The Untouchables – HUMAN EVENTS — This interesting Pat Buchanan essay openly asks if Obama is getting special kid-gloves treatment by pretty much everyone. The flap over the New Yorker cartoon epitomizes the situation.
Why did progressives recoil [over the New Yorker cartoon]? Because the more savvy among them sense that, like much humor, this cartoon was an exaggeration that contained no small kernel of recognizable truth.
Hey no parodies! After all, Barack did dump the flag pin. Michelle did say she had never been proud of her country before now. Barack did don that Ali Baba outfit in Somalia. His father and stepfather were Muslims. He does have a benefactor, Bill Ayers, who said after 9-11 he regrets not planting more bombs in the 1960s. He did have a pastor who lionizes Black Muslim Minister Louis Farrakhan. Put glasses on him, and Barack could play Malcolm X in the movies.
And assume the point of the cartoon had been to satirize the Obamas. Why would that have been so outrageous? Journalists, after all, still celebrate Herblock, the cartoonist who portrayed Richard Nixon with the body of a rat climbing out of a sewer.
Hillary Clinton has been compared to the sex-starved Glenn Close character in “Fatal Attraction.” George Bush’s verbal gaffes are endlessly panned by late-night comics and Comedy Central. But Barack gets the special-ed treatment. Our first affirmative action candidate.
The New Yorker made a “damn-fool decision,” said George Lockwood, a lecturer on journalistic ethics.
David West of Brookings wailed to USA Today of the cartoon: “It’s the mass media at its worst. It perpetuates false information, and it’s highly inflammatory. … It gives credibility to what’s been circulating for months, and that’s what makes it dangerous.”
But dangerous to whom? Again, it is only a cartoon.
For it suggests that Obama is an untouchable to be protected. As an African-American, he is not to be treated the same as other politicians. Remnick and Hertzberg obviously felt intense moral pressure to remove any suspicion that they had satirized the Obamas. No problem, however, if they were mocking the American right.
Obama–African-American
Isn’t he White African-American?
#64 – fulanoche,
If that makes a difference to you, then you are a racist. For the rest of us, who cares? He’s by far the better option for president. And, he can not only pronounce the names of foreign countries, he can even pronounce nuclear!!
Back to the African-American question though, pick up a book on evolution. Humans evolved in Africa. Therefore, we are all African in origin. So, there are 300 million African-Americans, plus a whole lot of African-Europeans, African-Asians, African-Canadians, African-Latin-Americans, African-etc.
Does that answer the question?
Remember, there are two types of people in the world, those who divide the world into two types of people and those who do not. Let’s try to stay in the latter group.
#65, Scott,
I thought there were three types of people. Those who divide the world into two types of people and everyone else.
#66 – Mr. Fusion,
No no no. There are three types of people in the world, those who can count and those who cannot.
Or was it this? There are 10 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who do not.