hop scandal is thankfully necessarily over as his White House performance went off without any controversy. On last night’s Dylan Ratigan Show, regular Touré gave his post-mortem to the scandal, highlighting an interesting point lost in the whole kerfuffle: if Common raps about carrying a gun, should conservatives applaud him for exercising his Second Amendment rights?

Touré began his monologue arguing with a bit of confusion that it would be Common, of all people, to rile up the conservatives. Describing him as a “sometime vegan who dates tennis star Serena Williams, supports animal rights, AIDS awareness, and is committed to not putting anti-gay slurs in his lyrics,” he wondered how inviting Common to the White House could possibly prove that President Obama is a “caucasian-hatin Malcolm X in disguise.” In fact, he argued, Common was one of the most “kind, gentle, humble, poetic, and intellectual people in music today,” and actively refuses to participate in the  “violent and materialistic cliches that make some rappers so easy to demonize.”

Then he went straight to the lyrics: “I hold up a peace sign and carry a gun.” “You would think conservatives would applaud that,” Touré argued, the idea of wishing for peace but keeping a weapon, like so many NRA members preach. Not to mention the army of more violent artists that have visited the White House, like Eazy-E of NWA and, er, Johnny Cash, “a great American who sang about shooting a man just to watch him die.”

Bottom line for Touré? The Common controversy has nothing to do with Common. “It keeps some people from having to talk about Obama’s success in killing bin Laden.”

His segment via MSNBC below: