printAs you can imagine, it wasn’t an easy item to find in mainstream media. I looked all over for Michelle Obama’s bitter slip of the tongue—at MSNBC’s website, the Washington Times’, and others—before finding it buried at the bottom of the New York Times’ page and framed as cat fight initiated by Cindy McCain. Ditto Time. Michelle Obama makes a snide snippy comment, and Time asks the McCain campaign to comment on Cindy McCain’s retort. Apparently, anyone shining light where the media sheds only darkness must answer for it.
Here’s what Mrs. Obama told a Wisconsin audience:
“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country.”
A good column calls the events and the characters correctly. I hate to keep reminding my readers, but, if I don’t, who will? As Hillel, the Jewish sage, said, “If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?” (Let Obama beat that brilliance) In “Homie Has Some Rings to Kiss,” I did not delude readers about Obama’s militant wife:
“Obama has always seemed a reluctant recruit to racial politics; driven more by expediency and fear—fear of his overbearing wife and the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton.”
Mark Halperin of “The Page” worried that conservative media would begin to scrutinize Michelle Obama if she kept such comments coming. He saw no reason to dissect the sainted one’s vicious remarks.
There is no finessing what Michelle Obama meant. Her comments come from the same bottomless pit from which the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson launch their periodical grievance campaigns; that festering reservoir of racial animus and envy. This is a comment from a woman who’s led a charmed life, yet feels aggrieved and angry.
(An aside: Mama is quite masculine.)