Posted on 08/04/2008 7:11:03 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.
Chozick insists that she didn't intend her playful feature about Obama's physique as potential electoral liability to carry any racial subtext. "I can't even respond to that," she told me. "That's ridiculous." Bob Christie, Dow Jones' vice president of communications, phoned me in a flash to reaffirm that message. I believe Chozick and Christie when they say that the Journal never intended skinniness to serve as a proxy for race. (Full disclosure: I was a reporter in the Journal's Washington bureau a dozen years ago. I know neither Chozick nor Christie. Fuller disclosure: I phoned my former Journal colleague, Michel Martin, an African-American journalist who is now host of NPR's "Tell Me More," which frequently addresses matters of race, to ask whether she was offended. She was not. )
But I firmly disagree that a racial reading of Chozick's story is "ridiculous," and I would counter that any failure on Chozick's part to recognize such is just a wee bit clueless.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
Say anything that isn’t a complement about Obama and it will painted as Racist by his people. He must grow a thicker skin. Its getting a bit silly. Charges of racism grow stale when used too much.
How many people are voting for Hussein because he's black?
How many would be supporting him with this messianic cult following if he were white?
I'm not, not voting for him because he's black but because he's a dyed-in-the-wool communist.
But guess what. If people don't want to vote for him because he's black and their are racist bigots (like Whoopi Goldberg who railed against the “white man in the White House,” which is, I suppose, the PC and acceptable bigotry), they have that right. For a while. Until the commie gets in and pushes even more radically, anti-civil-liberties legislation than his predecessors in the Democrat party have pushed.
You can't mention skin.
Thin is the new black.
Don’t forget that our troops are racists because they called skinny Somalis, “Skinnys” back during the Clinton Occupation.
How about a monkey.. No, to obvious.. Heck maybe we could just call him “them people”.
/s
I sure would like to know how I'm gonna 'splain that to our blue-eyed, blonde 10yo daughter? Heck, how am gonna 'splain that to my husband who thought he married a white woman?
Obama, and his wife who would be First Lady were he elected, are racists. I will never, ever vote for a racist.
He is also an anti-semite and she most likely is as well, given the “church” that she chose. I will never, ever vote for an anti-semite.
Then there is the Marxist, pro-terrorist thing. I mean this is just now working out for me. NoBama.
I would think a lot of people are waking up to this one-trick pony. Oooh! Was that racist?
“Fully 66 percent of all citizens who’ve reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese.”
This is exaggerated.
Good thing you didn't say “just call a spade a spade”.
I guess him being so darn skinny sort of puts the damper on fried chicken jokes...oops, was that racist?
How about his followers simply responding to reasoned criticisms of his many and varied policy positions? How about that for a change, rather than immediately assuming that any criticism is code for something else?
Racialism is a Democrat thing. We’re Repubs; we’re interested in figuring out which one of his many positions is his real position. We want to know if he’s changed his position on drilling again, or again, and which way it all fell out in the end. We want to know, since we’ve won in Iraq, if he’s going to apologize and give it all back. Maybe he can invite Saddam’s daughters to come home from Syria and present to them the keys to some of his palaces with some kind of compensation.
We want to know if he’s really going to invade Pakistan, or withdraw from Afghanistan, or something in between. We want to know if he even knows what he’s going to do.
We want to know how he managed to get this far in life with absolutely nothing to put on his resume. We want to know who is funding his campaign, and why our enemies think he’s the better bargain come election season.
I never once mentioned the fact that he’s not particularly patriotic. Thats sort of a non-issue, considering who his backers are.
You shouldn't even have to ask.
Just like not recognizing that 'black hole' could be racist is, well, just a wee bit clueless?
It doesn't matter what you intended when you say anything whatsoever - what matters is what any passerby over hearing you thinks you meant.
Don't tell a female employee she 'looks nice today' - you'll get booted for sexual harassment even if all you really meant was she 'looked nice that day.'
PC is ruining this country just as surely as it has ruined the once "Great" Britain.
I see a lot of tendency here to do as I used to when I discovered that nothing I did would please someone - I’d intentionally antagonize them.
We all know what the charge of “racism” is intended to do - it’s supposed to be a shield from criticism.
“What’s the definition of a racist? A white guy winning an argument with a minority.”
I forgot—can’t use Skin, or Black, or watermelon, or fried chicken. I should have said Mr. Obama should cultivate a profound sense of humor to laugh at the crude attacks leveled at him.
If a white voter thinks he is too skinny, what they are really thinking is that he might try to slide down their chimney to rob their house. He needs to go back to the communication tricks he wrote about in Dreams of My Father, you know, "no sudden moves." The global socialism speech in Berlin was a little too shifty, too sudden, too flim-flam.
He needs to review some video footage of how Eddie Haskell used to talk to Mrs. Cleaver. He's already been wrestling with an Eddie Haskell Factor so the pointers may be useful. The more Obama gets too know his inner Eddie Haskell, the easier it will be to overcome some of his excesses and Dionysian exuberance.
Oh, and she's really black, unlike the Messiah wanna-be.
This country can't afford to elect a commie. We'd be ruined for two generations, if we could ever recover.
There is a conflict between his inner Eddie Haskell and inner Mao Tse Tung. This comes out at times in goofy ways.
Never trust a skinny cook (except Giada).
OK, why beat around the...Bush?
Let's call Obama what he is:
He's a SMOC.
Scrawny
Metrosexual
Of
Color
Cheers!
This is why he thinks putting more air in your tires will save gasoline.
Look how much mileage he's gotten out of inflating his resume!
Cheers!
Hey -- no fair........
SMOCHAM or HAMSMOC
We’ll have to trade notes on how to do that ‘splainin’, won’t we?
Stage two of his energy policy is wheatgrass enemas. A leaner driver gets better gas mileage.
Mr. Noah I believe you are not just clueless but you are also ridiculous. If you can not recognize that the politically correct portion of this population is taking advantage of everyone else, you are more than clueless you are hopeless. We can not walk around this nation and wonder if because someone said skinny or used the word black (ie.black hole, in the black,etc) and worry if we hurt someones feelings. People like you are making it very hard for people who truly face race discrimination. Take a long hard look at how stupid saying that calling a skinny man skinny is racial. Get a life and stop traveling on the same road as people like jackson, sharpton and the rest of that group of racist pigs. It's simple if you are tall and skinny you can be called.
“I would think a lot of people are waking up to this one-trick pony. Oooh! Was that racist?”
I think “one trick pony” is OK, but “dark horse” or “black stallion”, would definitely be out;)
Cheers!
Is it safe to mention he looves round ball?
So Fat Albert and Pigmeat and Rerun and Barry White and Sir Mix A Lot and Biggie Smalls and the Fat Boys etc were the EXCEPTION???
Isn’t he a conservative these days? He was an officer for awhile. Considering the pest he was on tv as a child actor, he managed to keep himself from being a pain.
He may be a Greenie Weenie on the outside and a Red Commie on the inside but you’d better stay away from that term people use to describe other Green Reds.
I want to know how much rent they are going to charge conservatives when they send us to the gulags.
Get ready to take out another student loan to pay off your time at the re-education center.
The statistic is that 50% of the people in the US are obese as are 50% in Europe.
Obesity was redefined when they switched to using a BMI scale that does not differeniate between fat and muscle or men and women.
This whole thing is just getting ridiculous.
Barack Obama is becoming a first in presidential history. He is becoming the first perpetually offended candidate.
A Slate colleague informs me that an episode of the TV sitcom Happy Days ("Fonzie's New Friend") had its 1950s-era characters nervously discussing the fact that a black man in their midst was so … skinny. Was it true that skinny people liked fried chicken? That they were good at basketball? And so on.
Of course, my original take on the article was the implication that Americans were too fat to vote for Obama.
Have a beer!
I guess you can never be sure about anything political, but I have a feeling that Obama supporters claiming to find a subtle and evil racial subtext in everything and everything (Bob Herbert with celebrity, this absurdity about skinniness...) will backfire badly. When you combine it with the man himself and his stupid “I don’t look like others on the money” comments, rational people can’t help but laugh, and conclude they don’t need four years of this.
Yes, Eddie Haskell was a conservative in the tradition of the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. A distant, and reserved figure, student of Burke, Swift, and Chesterfield, who maintains a quiet preservation of order, tradition, and civility within an imperial system, from the sidelines. Eddie emerges during the Eisenhower-McCarthy period as a suburban adolescent satirist of modern hypocrisy, always reminding us of our higher calling, and disappears quietly after the Kennedy assassination and the defeat of Goldwater, only to reappear years later as a respectable Los Angeles police officer. A true hero for our times.
I read an article by some lib journalist today in which he claimed that the recent McCain ad with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears was somehow racist because of the juxtaposition of two attractive young white women with Barack Obama.
“he’s a thinner. And we should dress up as ghosts, erect a big lower case ‘t’ on his lawn, and set fire to it to show we don’t like him”
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