During a recent visit to Italy while her father attended three days of G8 talks, first daughter Malia Obama was spotted wearing a shirt with the peace sign made famous by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Here’s the picture:
Apparently, the sight of Malia wearing a shirt promoting a nuclear-free planet was enough to send some conservatives into a tailspin, as evidenced by their reactions to the photo on the conservative website FreeRepublic.com:
In case you’re thinking, “C’mon Zach, it’s not possible someone said that about Malia,” here’s a link to the first fifty comments to the original post made at FreeRepublic.com(you’ll need to enlarge the image to see it all).
Conservatives at their finest, right there….attacking an 11 year-old girl simply because they hate what her father stands for. This has to be some of the most vile, reprehensible stuff I’ve ever seen written about anyone, much less a young girl.
Taking an anonymous blog comment and spinning that out to define all Conservatives. That’s as obscene a generalization and as intellectually dishonest as anything I’ve ever seen.
I never said this applied to “all conservatives;” you simply inferred that’s what I meant, Roland.
…and yes, the “whore” comment is a shitty one.
If you look at the rest of the blog comments, and then the rest of free republic.com, you will see that it is a pretty good representation of the fringe-right in our society.
Agree with MMT, however,fringe may be too light a word to describe them.
Could you please direct me to your post about the Letterman’s comment about Palin’s minor daughter and a certain major league baseball player??? I seemed to have missed it.
Silent, sorry for not responding to this sooner. I didn’t post on what Letterman said about Sarah Palin’s daughter, but I’ll say it did cross the line in a big way.
Zach didn’t say “fringe right”…his phraseology was “Conservatives at their finest…”
Roland, I’m not a professional journalist, so you’ll have to excuse me if I’m not always as clear as I’d like to be. Obviously the freepers aren’t representative of all conservatives, but they certainly do represent an increasingly vocal segment of the conservative movement.
When I look at the picture of President Obama and Mrs. Obama’s daughter all I see is a beautiful young girl. How anyone can make such vile comments about her is beyond my comprehension.
Agreed.
Oh yes cuz an 11 year old girl is just the same as an 18 year old girl who agreed to put herself into the spotlight with numerous interviews and photo-ops.
Letterman spoke of the daughter who was at the Yankee’s game…. That daughter was Willow….Willow is 14.
Free Republic has been around for about a decade and frequently trumpets itself as the clarion call of the True Conservative movement in America. That description has been successful enough to garner sitting U.S. congressmen as members, as well as conservative celebrities like former FOX News correspondent and White House Spokesperson Tony Snow. It’s by no means a small or unknown website, nor is it unrepresentative of the American right as soon as you aren’t being critical of content on it. It’s only when someone has the temerity to mention that its content is racist, homophobic, sexist or treasonous that the same people previously rattling on about how it’s representative of American conservatism suddenly retreat into definitions debates and qualifications. Tarring the American right because of the actions of Freep seems like fair play. Whether the rest of the American right feels that’s fair is another debate. Although it’s safe to say they don’t spend much time hand-wringing about Freep when nobody is posting racist, homophobic and treasonous posts from it. I’d say ask Tony Snow about that level of indifference, but the poor man is dead.
Finally, Letterman mentioned Willow Palin in a joke about Elliot Spitzer. The joke was about how Elliot Spitzer was a sex fiend. Willow Palin was just used as shorthand illustration of it: look, this dude will fuck goddamn near everything, including a 14-year-old girl. Because Elliot Spitzer is a sex fiend. If the joke had had anything to do with what kind of person Willow Palin was, she wouldn’t have been, in the formulation of the joke, a completely passive and inert figure with which the dynamic and described figure (ELLIOT SPITZER) interacted in a way that only described the dynamic, acting figure (ELLIOT SPITZER). The joke is so completely self-evident that at this point it’s on everyone who doesn’t get it.