What’s it like being the “token Conservative” on that raucous Friday free-for-all known as HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher? After last week’s show, San Diego radio host and columnist Roger Hedgecock has shared his experience.

Hedgecock was joined on the panel by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and TIME magazine reporter Rana Foroohar. Anyone with right leanings who agrees to do Maher’s program is to be commended, and this latest brave soul admits he knew what he was in for. But he still takes Matthews to task:

“I didn’t expect Matthews to falsely claim that President Obama inherited unemployment over 10%. Unemployment in January 2009 was actually 7.8% and has not been that low since. Then Matthews really lost it, bellowing you people are just racists who hated Obama from the first day. I haven’t heard the “you people” phrase since Ross Perot used it in front of an African-American audience in 1992.”

According to Matthews, any criticism of Obama is racist. End of story.

Hedgecock wryly notes that while he was escorted to the show after-party by the program’s head of security, author Salman Rushdie was deemed to need no such protection. At the party, Maher told Hedgecock he was surprised by how “hardcore” Matthews had become and that Matthews has perhaps “moved left to keep his job at an increasingly leftist MSNBC.” Read Hedgecock’s full piece here.