BUT WHAT ABOUT BEY?

Obama’s New Problem: Jay-Z

Rapper contradicts his views on guns and gay rights.

Obama's got millions of problem—Jay-Z is now one of them. In the New York Post, Phil Mushnick decries Mr. and Mrs. Obama's close allegiance to the “ex-con rapper,” who regularly writes songs “loaded” with hate for gays and praise for street violence. The problem, Musnick says, is not the president’s friendship with Jay-Z. It’s our failure to recognize it as an issue. Imagine if George W. Bush had forged such a relationship? Mushnick challenges. “It couldn’t have happened!” With the issue of guns alone, Jay-Z has written enough inflammatory lyrics to write a book. “I keep a banger in the ankle, one in the hip,” he writes. “I even got a gun in the hair in the bun of my bitch.” It’s an interesting point that raises some questions for Obama. But the president is never asked these things, Mushnick says, at least not “by a media that ignore in some presidents what they’d never allow in others.”