Michelle Malkin: Magic Negro Lover

In her ongoing Quixotic campaign to discern notable differences between apples and oranges, rightwing politicunt Michelle Malkin equates Chip Saltsman’s distribution of Barack the Magic Negro to examples of grassroots Bush-bashing.

In my own Obama-inspired personal initiative to seek common ground with idiots, I will concede one fairly valid point–particularly because it undermines her entire thesis.

Dearest Michelle,

I sense you have a congenital defect crippling your ability to recognize differences in scale. I will not ridicule your for this shortcoming as it is an ailment rampant in your political set, likely transmitted through close contact in the FoxNews green room and further dispersed via strands of html. Its jump from human to Internet transmission still baffles medical researchers, but I do have sympathy that you can’t seem to help yourself.

I know you can’t recognize this, but you must trust that I have your best interests–and those of your readers–at heart when I tell you there is a significant difference between individuals producing stupid and offensive things for their own skewed sense of entertainment, and a man running to head the Republican party re-distributing one of those things as part of his campaign.

The original piece in the LA Times is an examination of how Barack Obama could be considered to represent an archetype of pop culture. David Ehrenstein may not be the most sophisticated thinker to ever grace the opinion pages, but at least he put some thought into it.

The failed attempt at parody put into song by Paul Shanklin resembles Ehrenstein’s piece only in that it picks up on the title “Barack the Magic Negro.”

You point out, “The parody is as much, if not more, a satire of race-mongering demagogue Al Sharpton than it is of Obama.”

I agree Shanklin’s song does not particularly direct insult at Obama as much as it does elsewhere. I see how you perceive the criticism to be aimed solely at Al Sharpton. However, if you were to pay attention to the lyrics (during the 1-hour window when your empathy gene is activated briefly every day), you would hopefully recognize the song is pretty insulting to black men in general.

Shanklin suggests black men are only “authentic” if they are unclean and inarticulate and hail from the “hood”–assertions missing from Ehrenstein’s piece. I have a hard time recognizing any relevant principles of satire in the way Shanklin frames his song.

So it’s a clumsy attempt at humor that skirts the border of racism–perfect fodder for the likes of Rush Limbaugh and yourself. You can insult black men as much as you want–that’s why we have the 1st Amendment.

But considering the lengths to which the GOP has gone in attempting to embrace racial minorities, it raises some troubling issues when a man campaigning to lead the party distributes something in such poor taste to the colleagues he is petitioning for votes.

So you can whine all day about the liberals who created the Dubya-the-Chimp photo galleries, or who painted signs of a beheaded Bush for an anti-war protest–that is no equivalent to Chip Saltsman’s ill-considered mailing of “Barack the Magic Negro.”