OBAMA JOKES ABOUT HANDICAPPEDBy Lisa Casey of ALL HAT, NO CATTLE
Has everyone heard about President Obama’s lame joke referencing the Special Olympics on the Jay Leno show last night?
Oops! Pardon us here at All Hat No Cattle! We shouldn’t have used that adjective. It was an unintended pun. Really. We swear.
Anyway, Obama apologized for his insensitive comment even before the show aired, but the damage already was done. We now will see the video snippet of Obama saying that his bowling prowess is “like the Special Olympics” re-broadcast ad nauseam by the fair and balanced network and in ads from right-wing PACs.
Not to be outdone, the tabloid press will devote their considerable investigative resources to the story. They will probe the President’s past for any hint of ill will toward disabled people. So expect headlines like “Source: Obama once pushed child in wheelchair down stairs” and “Obama’s Islamic school urged tormenting of handicapped”.
All of this could have been avoided – we here at AHNC believe – if Obama simply had sent Vice President Joe Biden to the Leno show in his place. Everybody expects Biden to commit at least one gaffe per interview, and a Special Olympics moment by Biden would have been acceptable, almost predictable. “There goes Joe, shootin’ off his mouth again! But that’s Joe!”
Please do not get the impression that AHNC in any way endorses humor about the physically or mentally impaired. We already have Rush Limbaugh to laugh at.
And with all the economic chaos and scandal going on, there is a whole new humor genre for us to disparage or make jokeS about instead of the handicapped: Big Business.
CEOs appear before more Congressional committee hearings these days than Mafia members used to in the 1960s and ’70s. A lot of tired old jokes about lawyers can now be recycled and told about Wall Street players. Titans of industry have become the new whipping boys for a fed-up, near broke and pissed-off American public.
So we say forget about Obama’s slip-up. Focus instead on the incredible actions and the dire consequences brought to us courtesy of corporate greed and its practitioners.
Start referring to America’s automakers as The Three Stooges instead of The Big Three. Stop thinking of major international banks as financial institutions; think of them as institutions for the criminally insane. Don’t look to Big Oil to fuel and lubricate the global economy. Look upon it as Big KY Jelly, and you’ll have a better idea of what the oil industry has in mind for humanity.
And don’t by any stretch of the imagination consider AIG – formerly known as American International Group – to be just another huge insurance company. When you see or hear the letters AIG, think of three words: arrogance, incompetence, greed.
Just don’t make any cracks about a crippled company or its moronic managers. After all, some of them were just being crazy like a fox.
