When "Skinny" Means "Black" (Obamaniac racial paranoia)

slate.com ^ | August 4, 2008 | Timothy Noah

[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.

[weegee]

Get ready to take out another student loan to pay off your time at the re-education center.

[weegee]

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.

[chaos_5]

So if we call him a watermelon, that would be racist... dohw!

[keepitreal]

This whole thing is just getting ridiculous.

Barack Obama is becoming a first in presidential history. He is becoming the first perpetually offended candidate.

[keepitreal]

And the cry of racism comes down to an episode of "Happy Days":

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.

[the anti-liberal]

Fine then :^) - Halfrican-American Marxist Muslim [HAMM]

Have a beer!

[Minn]

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.

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

"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."
38 posted on Monday, August 04, 2008 11:32:25 PM by weegee

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.

[Junior_G]

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.

[Oztrich Boy]

“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”

[Ghost of Philip Marlowe]

That's a pretty funny analysis. lol

[HowlinglyMind-BendingAbsurdity]

The Eddie Haskell School of L'enfant terrible Conservatism has had a number of notable members over the years. Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, R. Emmett Tyrrell, and William F. Buckley, Jr., among others. You can usually count on them to say what everyone has been thinking but were afraid to say up to that point.

[ApplegateRanch]

He must grow a thicker skin.

"Thick skin" implies scar tissue from Massah's whips. You should be ashamed of using such racist language about B.O.

[Wolverine]

LAST 100 DAYS VIDEO

 

A MUST SEE VIDEO! and MUST SHARE FAR AND WIDE!

 

 

 

[ApplegateRanch]

How about his followers simply responding to reasoned criticisms of his many and varied policy positions?

You got something against Change?

He SAID he was for Change, and he proves it by Changing his positions every day.

Why don't you like a candidtate who is keeping his word?

[ApplegateRanch]

All the leaness of the driver, even with properly inflated tires, won’t do doodly-squat, if the wheel bearings aren’t properly greased and adjusted.

Improperly adjusted & ungreased wheel bearings increase rolling resistance, and hence adversely affect milage. In extreme cases, they also get very hot, contributing to Global Warming, just before seizing up & bringing your vehicle to a screeching halt.

We can add another 0.0396% to our milage if everybody would properly grease and adjust their wheel bearings every month, when they check their tire pressures. That would save an extra untold millions of barrels of oil/century.

And never forget that a nude driver weighs less than the same driver with clothes on. Driving nude will increase your power/weight ratio, and so requires less gasoline use for the same time/distance/speed trip than otherwise. The downside is that you have to have clothes at both your departure site and you destination, since it would defeat the purpose to carry them in the vehicle.

I haven’t quantified this savings yet, as the local police said they would not take kindly to the required experimentation. I think they must be in the pockets of McCain & Bigoil.

[doug from upland]

I have become very careful using our language during this campaign. I even now call a black hole a hole of color -—http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2043960/posts

[estrogen]

When one has a white mother and a black father, why is it that he is black? It seems to me that Obama is playing the race card himself. Why not call yourself what you really are, biracial? Why Black and not White?

[fightinJAG]

Besides everything else that is dumb about it, uh . . . skinny does NOT mean black.

[savedbygrace]

The point is even more ridiculous than that. He’s saying that if you made any comment about ANY physical characteristic of BHO, you will remind white people of his main noticeable physical characteristic - the color of his skin.

Apparently, we white people just can’t stop our brains from all that mental associating.

skinniness = physical characteristic

physical characteristic = skin color

Of course, it apparently is a good thing when Team Obama and the MSM remind us that this is an historic election, with the first black candidate running for president.

Timothy fails to explain the contradiction there.