Captain’s Log: We have begun scanning Townhall for signs of intelligent life. So far, all results have proven negative, but Lt. Uhura reports that there’s a being with the unpronounceable name of D’Souza (what is it with these aliens and their yen for inappropriate apostrophes?) who is attempting to contact the ship via a really crappy dial-up connection.
On screen, Lieutenant.
Now that Barack Obama has pretty much wrapped up the nomination, it’s time to raise a question that lots of people have been talking about privately but not publicly. Is it possible that Michelle Obama is the force behind Barack Obama’s refusal to embrace traditional patriotic symbols? Could Obama’s wife be largely responsible for the candidate’s damaging associations with crackpot race-baiters like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Reverend Michael Pfleger? In sum, could Obama’s wife be a large part of his political problem?
Great. More weird alien names. What the hell’s a “Michelle?”
Ooh. She does look angry…
Obama himself seems, at least on the surface, relatively free of the kind of corrosive racial resentment that is so common among African American activists of our day. This resentment is especially puzzling as it often comes from people who, far from being victims, have actually enjoyed benefits and privileges that they would probably never get if they happened to be white.
Well, that just made no frigging sense. Hey, anybody have a Universal Translator on them?
Good, thanks. Try not to hold it like it’s your dick, Chekhov. All right, run that last paragraph through and let’s see if we can figure out what this humanoid is trying to say…
Translating…
Obama seems to hate Whitey only half as much as most blacks, probably because he’s half white. Lucky for him he’s got a touch of the tar brush, though, since black people get first pick of top universities and the best-paying jobs, and they get to cut to the head of the line at Space Mountain, and run red lights without getting tickets, and they can eat all the Frusen Gladje and nobody can say anything about it.
Ah. Okay. That’s what I thought he meant.
Consider the case of Michelle Obama. She was raised in a two-parent, middle-class family. She applied to one of America’s top universities, Princeton, and was admitted. Of this experience, Michelle says on the stump, “All my life I have confronted people who had a certain expectation of me. Every step of the way, there has been people telling me what I couldn’t do. When I applied to Princeton, they said: you can’t go there, your test scores aren’t high enough.”
Translating…
Low test scores didn’t stop George W. Bush from getting into Yale! You know, Michelle, people might respect you more if you spent less time bitching about racism and more time oozing out the birth canal of a rich, politically-connected white woman.
Which is all very moving, except that her test scores weren’t high enough. Michelle Obama is part of the affirmative action generation of above-average but far-from-stellar performers who were granted preferential admission to America’s most elite institutions.
Translating…
You’re a quota baby who could barely pay off her student loans. I’m a “scholar” at the Hoover Institution, and I write books for Regnery like, “What’s So Great About Christianity?” and “What’s So Great About America?” and “The Virtue of Prosperity,” where I prove the counterintuitive fact that having money in your pockets is better than lint! Yeah, sure, each one is stuffed from cover to cover with pure, nitrogen-rich bullshit, but guess what? Whitey pays through the nose for it!
And yet, amazingly, you don’t hear me whining about how unfair the system is.
Michelle notes that she graduated with honors in her major. Again, the problem is that her undergraduate thesis is on the web. You might expect that she wrote about Shakespeare’s sonnets or the political evolution of W.E.B. Du Bois. Well, no. Essentially Michelle Obama wrote about the problems of being a black woman at an Ivy League university.
Translating..
So Michelle wrote some tendentious boilerplate about black people fitting into white society, blah, blah, blah, and because of affirmative action, she got a passing grade. Just the kind of thing you’d expect from a black liberal feminist who’s black. See, the secret to real, earned success in American letters is to crank out shockingly original and transgressive material that is so contrarian you would never imagine it coming from the pen of a conservative with a sinecure at a right wing think tank. Just take a gander at my ouevre:
Ronald Reagan: How An Ordinary Man Became an Extraordinary Leader
Reagan Versus The Intellectuals
How Ronald Reagan Won The Cold War
The End of Racism
The Self-Esteem Hoax
We the Slaveowners
Two Cheers for Colonialism
10 Great Things About AmericaAnd then I throw my change-up…
10 Things To Celebrate: Why I’m An Anti-Anti-American
Here is a typical passage: “By actually working with the Black lower class or within their communities as a result of their ideologies, a separationist may better understand the desparation of their situation and feel more hopeless about a resolution as opposed to an integrationist who is ignorant to their plight.”
Alas, the grammar is all wrong here. More than once, the tenses are garbled. People are ignorant “of” the plight of the lower class, not ignorant “to” their plight. And”desparation” should be spelled “desperation.”
Is it actually legal to grade someone’s paper twenty years after they’ve turned it in?
To wreak so much havoc on the English language in one sentence, without conveying anything of substance, is perhaps deserving of a prize. Is this what her professors were thinking when they granted her honors? Whatever the Obamorons say
…they clearly have no respect for the grandeur and majesty of their mother tongue, the stupid Obozos.
…let’s remember that that these are not mere typos; they reflect an estranged relationship to the English language. Moreover they appear not in an off-the-cuff transcript but in a thesis that is supposed to reflect the culmination of one’s college career.
Translating…
Perhaps it made a modicum of sense in the original Swahili.
Subsequently Michelle went on to further appointments and even managed to cash in big time on her skin color and marriage to Barack Obama. She was hired by the University of Chicago hospitals to run “programs for community relations, neighborhood outrecah, volunteer recruitment, staff diversity, and minority contracting.” Here her salary was $400,000 a year.
Just for failing the Paper Bag Test. Wow.
One might expect that the reaction of someone who gets so many privileges to be grateful to a society that makes them possible. But no. Michelle Obama thinks that her very success is an example of white oppression. By a bizarre twist of logic, she converts “you’re not good enough, but we’ll take you anyway” into a message of “they said I wasn’t good enough, but I proved them wrong.”
Or perhaps like many minorities in this country, especially African-Americans, and particularly African-American women, she encountered closed doors, preconceptions, and outright prejudice and had to excel beyond the standards expected of white men in order to achieve a position of responsibility, and a salary commensurate with her professional duties. Of course, that just proves she’s too dumb to take a job as a decorative blackamoor on Richard Mellon Scaife’s estate, grinding out 700-word encomiums to the blameless and alabaster ruling class.
Ordinarily these psychological peculiarities may be of little interest, except perhaps to a therapist.
Or someone who titles a column, “Michelle Obama’s Inferiority Complex.”
But Michelle now stands next to a man that may be elected president of the United States. Barack Obama wants everyone to “lay off” his wife. He doesn’t seem to realize that this is not a reasonable request concerning a woman who clearly influences him and who stands to have public influence in her own right. Moreover, for months the media has been laying off her precisely because she is his wife. Like Michelle, Obama seems to confuse preferential treatment with ill treatment.
Whereas if somebody smacked Dinesh upside the head, I’m sure his superior powers of ratiocination would permit him to eventually sort out the motive.
Of course we’ve had controversial first ladies in the White House before. The Obamas, however, aren’t there yet. Will Barack Obama be ultimately forced to distance himself not just from the Reverend Wright and the Reverend Pfleger but also from his own wife?
Translating…
Will I continue to get a paycheck for cut-and-pasting crap off the Internet and padding out the word count with grammar lessons and rhetorical questions?
All right, you can stow the Universal Translator, I’ve heard enough. Let’s dust off and nuke the planet. It’s the only way to be sure.
