toohotfortnr: all this pressure to be bright

Sunday, December 03, 2006

all this pressure to be bright:

This is from a month ago, but via Julian, I see the Weekly Standard recently ran a particularly vile, racist parody of a letter to Barack Obama:

Dear Senator Obama,
I'm a student here at Harvard and my mama tells me there ain't no way a person of color be treated fair in Amerika even if they go to Harvard and [stuff]. You cool with that?
Franklin
Cambridge, Massachusetts

I mean, holy shit. The Standard thinks black Harvard students are shuck-and-jive baboons. Holy shit. The only thing I can even think of adding here is why the student is named "Franklin." My guess, judging from the pop-culture tastes of certain Standard staffers (it's a good blog!), is that the name is a reference to the black puppet/alter ego of GOB from Arrested Development. The joke there -- something apparently lost on whoever wrote this bullshit -- was GOB's ignorance and racism.

--Spencer Ackerman

Could also be a reference to the black character in Peanuts.
Matt | 7:05 PM

I'm not one to defend The Weekly Standard. But it seems to me they were trying to call into question Obama's assertion that is impossible (I don't ever think he made this assertion though) for an African American to succeed. Therefore, they contrasted a horribley caricatured ignorance against a Harvard education. I could be completely wrong though.
DevinCarpenter | 9:13 PM

I think the only way for that point to come across would have been for the letter-writer, "Franklin," to have shown himself to be in on the "joke."
Spencer Ackerman | 9:32 PM

But the Weekly Standard did zing zing you back in 2004 for your "fine retreat-from-the-face-of-success form" because:

"Ackerman mourns that the Bush administration--and the majority of Iraqis, evidently--did not heed Sunni calls to postpone the elections, claims that the elections are dangerously illegitimate and--get ready for it--will create even more violence as growing numbers of Sunnis come to accept the results."

Take that! As we all know now those elections caused the beautiful pony-filled paradise that is modern Iraq to spring into being!
Jacob | 10:52 PM