Saturday, December 20, 2014

Mrs. Obama's tall tales of racialized victimhood

From overjoyed Regular Mom to Oppressed Martyr, can Mrs. Obama's shopping fable get any more absurd? - Michelle Malkin

Oh, woe is she. In an "exclusive" interview with People magazine this week, first lady Michelle Obama lamented the "sting" of "racist experiences" that she and her husband allegedly still suffer. My message for America's Marie Antoinette? Cry me a river.

To show how she's down with "The Struggle" of post-Ferguson agitators, Mrs. Obama cited a supposedly horrifying incident at a Target store where she was treated, in her paranoid mind, as a subservient. "Even as the first lady," she bemoaned, "not highly disguised, the only person who came up to me in the store was a woman who asked me to help her take something off a shelf."

A lowly peon asked her for an innocent favor? It's Jim Crow all over again! ABC News reports that Mrs. Obama said such "incidents are 'the regular course of life' for African-Americans and a 'challenge' for the country to overcome."

Newsflash: Oh, deep in my heart, I do believe that it is part of the "regular course of life" of tall people of all colors (Mrs. Obama is 5-foot-11) to be prevailed upon to reach high on behalf of those of us who are vertically challenged. These are not odious "incidents" of racism between slaves and masters. They're matters of common courtesy between equals....

There is, of course, a truly insidious "-ism" at work here: Cynicism. Mrs. Obama's dissemination of her false racial narrative in a popular celebrity rag is cunningly calculated to pander to America's aggrieved leftists. We know Mrs. Obama's victim sob story is a steaming pile of rotten turnips because the last time she talked about "The Incident," it was a feel-good late-night talk show anecdote devoid of discrimination.

On David Letterman's show in 2012, the haute-couture-clad first lady recounted the same "incognito" Target visit to demonstrate her just-like-you bona fides. She chuckled as she shared how the shopper asked: "Can you reach on that shelf and hand me the detergent?" As the audience laughed with delight and Mrs. Obama grinned from ear to ear, she told Letterman: "I reached up, 'cause she was short, and I reached up, pulled it down — she said, 'Well, you didn't have to make it look so easy.' That was my interaction. I felt so good."