Check out the comments to the screenshots of these photo tweets by Michelle Obama and Pro Football sensation, Colin Kaepernick posted at this San Francisco 49er Fan Blog. Compared to some comments I’ve seen regarding her, these are actually pretty tame, but still the nastiness is raw and palpable. She’s called a hag, fat, a vampire, classless, and one person suggests she is flashing gang signs. The way they talk you’d think she killed a former boyfriend and got away without even a slap on the wrist. Oh wait, that was someone entirely different who was greatly esteemed while her husband held office. You know, the guy who had to call off a trip to Europe for fear of being arrested as a war criminal.
I simply don’t know what Michele Obama did that is deserving of such animosity. Do you (yes, that’s a rhetorical question folks)?
Looks like a lot of the worst comments have been deleted by the moderator.
I know around here, she runs a very close second to her husband in the level of hatred and vilification received. I can say this with certainty. If there is one thing the GOP base hates, it is an outspoken black woman with a powerful pulpit from which to speak. In their view, she is simply an uppity n@#$ger who doesn’t know her proper place. I hear hateful bile spewed about her all the time. It is, simply, racial hatred that motivates those people. They don’t even try to hide it.
As a Black woman, it was almost more important to me that Michelle Obama became First Lady than Barack Obama becoming President.
When I think of what it means for Michelle Obama to be First Lady, I have to go back to 2007, in the comments section of Skeptical Brotha.
Something written there I’ve never forgotten:
exactly – I’m surprised this question is even being asked.
Though I would say your #3 is the most accurate. It’s a combination of race and gender that gets up the full racist-mysogynist ire. Hillary Clinton obviously gets a lot of shit too on the gender side. And Barack Obama gets the racial side, but not the gender side.
So you could say Michelle, subject to both strains of hate, is just getting the “full experience.”
Yup, this old white woman agrees: Michelle has the NERVE to be FLOTUSing while Black.
The GOP operatives haven’t succeeded in demeaning POTUS. So they start in on FLOTUS. We saw the same thing in the Clinton administration. And the same operatives have also opened up on the Obama kids.
They hate the fact that they are still popular despite all the efforts to tear them down.
Start with that.
But supercharge it with the bigots who still can’t get over having a black man in the White House. (Their mental construction of it conflating race and paint color of a building. White privilege owns that house in their minds.)
And then add the fat slobs who are mad as hell that FLOTUS is trying reduce childhood obesity in the US by telling folks to eat healthy. That’s like Mom telling you to eat your spinach. And that put some “libertarians” over the edge.
Mix those groups, have them talking to each other at the cafe and church and bingo. The few uninhibited ones among them unleash on the internet. And the real cranks are full of seething bigoted racist fury.
You left misogyny from the mix.
Honestly, while I’ve seen a lot of vile racial bigotry in my days, nothing brings out bile and bitterness like gender for a certain subspecies of guy. That subspecies, of course, has a disproportionate number of overt racists as well. And fat slobs. And the guys with all three of those working “for” them aren’t all Republicans, either.
And the same operatives have also opened up on the Obama kids.
Well they sure went full attack mode on Chelsea, didn’t they? Rush Limpballs and the Honorable Sir John McCain both made public “jokes” at her expense – both probably thinking it was okay because bullies … a.k.a. “conservatives” … thought picking on a teenage girl for her looks is fair game if she’s not with the “in” crowd.
Well, yes, I do remember some negative articles early on about Bush’s daughters, but they all had to do with underage public drunken revelry, and most of those articles were in tabloids like the Sun and Enquirer. All that ended, of course, after the photo editor who edited those pictures was killed in the first anthrax attack. Hmmm … rather odd now that I think about that ….
Racism.
Need to fix the "Oh wait" link.
Sorry – fixed now. Been out all morning as the designated driver for my wife’s oral surgery.
That’s pretty tame criticism, and you’re tapping perhaps the most liberal group of sports fans, the SF Bay Area.
I remember being outraged that Nixon passed along plays to someone (maybe George Allen?) back in the day, but we didn’t have internet to kvetch on. We had to do it bare knuckles at the corner bar.
You’d find more anti-Michelle stuff if she ever does a photo op with Tony Romo.
Remember when the Republicans were going to turn Michelle Obama into a millstone around her President’s neck during the 2008 campaign? Remember when “For the first time, I was really proud of my country” was supposed to be a career killer?
There are many things that drive Republicans crazy, but someone who they target with attacks that completely fail drives them crazies of all.
Republicans are like al Qaeda; if they aim for a target and the scheme doesn’t work, they feel compelled to keep going after it again and a again.
and yet,
nobody Black that I knew had any qualms with what she said.
Being First Lady While Black.
BFLWB.
Go ahead and use that reasoning for pretty much any criticism of her.
They are fucking racist pieces of shit. The sooner they die off, the sooner this country improves itself.