Monday, August 19, 2013 7:31:14 PM
duh! .. you can wonder ..
"I haven't heard about the president's reaction or if he had one," Earnest told reporters at Martha's
Vineyard, where Obama is vacationing. "I can tell you as a native Missourian, it was certainly not
one of the finer moments for our state, and not the way I like to see our state depicted in the news." ..
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/317027-white-house-spokesman-rodeo-clown-flap-not-one-of-missouris-finer-moments
yet you made the comment about the pres. being thin skinned ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91040095 ..
you know .. in this Australia summer day i did wonder what all the fuss was about ..
until i read these two ..
Obama rodeo clown incident illustrates nation’s continued racial divide
By Philip Rucker,August 15, 2013
A clown wearing a mask intended to look like President Obama was part of a… (Jameson Hsieh/AP )
SEDALIA, Mo. — As some people at the Missouri State Fair see it, the rodeo incident last weekend in which a ringleader taunted a clown wearing a mask of President Obama and played with his lips as a bull charged after him was neither racist nor disrespectful.
It was a joke, they said, overblown by a news media that’s hypersensitive to any possible slight against the nation’s first black president. They said the hooting and hollering from the crowd that night was because of a fundamental dislike of the president.
“I’ve got no respect for him,” said Virgil Henke, 65, a livestock farmer who explained his distaste for Obama with several falsehoods about his background: “Why, he’s destroyed this country. How much freedom have we lost? I don’t care whether it’s a black man in office, but we have to have a true-blooded American. I think he is Muslim and trying to destroy the country, catering to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.”
The rodeo incident and the clown at the center of it have become the latest illustration of racial divisions that continue to surface nearly five years into Obama’s presidency.
A three-minute amateur video of the rodeo act was picked up by news outlets worldwide. Democratic and Republican elected officials in Missouri quickly condemned the incident, saying it was offensive and inappropriate at a taxpayer-funded event with children in attendance. Asked about it Wednesday, a White House spokesman said that it was not one of Missouri’s “finer moments.”
But there has also been a backlash on the right, with conservative radio talk show hosts and writers dismissing the act as a joke no different from jabs aimed at other presidents. Moreover, they said, the president’s supporters ought to learn how to take a joke rather than seeing everything as racially motivated. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who tweeted that liberals are “thin-skinned and totalitarian,” has invited the clown to perform at rodeos in Texas.
There is a long history of mocking politicians at rodeos, and clowns have donned masks of other presidents as part of their acts. But James Staab, a political science professor at the University of Central Missouri, said last week’s incident “goes beyond the pale — they’re talking about physical injury and racial stereotypes.”
Whether the scene at the state fair was meant merely as mockery or something more sinister, there was no room for nuance among a dozen fairgoers interviewed Wednesday. There was near universal agreement that the incident was all in good fun, and disapproval of the president crossed into a deep, personal hatred, often tinted in racial terms.
“I was raised to think the blacks were bad; I’m not gonna lie. We lived on one side of the tracks, and they lived on the other,” said Margaret Abercrombie, 68, who is white and grew up along the Mississippi River in Sikeston, Mo.
Abercrombie said she voted twice for Obama but didn’t find anything wrong with the rodeo act. As she rode her motorized wheelchair to the grandstands at the rodeo arena, which on this day hosted tractor pull races, Abercrombie said the anti-Obama sentiments she encounters are based on race.
“You hear the farmers here, they just don’t like him because he’s black,” Abercrombie said. Pointing across the fairgrounds to the cattle barns, she added, “I’m surprised they ain’t got a cow over there named Obama.”
The Wednesday crowd at the fair, which lasts 11 days in remote Sedalia, was overwhelmingly white. Some vendors played right-wing talk radio from boom boxes at their tents. One vendor sold “rebel pride” hats emblazoned with Confederate flags for $8 each. Another, who would only be identified as “Dennis the Sticker Dude” because he was afraid of government retaliation, hawked car decal stickers featuring a cartoon boy urinating on Obama.
Henke hesitated at first to provide his name, fearing that if he publicly criticized Obama the Internal Revenue Service would “be up my [backside] and at my door.”
Henke said he sometimes surfs the Internet for Web sites making fun of Obama and his family. For instance, he said, one site he looks at compares “Obama’s wife to a monkey — they have the same expression. The media makes it all hate. I don’t hate a black person. It’s just funny.”
At the rodeo here last Saturday night, a clown wearing an Obama mask stood on the arena’s dirt floor, propped up like a straw man with the appearance that a broom stick was going up his backside. A second clown called him “ya big goober.” Before letting the bull loose to charge at the clown with the Obama mask, the second clown provided live narration over the loudspeakers:
“Obama, they’re coming for you this time.”
“He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha.”
“Yahoo! We’re gonna smoke Obama.”
In the stands, Perry Beam was so sickened by the scene he began recording it.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-15/politics/41413723_1_president-obama-rodeo-arena-clown
.. that's the first time i've seen the clown's dialogue .. it's ridiculously stupid and dangerous in the context of your USA .. no? .. well in the context of the rise of militant white groups since Obama was elected .. yes .. it is ridiculously stupid and irresponsible ..
i read this one first ..
Was Obama rodeo mask just a case of clowning around?
By Kathleen Parker, Published: August 17 E-mail the writer
Children, children.
Here we are in the midst of a bloody clash in Egypt, more than 100,000 slaughtered in Syria, another looming debt crisis at home, and we’re consumed with angst over a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask and invited the crowd to cheer for the bulls.
There’s more. The clown has been fired. The president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has stepped down. The Missouri State Fair is forcing clowns to undergo sensitivity training. The NAACP wants a Justice Department investigation into the clown act as a hate crime. And a Texas congressman has invited the clown to come on down.
It seems impossible to take this seriously, yet seriously we must take it. Here we go. The clown act was offensive for one reason only: The president is black. No peep would have been made otherwise. But therein lies a difference and a distinction that deserves our unbiased scrutiny.
A word about my own biases: I don’t like rodeos, and I don’t like clowns. The former involve animals performing involuntarily and the latter are creepy. (I don’t like zoos or circuses, either.)
But clowns are .?.?. clowns! It’s their job to poke the precious and touch the untouchable. They are inherently rude, irreverent, insulting, insensitive and sometimes salacious. Presidents, obviously, are fair game, and every modern president’s face has been made into a mask.
Still. There’s something wrong with this clown act. It isn’t a hate crime, which is a ridiculous charge, but it is something we need to wrap our minds around. First, let’s correct a popular mischaracterization. Wearing an Obama mask is not tantamount to “blackface,” which is implicitly racist. When the president’s face is “black,” then the president’s mask is necessarily “black.”
Unless, apparently, the person wearing the mask is white, as was the rodeo clown.
Question: If a black person wears a George W. Bush mask, is he racist? The next logical question answers the first: What if the clown wears a Bush mask at an event attended primarily by blacks and invites the crowd to cheer for the bulls?
This unlikely event would feel offensive for the same reasons the recent clown event did. The Missouri rodeo audience was mostly white and the masked man in the ring was depicting a black man. This changes everything we think about humor, about clowns and about good old-fashioned fun.
Just as N-jokes are no longer funny to almost anyone, placing a black man in the arena like an unarmed gladiator isn’t amusing. As much as we aspire to racial harmony, we have centuries of history to overcome, including the mob-inspired lynching of black men, and this is what so many saw in the clown skit. Memory conquers humor.
To be honest, my first reaction was: What a lot of bull. But then, as one must, I put myself in the other’s shoes. How would I feel if my face were on the clown’s mask and the arena were filled with men who cheered the beast who would trample and destroy me?
This is where political commentary becomes something else. Frightening. We all know what happens when the mob is empowered, especially when further emboldened by the excuse of humor. Few statements are more dishonest than “It’s just a joke.”
I am the last person who would suggest that irreverence be censored or punished — or that clowns be sensitized. The excessively reverent are far scarier to me than those who would die laughing. Political satire is, in fact, a public service inasmuch as it channels aggression that otherwise might find bloody expression.
But a civil society should find reprehensible even mock violence against a president, especially one who belongs to a minority that was once targeted for state-sanctioned violence.
I sincerely doubt that the rodeo clown was motivated by racial hatred. I also doubt that President Obama much cared, except for how his daughters might feel about it. Or, to be cynical, about the degree to which public outrage accrued to his political advantage. I even give the benefit of the doubt to those who cheered the bulls as being inspired by political rather than racial animus.
And, yes, reaction has been overblown to the point of silliness. But there are lessons, nonetheless. We could stand to tone down our political expression for the sake of all our daughters and sons, who bear witness to these events and must make sense of their world. Perhaps more to the point, we might try to take ourselves more lightly
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-just-clowning-around-at-the-rodeo/2013/08/16/634b989e-06a7-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html
poster44ny - you really oughta think about that, and your, clown act more ..
"I haven't heard about the president's reaction or if he had one," Earnest told reporters at Martha's
Vineyard, where Obama is vacationing. "I can tell you as a native Missourian, it was certainly not
one of the finer moments for our state, and not the way I like to see our state depicted in the news." ..
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/317027-white-house-spokesman-rodeo-clown-flap-not-one-of-missouris-finer-moments
yet you made the comment about the pres. being thin skinned ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91040095 ..
you know .. in this Australia summer day i did wonder what all the fuss was about ..
until i read these two ..
Obama rodeo clown incident illustrates nation’s continued racial divide
By Philip Rucker,August 15, 2013
A clown wearing a mask intended to look like President Obama was part of a… (Jameson Hsieh/AP )
SEDALIA, Mo. — As some people at the Missouri State Fair see it, the rodeo incident last weekend in which a ringleader taunted a clown wearing a mask of President Obama and played with his lips as a bull charged after him was neither racist nor disrespectful.
It was a joke, they said, overblown by a news media that’s hypersensitive to any possible slight against the nation’s first black president. They said the hooting and hollering from the crowd that night was because of a fundamental dislike of the president.
“I’ve got no respect for him,” said Virgil Henke, 65, a livestock farmer who explained his distaste for Obama with several falsehoods about his background: “Why, he’s destroyed this country. How much freedom have we lost? I don’t care whether it’s a black man in office, but we have to have a true-blooded American. I think he is Muslim and trying to destroy the country, catering to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.”
The rodeo incident and the clown at the center of it have become the latest illustration of racial divisions that continue to surface nearly five years into Obama’s presidency.
A three-minute amateur video of the rodeo act was picked up by news outlets worldwide. Democratic and Republican elected officials in Missouri quickly condemned the incident, saying it was offensive and inappropriate at a taxpayer-funded event with children in attendance. Asked about it Wednesday, a White House spokesman said that it was not one of Missouri’s “finer moments.”
But there has also been a backlash on the right, with conservative radio talk show hosts and writers dismissing the act as a joke no different from jabs aimed at other presidents. Moreover, they said, the president’s supporters ought to learn how to take a joke rather than seeing everything as racially motivated. Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Tex.), who tweeted that liberals are “thin-skinned and totalitarian,” has invited the clown to perform at rodeos in Texas.
There is a long history of mocking politicians at rodeos, and clowns have donned masks of other presidents as part of their acts. But James Staab, a political science professor at the University of Central Missouri, said last week’s incident “goes beyond the pale — they’re talking about physical injury and racial stereotypes.”
Whether the scene at the state fair was meant merely as mockery or something more sinister, there was no room for nuance among a dozen fairgoers interviewed Wednesday. There was near universal agreement that the incident was all in good fun, and disapproval of the president crossed into a deep, personal hatred, often tinted in racial terms.
“I was raised to think the blacks were bad; I’m not gonna lie. We lived on one side of the tracks, and they lived on the other,” said Margaret Abercrombie, 68, who is white and grew up along the Mississippi River in Sikeston, Mo.
Abercrombie said she voted twice for Obama but didn’t find anything wrong with the rodeo act. As she rode her motorized wheelchair to the grandstands at the rodeo arena, which on this day hosted tractor pull races, Abercrombie said the anti-Obama sentiments she encounters are based on race.
“You hear the farmers here, they just don’t like him because he’s black,” Abercrombie said. Pointing across the fairgrounds to the cattle barns, she added, “I’m surprised they ain’t got a cow over there named Obama.”
The Wednesday crowd at the fair, which lasts 11 days in remote Sedalia, was overwhelmingly white. Some vendors played right-wing talk radio from boom boxes at their tents. One vendor sold “rebel pride” hats emblazoned with Confederate flags for $8 each. Another, who would only be identified as “Dennis the Sticker Dude” because he was afraid of government retaliation, hawked car decal stickers featuring a cartoon boy urinating on Obama.
Henke hesitated at first to provide his name, fearing that if he publicly criticized Obama the Internal Revenue Service would “be up my [backside] and at my door.”
Henke said he sometimes surfs the Internet for Web sites making fun of Obama and his family. For instance, he said, one site he looks at compares “Obama’s wife to a monkey — they have the same expression. The media makes it all hate. I don’t hate a black person. It’s just funny.”
At the rodeo here last Saturday night, a clown wearing an Obama mask stood on the arena’s dirt floor, propped up like a straw man with the appearance that a broom stick was going up his backside. A second clown called him “ya big goober.” Before letting the bull loose to charge at the clown with the Obama mask, the second clown provided live narration over the loudspeakers:
“Obama, they’re coming for you this time.”
“He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha.”
“Yahoo! We’re gonna smoke Obama.”
In the stands, Perry Beam was so sickened by the scene he began recording it.
http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-08-15/politics/41413723_1_president-obama-rodeo-arena-clown
.. that's the first time i've seen the clown's dialogue .. it's ridiculously stupid and dangerous in the context of your USA .. no? .. well in the context of the rise of militant white groups since Obama was elected .. yes .. it is ridiculously stupid and irresponsible ..
i read this one first ..
Was Obama rodeo mask just a case of clowning around?
By Kathleen Parker, Published: August 17 E-mail the writer
Children, children.
Here we are in the midst of a bloody clash in Egypt, more than 100,000 slaughtered in Syria, another looming debt crisis at home, and we’re consumed with angst over a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask and invited the crowd to cheer for the bulls.
There’s more. The clown has been fired. The president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association has stepped down. The Missouri State Fair is forcing clowns to undergo sensitivity training. The NAACP wants a Justice Department investigation into the clown act as a hate crime. And a Texas congressman has invited the clown to come on down.
It seems impossible to take this seriously, yet seriously we must take it. Here we go. The clown act was offensive for one reason only: The president is black. No peep would have been made otherwise. But therein lies a difference and a distinction that deserves our unbiased scrutiny.
A word about my own biases: I don’t like rodeos, and I don’t like clowns. The former involve animals performing involuntarily and the latter are creepy. (I don’t like zoos or circuses, either.)
But clowns are .?.?. clowns! It’s their job to poke the precious and touch the untouchable. They are inherently rude, irreverent, insulting, insensitive and sometimes salacious. Presidents, obviously, are fair game, and every modern president’s face has been made into a mask.
Still. There’s something wrong with this clown act. It isn’t a hate crime, which is a ridiculous charge, but it is something we need to wrap our minds around. First, let’s correct a popular mischaracterization. Wearing an Obama mask is not tantamount to “blackface,” which is implicitly racist. When the president’s face is “black,” then the president’s mask is necessarily “black.”
Unless, apparently, the person wearing the mask is white, as was the rodeo clown.
Question: If a black person wears a George W. Bush mask, is he racist? The next logical question answers the first: What if the clown wears a Bush mask at an event attended primarily by blacks and invites the crowd to cheer for the bulls?
This unlikely event would feel offensive for the same reasons the recent clown event did. The Missouri rodeo audience was mostly white and the masked man in the ring was depicting a black man. This changes everything we think about humor, about clowns and about good old-fashioned fun.
Just as N-jokes are no longer funny to almost anyone, placing a black man in the arena like an unarmed gladiator isn’t amusing. As much as we aspire to racial harmony, we have centuries of history to overcome, including the mob-inspired lynching of black men, and this is what so many saw in the clown skit. Memory conquers humor.
To be honest, my first reaction was: What a lot of bull. But then, as one must, I put myself in the other’s shoes. How would I feel if my face were on the clown’s mask and the arena were filled with men who cheered the beast who would trample and destroy me?
This is where political commentary becomes something else. Frightening. We all know what happens when the mob is empowered, especially when further emboldened by the excuse of humor. Few statements are more dishonest than “It’s just a joke.”
I am the last person who would suggest that irreverence be censored or punished — or that clowns be sensitized. The excessively reverent are far scarier to me than those who would die laughing. Political satire is, in fact, a public service inasmuch as it channels aggression that otherwise might find bloody expression.
But a civil society should find reprehensible even mock violence against a president, especially one who belongs to a minority that was once targeted for state-sanctioned violence.
I sincerely doubt that the rodeo clown was motivated by racial hatred. I also doubt that President Obama much cared, except for how his daughters might feel about it. Or, to be cynical, about the degree to which public outrage accrued to his political advantage. I even give the benefit of the doubt to those who cheered the bulls as being inspired by political rather than racial animus.
And, yes, reaction has been overblown to the point of silliness. But there are lessons, nonetheless. We could stand to tone down our political expression for the sake of all our daughters and sons, who bear witness to these events and must make sense of their world. Perhaps more to the point, we might try to take ourselves more lightly
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/kathleen-parker-just-clowning-around-at-the-rodeo/2013/08/16/634b989e-06a7-11e3-a07f-49ddc7417125_story.html
poster44ny - you really oughta think about that, and your, clown act more ..
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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