~~By Grail Guardian
I read a rather innocuous piece on Michelle Malkin’s site about Billie Jean King and how Obama dissed her when presenting her with the Medal of Freedom. The pResident understated how many tennis titles King held by a rather significant amount. Seems innocent enough, right? Malkin herself makes no real judgment about King, she merely presents the brief story from Politico and a bit of snark aimed at Obama. Here’s the piece:
Rowdy town hall protesters, take note: Please do not correct the president’s faulty math. It’s rude. And un-American.
Instead, follow the cue of tennis player Billie Jean King and embrace Obama math as “adorable.”
This is the polite and patriotic thing to do.
Via Politico:
Before presenting tennis legend Billie Jean King with the Medal of Freedom Wednesday, President Obama ticked off some of her accomplishments: 12 Grand Slam titles, 101 doubles titles, 67 singles titles.
“Pretty good, Billie Jean,” he quipped.
But he didn’t get any of it right, according to King herself.
“They didn’t get any of my facts right,” King lightheartedly noted afterward. “Did you see all the – how many titles I won? I was cracking up.”
“Not even in the ballpark,” she continued.
King found it amusing, and said her accomplishments on the court aren’t the most important.
“I thought it was adorable,” she said.</blockquote>
Watch the video at the link as she shrugs at the inaccuracies: “Who cares?
Now I’m not a regular reader of Malkin’s site; I had been directed there by a link to another story and noticed the blurb about King. I found the article rather odd in its lack of any real purpose other than to report a rather minor incident, so I decided to read what others had to say. The discussion in the comments startled me. It started with the general assumption that King must be an Obot since she let Obama off so easily, but quickly deteriorated into people slamming King for defending Obama because she called the incident “adorable”. The next thing I know, people are not only projecting how King would have acted had President Bush made the same mistakes, but attacking her work for Women’s Rights and Title IX . Of course there were the inevitable gay slams. (For the younger crowd King was the subject of a “Palimony” suit by a female lover which was used by social conservatives to discredit her work and tennis accomplishments by implying that the bi-sexual King could never have done any of this had she been strictly heterosexual.) The commenters even attacked a regular poster who tried to point out that King was just being diplomatic and polite to the “POTUS”.
Sample asshattery:
lgm said:
Because of her work promoting women’s sports — title 9, women’s leagues, etc. And, I hope, cleaning the clock of Bobby Riggs.On August 13th, 2009 at 4:14 pm, emjem24 said:
As a huge tennis fan myself, I really don’t get the importance of this award. It’s meaningless. Anybody can now receive it for whatever accomplishment under the sun. Even foreign citizens.Title 9 has so skewed the balance of women’s sports that both men’s and women’s sports aren’t equally funded. In essence, title 9 has had unforeseen consequences as a result of feminist meddling in sports.
Billy Jean King may have done a lot for women’s tennis such as equating prize money but the male tennis players have a point. Why not have the women play 5 set matches like the men? The men often play longer than the women. This is an example of feminist meddling where there shouldn’t have been. It’s about time on the court, not who makes more.
Billy Jean King really just needs to get over herself.
Now I should tell you that I am a Billie Jean King fan. Not for her tennis skills or personal life choices, but for her efforts as a spokesman for equal pay for professional women athletes and equal opportunity for all female athletes, right down to the grade school level. When I was a kid I remember King taking on Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes”, and the significant social paradigm shift that occurred after she whooped his butt. It was thrilling to watch all the cocky boys in town have to scramble for excuses as to why she’d won after being forced to suffer their constant taunts that Riggs could beat her blindfolded, with one hand tied behind his back. Critics now cite that Riggs was 55 years old and not that good a tennis player, but at the time almost every male I knew boasted that these things didn’t matter because no woman could beat any man that wasn’t in a wheelchair! So you young ‘uns out there that aren’t old enough to remember can’t truly appreciate the collective sigh of relief heard from females across the nation as King proved that a woman could indeed beat a man at a physical activity, and do it with style and class. There was much more riding on this highly publicized match than meets the eye when simply reading historical reports about it. It was about the ability of women and girls to walk with their heads held high and the chance (however slim it may have been) to prove that you could be “as good as” or (gasp) even “better than” a male. To a young girl with something to prove, this event was pivotal in the fight for Women’s Rights; as significant as Susan B. Anthony and Co.’s efforts to win women the right to vote. I don’t think it is overstatement to say it was a social breakthrough of the type you only see once or twice in a lifetime. Billie Jean King represented to a generation of young and aspiring females what Martin Luther King, Jr. represented to a generation of blacks: hope and opportunity. No one was asking for a handout, just the chance to prove ourselves. And prove ourselves we did. We championed Women’s Rights like no other generation before or since. We shouldered the burden to bring about a facsimile of equality that has allowed the current Generation Jones female population to presume that their rights were God-given and (wrongly) irrevocable.
So after reading these off the wall comments, I started to think about what is actually going on here. Practically anyone would agree that Barack Obama and his advisors
Purported Obama advisors (could that be Jon Favreau on left??)
have done more to set back the cause of racial equality than the worst Neo-Nazi or KKKer I could ever have dreamed of (you can read an excellent rant on this topic by raGing here at Deadenders), but I would be remiss if I didn’t get to the juicy point buried in the midst of all this:
Barack Obama has handed the extreme right fringe of this country the ability to revert back to the Stone Age socially, and to feel 100% comfortable while doing it. Where they lead, others with weak minds and morals will happily follow.
Back to the Stone Age
There you go, Obots! I said it! Teh Won has enabled not only the über-liberals to call anyone that disagrees with them racists, but he has empowered the right cliffers, rednecks, Christian extremists, and other dregs of society to spread their filth at will. He promised us change, and boy did he deliver! Now everyone has the right to “go postal” on anyone. To wit:
It’s okay to attack taxpayers:
Just when you thought they could stoop no lower…
It’s ok to attack cops:
The Cambridge cop prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. claims is a racist gave a dying Reggie Lewis mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in a desperate bid to save the Celtics [team stats] superstar’s life 16 years ago Monday.
“I wasn’t working on Reggie Lewis the basketball star. I wasn’t working on a black man. I was working on another human being,” Sgt. James Crowley, in an exclusive interview with the Herald, said of the forward’s fatal heart attack July 27, 1993, at age 27 during an off-season practice at Brandeis University, where Crowley was a campus police officer.
It’s a date Crowley still can recite by rote – and he still recalls the pain he suffered when people back then questioned whether he had done enough to save the black athlete.
“Some people were saying ‘There’s the guy who killed Reggie Lewis’ afterward. I was broken-hearted. I cried for many nights,” he said.
(For those not convinced, you can read the police report on the Gates incident here.)
It’s ok to attack the homeless:
A report due out this weekend from the National Coalition for the Homeless documents a rise in violence over the last decade, with at least 880 unprovoked attacks against the homeless at the hands of nonhomeless people, including 244 fatalities. An advance copy was provided to The New York Times.
Sometimes, researchers say, one homeless person attacks another in turf battles or other disputes. But more often, they say, the assailants are outsiders: men or in most cases teenage boys who punch, kick, shoot or set afire people living on the streets, frequently killing them, simply for the sport of it, their victims all but invisible to society.
“A lot of what we see are thrill offenders,” said Brian Levin, a criminologist who runs the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
It’s ok to attack women:
George Sodini went to a sprawling L.A. Fitness Club on Tuesday night, turned out the lights on the “Latin impact” dance-aerobics class for women, and opened fire with three guns, spraying dozens of bullets before committing suicide.
“He just had a lot of hatred in him and (was) hell-bent on committing this act, and no one was going to stop him,” Allegheny County Police Superintendent Charles Moffatt said Wednesday.
His 4,610-word Web diary appeared to be a nine-month chronology of his plans to end his misery with a shocking act of carnage at his gym. He couldn’t understand why women ignored him, despite his best efforts to look nice. He wrote that he hadn’t had a girlfriend since 1984, hadn’t slept with a woman in 19 years.
It’s ok to attack blacks (if they’re conservatives):
Kenneth Gladney, a 38-year-old conservative activist from St. Louis, said he was attacked by some of those arrested as he handed out yellow flags with “Don’t tread on me” printed on them. He spoke to the Post-Dispatch from the emergency room of the St. John’s Mercy Medical Center, where he said he was waiting to be treated for injuries to his knee, back, elbow, shoulder and face that he suffered in the attack. Gladney, who is black, said one of his attackers, also a black man, used a racial slur against him before the attack started.
“It just seems there’s no freedom of speech without being attacked,” he said.
(Or if the attacker is a Black White Supremacist):
Black Man Pleads Guilty to Posing as Obama-Hating White Supremacist on Facebook
An African-American man from Mississippi admits posing as a white supremacist to send a death threat across state lines by Facebook.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office says 20-year-old Dyron L. Hart of Poplarville pleaded guilty Wednesday in federal court to making a threat in November 2008.
Hart admitted creating a name and using a white supremacists’ photo to pose as a white man who planned to kill blacks because Barack Obama had been elected president.
Of course all of this may leave you wondering, “just who isn’t it ok to attack?” The answer is rather painfully obvious: Barack Obama and Congress
An HCAN affiliate called Progressive Future is partnered with Fund for the Public Interest. Fund for the Public Interest is hiring people nationwide to do “canvassing” for Obama’s health reform agenda.
<snip>
But here I think is the smoking gun. This page on the Progressive Future site describes the action they are taking to fight for health reform. It says:
[T]his summer is the key time to ramp up the public pressure for reform. Every member of Congress needs to hear from us, that we won’t wait any longer for real health care reform.
Progressive Future is stepping up to the challenge:
We’ll be sending out hundreds of canvassers in nine cities across the country to talk directly with more than 50,000 citizens about the need to solve our health care crisis, building our rapid-response network, and engaging supporters immediately.
So as he sends his paid ACORN-style minions out across the country to combat peaceful protesters, it seems the self-styled post-racial, progressive President is anything but. In fact, Barack Obama has given credibility to Rush Limbaugh and jumpstarted the previously deceased careers of the likes of Newt Gingrich and Ann Coulter. Wow. That’s some Liberal Agenda, isn’t it? You Obots out there must be proud!
Just as the democratic (I refuse to capitalize it anymore) party uses abortion and gay marriage as wedge issues to keep women as members/voters of a party that doesn’t respect or help them, Axelrod and Co. have figured out how to use the biggest right wing tools to keep the real racists/sexists/homophobes agitated, and they have given them Carte Blanche to do it to the rest of us. After all, what good is a bi-racial, hipster pResident and left cliff Congress without some good old fashioned right wing crazies to make them look cool in contrast?
Filed under: Current Politics | Tagged: abortion, ACORN, Ann Coulter, Barack Obama, Billie Jean King, Bobby Riggs, Boston Celtics, Center of the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, Christian extremists, David Axelrod, Fund for the Publoic Interest, gay rights, Generation Jones female population, Harvard University, health reform, Jon Favreau, Jr., Kenneth Gladney, KKK, Martin Luther King, Medal of Freedom, Michelle Malkin, National Coalition of the Homeless, Neo-Nazis, Newt Gingrich, Obots, palimony, Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Progressive Future, racism, rednecs, Reggie Lewis, right cliffers, Rush Limbaugh, Sgt. James Crowley, Susan B. Anthony, tennis, Title IX, wedge issues, white supremacists, women's rights, women's sports | 27 Comments »
