The First Lady’s Moving (But Untrue) Stories of Racial Slights

She’s baaaaaaaack. And she’s maaaaaad.

First lady Michelle Obama delivered the commencement address at Tuskegee University last weekend. She’ll do it again next week at Ohio’s Oberlin College — the UC Berkeley of the Midwest, Ground Zero for racial grievance-mongering and fake hate crimes.

Commencement FLOTUS is not the same first lady who shows up on Ellen or The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon wearing her pastel cardigan, Chuck Taylors, and a megawatt grin. No, this frowny-faced Michelle Obama talks and squawks like Al Sharpton in Jimmy Choo kitten heels. At Tuskegee, FLOTUS traded her affable TV persona for the divisive social-justice complainer we all came to know and loathe during her husband’s first presidential campaign.

Obama’s resurrected bitter half inspired the graduates by complaining about people complaining about her. She complained about the “sting” of “daily slights” throughout her life and her poor, beleaguered husband’s. And then she complained. And complained. And complained some more.

It’s hard to take Mrs. Obama seriously, because she has been caught so brazenly lying about the racial discrimination she supposedly still faces today even as first lady of the United States.

She clucked at the “folks” (read: white folks) who allegedly “crossed the street in fear of their safety” at the sight of the Obamas.

She called out unnamed “clerks who kept a close eye on us in all those department stores.”

She decried the racist “people at formal events who assumed we were the ‘help.’” (Funny, the only time I recall this happening in the Obama White House was when Valerie Jarrett mistook four-star Army general Peter Chiarelli, who is white, for her waiter. But I digress.)

Reaching into her deep well of indignation, Mrs. Obama then assailed “those who have questioned our intelligence, our honesty, even our love of this country.”

Let me take out my teeny-weeny bow and play the world’s smallest violin at the thought of Mrs. Obama being subjected to the “sting” of impolite questions about her honesty. Using my best slow vibrato: Waw-waw-waw-wawwww.

It’s hard to take Mrs. Obama seriously, because she has been caught so brazenly lying about the racial discrimination she supposedly still faces today even as first lady of the United States. When she told the Tuskegee students about being watched “in all those department stores,” she neglected to mention that just five months ago, one of her most famous anecdotes of retail racism went up in smoke.

What? You forgot already? Using almost the exact same language in a People magazine interview that she used in her Tuskegee commencement speech, the first lady deplored the “sting” of “racist experiences” that she and her husband allegedly still suffer.

Get her some Calamine lotion, STAT!

“Even as the first lady,” she bemoaned, “not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me” at a Target store “was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf.” Remember: ABC News reported that Mrs. Obama claimed such “incidents are ‘the regular course of life’ for African Americans and a ‘challenge’ for the country to overcome.”

The anecdote turned out to be a tall tale — with the emphasis on “tall.” The reason the 5-foot-11 first lady was asked to get detergent off the Target shelf was that her vertically challenged fellow shopper couldn’t reach it. How do we know this? Because Mrs. Obama said so herself in a radically different version of the Target story she told David Letterman three years ago.

“I reached up, ’cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down,” the first lady described with that megawatt grin, and the shopper said, “Well, you didn’t have to make it look so easy.” Far from psychologically debilitated by any racial “sting,” Mrs. Obama told Letterman, “I felt so good” helping out the short woman.

I don’t care what color you are: This arrogant exercise of first-lady privilege — invoking false stories to stoke racial hostility and score political points — is patently offensive. There’s enough demagoguery in the public square. The Aspen ski-vacationing, haute-couture-wearing, Hollywood-elite-chumming first lady’s delusional discrimination fables are fuel on a raging fire her husband has failed to alleviate with billions of dollars of government “investments,” programs, summits, and photo-ops.

It is especially irresponsible of Mrs. Obama to be spreading her cultural gasoline on college campuses, where the excesses of identity politics and multiculturalism continue to poison young minds.

Don’t like suffering the “daily slights” of questions about your honesty? Stop lying.

— Michelle Malkin is author of the new book Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs.

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