White Gloves Come Off

Thers of Whiskey Fire likes to poke the smug with a sharp stick.--SS

White Gloves Come Off:

The Hill publishes perhaps the most venomously mindless article in the history of wannabe insidery DC horseshit. Wow. This is some smug godawful garbage.

Michelle Obama finally went there.

The first lady jumped head first into a discussion about racial issues.

She and her husband, the first African-American president, have mostly avoided addressing race except in oblique terms since reaching the White House.

It rather says a lot about the values that dominate Our Elite Discourse that it is widely accepted that the first black president and his black wife ought never to talk about "racial issues."

But it gets odder:

Earlier this week, responding to the publication of New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s book “The Obamas,” Michelle Obama veered sharply off that cautious path.

Though she said she had not read the book — which was the target of a fierce White House pushback that was widely criticized as counter-productive — Obama took issue with the criticisms she perceived had been leveled against her.

“That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since the day Barack announced,” she told CBS’s Gayle King. “That I’m some angry black woman.”

Golly.

First off, this is guff -- that the book "was the target of a fierce White House pushback that was widely criticized as counter-productive." "Many people said things" is the worst sort of lazy-ass journalism.

Worse, though, is that Obama here is indisputably correct. She has been the subject of a concerted effort to smear her as "an angry black woman."

And how do we know this? From this very fucking article.

On one hand, it would be hard to argue that Obama was factually incorrect in what she said.

During the 2008 campaign, the conservative magazine National Review used a photograph of her in a scolding pose on its front cover above the headline “Mrs. Grievance”. The image seemed to many a harsh mischaracterization of black womanhood, making the then-candidate’s wife look like a Jim Crow era caricature....

“She comes from a very angry, black nationalist background,” David Webb, a conservative radio talk show host and Tea Party activist who is himself African-American, told The Hill.

That Webb is "African-American" gives him the pass to say flat out what the National Review has been obliged to insinuate ever since the early 1960s, namely, Fear the Vengeful Negros.

But please. The real issue here is the effort to censor from Polite Conversation any mention of racism and its nastiness from Polite Conversation... in the sense that it is now supposed to be black people, like Michelle Obama, who are the Real Racists.

The logic would seem to be: (1) Attack Michelle Obama, a black woman, for being Angry; (2) Make Michelle Obama, a black woman, angry at being called an Angry Black Woman; (3) Use the anger of Michelle Obama, a black woman, at being called an angry black woman, as evidence that Michelle Obama is an angry black woman.

Fucking hell.

MAS. Bill O'Reilly shows a clip to prove how he doesn't have anything racial against Michelle Obama.

This is the first time I've spoken to Michelle Obama, and I was impressed. She's charismatic, articulate, and beautiful.

See? He thinks she's articulate. So accept his chivalry, or face the wrath of Juan Williams!