Off To The Racists

Well, better we stop him now before he actually wins the White House, unless we want a Popeye’s on every corner and a hooptie in every garage.

The good folks at Sock Obama LLC have tried their best to prevent a Secretary of Defense Sharpton and a domestic initiative to infuse baseball’s pennant races with a resurrected Negro League. Lest anyone miss the simian connection between Senator Obama and the figure second from the left on the evolution profile, Sock Obama, LLC has released the “Sock Obama” toy, an adorable stuffed monkey with comical monkey ears and a long curled tail.

There were a few defensive souls on the Intarwebs today who said this was no different than when George W. Bush was compared to a developmentally-challenged primate. From a purely academic perspective, possibly a fair point, but the portrayal in that instance was of our President as a moron. He may not fit the clinical definition of a moron, which would be, “A person of mild mental retardation having a mental age of from 7 to 12 years and generally having communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education.” In fact, that term is no longer used in the medical community. However, he did graduate from Harvard Business School, so George Bush clearly has communication and social skills enabling some degree of academic or vocational education. Those skills just haven’t translated to forming coherent sentences, and managing foreign wars.

There is also his breathless expressions of mirth, gaping rictus, and his childlike simplicity when matters veer toward the intellectual.

With the simian depiction of Barack Obama, especially as first deployed several weeks ago by a Georgia entrepreneur selling “Obama in ’08″ tee-shirts showing an adorable, banana-eating Curious George, the portrayal is a bit less artful than that of President Bush. Unfortunately, the opposition imagemakers have a difficult time attacking Obama for a dearth of eloquence, but they’ve hewed to the chimpanzee theme that their Democratic counterparts used on President Bush, but in this case to imply that the junior Senator from Illinois is a hirsute savage who until only very recently swung from trees.

Admittedly, I was never a fan of the “Chimpy McFlightsuit” jokes about President Bush–they were lazy and not particularly inspired–but this campaign against Obama shows even less imagination and creative agility. Fuzzy Zoeller proved ten years ago that most racist humor is as dated and tired as The Capitol Steps. If you really need to trot out racially charged humor to make your point, your best bet is to take a page from vintage Richard Pryor or the short-livedChappelle Show. White people can’t cut to the black like African-American comedians can, and “it’s funny because he’s Negro” hasn’t washed since the Stepin Fetchit era. White people can only deliver jokes about watermelon and swollen, distended lips.

FOXNews is doing their best, running their headling “Outraged liberals: Stop picking on Obama’s baby mama!” According to the Urban Dictionary, “baby mama” is defined as “the mother of your child(ren), whom you did not marry and with whom you are not currently involved.” So, they can’t even get their slur right.

In all fairness, as Huffington Post points out, Michelle Obama did refer to Barack as her “baby’s daddy” after his 2004 Senate victory. But when a network of record–run by white people–is doing it, it’s always fraught with danger, double-standard.

They would seemingly have more fecund territory cultivating the Muslim connection, but there hasn’t been a lot of finesse on that count either. After clinching the nomination, Obama stood on the podium and bumped knuckles with his wife–what the “high-five” was to the 1980s and 1990s and the “low-five” and “drug brother” handshake was to the 1970s. In fact, it had already jumped the shark when it began appearing in Burger King commercials early in the decade. Given that and when the President’s octogenuarian father is seen doing it, we’re clearly as a country crying out for a fresh collegial gesture. In other words, it’s been around and around and around the block, so FOXNews looked desperate at best and retarded at worst when they suggested that Barack and Michelle’s triumphal exchange might have been, in E.D. Hill’s estimation, a “terrorist fist-jab.”

Good lord. As Barack’s babies’ mama might say, “Bitch, please.”

E.D. Hill is currently looking for work, by the way. Sock Obama, LLC’s site has been crashed. No matter. There’s plenty more silliness in the hopper. If you thought ’88 and ’04 were bad, you might be happier tuning into Nickelodeon. In the titular words of Paul Thomas Anderson, “There will be blood.”