Tar baby

From A Way With WordsDepartment of Foot in Mouth
I don't see much wrong with Snow using this expression , but some in the Politically Correct crowd do .
"Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary, got off to an inauspicious
start at his first press briefing on Tuesday by using the term tarbaby when
asked about the government collecting phone records on millions of
Americans:

I don't want to hug the tarbaby of trying to comment on the program, the
alleged program, the existence of which I can neither confirm nor deny.

The term has a history of use as a derogatory term for African-Americans.
Snow was using the term in its sense meaning an intractable problem that
brings discredit to those who attempt to solve it and undoubtedly did not
intend any offense, but he did display significant insensitivity in using
it.

The term comes from 1881 Joel Chandler Harris story of Uncle Remus, where
Brer Fox smears a doll with tar in hopes of using it to ensnare Brer Rabbit:

Brer Fox..got 'im some tar, en mix it wid some turkentime, en fix up a
contrapshun what he call a Tar-Baby.

>From this original use, the term was extended to its metaphorical sense of a
difficult problem. But by the 1940s, the term was being used as a racial
epithet. From Sinclair Lewis's Kingsblood Royal of 1948:

"I didn't know she was a tar-baby." . . . "Don't be so dumb. Can't you see
it by her jaw?"

Sometimes people take offense at words and phrases like nitpicking, picnic,
or call a spade a spade, falsely believing there to be a history of racist
usage in them. In such cases, people should not be afraid to use the term in
question-if someone takes offense, one can simply point out their error. But
in this case, the term does have a long history of racist usage. Snow would
have been better served choosing a more neutral metaphor like playing in
traffic or touch the third rail."