In a moment of "unscripted" banter, President Obama commented that he bowls like the special Olympics. Now, as someone who has closely followed Barack Obama for almost three years now, the content of the quote itself does not cause suspicion. He has, on occasion, been insensitive. It's human. What is surprising though, is the piss poor grammar. "I play like the special olympics" is not only awkward phrasing, but doesn't make sense. I play like I am in the special olympics seems much more on spot for such an articulate and eloquent person.
Now, that gaffe does a number of nice things for the president as well. It assures that the Leno interview is watched by tons of people, as it is played online. It takes a fairly innocuous outing and turns it into a week to two week story. It also, and this rings of Michelle, calls attention to a racially driven cause.
It just so happens to neatly correspond with the new R-word campaign run by the same people who run the special olympics. They are taking on language itself, a very Obama thing to do, to "change the conversation" about mental handicaps.
And, finally, although a tad conspiracy theorestic in nature, the organization responsible for the r-word campaign is JPKF, or the Joseph P Kennedy Jr Foundation. A foundation, which is presided over by Barack's good friend Sen. Edward Kennedy and a Mr. Steven M. Eidelman, a good friend of Vice President Joseph Biden's from undergrad.
Fun, huh?
1 comment:
We spoke about this over AIM, but I wanted to mention that this kind of reading of Obama (what Glenn Greenwald calls the "Bible-like 'he’s-a-master-of-11-dimensional-chess' cliché" sounds like the Democratic equivalent of all the passes Bush got during the last eight years. Obama is not a god-like genius (sinister or otherwise), and is certainly fallible. Wrapping the rhetoric up in intellect instead of "divine prophesy smacks of secular deification - not reasonable critique.
That said, I don't think there was anything wrong with the Special Olympics comment because I don't think it was offensive and in general I'm against knee-jerk Political Correctness (even though I think it serves a valuable purpose in keeping insensitive people away from truly offensive hate speech and rhetoric). But I'm very skeptical of calling this a brilliant Obama maneuver. (It should also be mentioned that things that are funny tend to offend someone or other. Humor partially comes from shock/surprise/subversion of expectation. Leno is, despite rarely being actually funny, still a comedian/variety show host foremost.)
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