National Post

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One way of looking at Fox's ghettoization of Obama and Michelle -- their attempt to associate his family with a world of missing fathers and single mothers -- is as reaction to the image of the Black Camelot created by Vogue and The New York Times. But both fantasies of the Obamas fail to capture how their family situation reflects a new ideal and a new reality: the strong loving unit not perfectly within the traditional order (Grandpa carving the turkey) but not completely outside it either (no turkey at all). Like many contemporary families, maybe most, they exist in resistance to the breakdown of the family order, finding love and stability in an era where the traditional strictures of rights and duties have more or less collapsed. They're not big enough for a game of touch football, but they're big enough for pick-up hoops. Fox News will not stop attacking the Obamas. They cannot. Attacking is their self-appointed task -- their reason for existence. The baby mama comment is only the latest in a long and bizarre list of awkward and bumbling pseudo-accusations. When Michelle Obama bumped fists with her husband on stage, Fox described it as a "terrorist fist jab." The misunderstanding of the dap is not surprising, considering the source, but where did the producers get the idea that terrorists jab their fists? When Michelle Malkin accused Obama of plagiarizing a Cuomo speech, she made the poor decision to play the two speeches one after the other: None of the words matched. The desperation of the producers has become palpable on screen. In the current campaign, Fox is like a three-ring circus with the tent set up and all the tickets sold but the performers out sick: Look! Invisible tigers! Invisible clowns!

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The racism of Fox's phrase is so stark because it conflates "baby mama" with "black wife"; it says that any black woman with a child is outside societal norms; that any black family as such is a broken family. But an attack on the family values of the Obamas is surely misplaced at this point -- John McCain is on his second marriage, let's remember, and Ross Perot described McCain's divorce in these terms to Newsweek: "After he came home, he walked with a limp, she walked with a limp. So he threw her over for a poster girl with big money from Arizona." They are picking on Michelle and Barack, much like kids would pick on a new student at school. The rumours swirl, fantastic and beyond belief: Barack is a Muslim. Michelle is a black separatist. "I'm not saying it's true, but what I heard is…." The rumour-mongers almost don't want to be believed. They want to indulge in the comfort of shared nastiness.

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Back in the day – you know, when presidential candidates were respectably white – news organizations called potential First Ladies “wives.” But now that black folks are running, we can get all funky fresh with the lingo, yo. So it’s basically fine for Fox News to use “Baby Mama” for Michelle Obama, slang that implies a married 44-year-old Princeton-educated lawyer is, to use an Urban Dictionary definition of the term, “some chick you knocked up on accident during a fling who you can’t stand but you have to tolerate cuz she got your baby now.” Because the Obamas are black! And the blacks, they’re all relaxed about that shit, yo. Word up. And anyway, as the caption clearly indicates, it’s not Fox News that’s calling Michelle Obama “Baby Mama,” it’s outraged liberals. Fox News is just telling you what those outraged liberals are saying. They didn’t want to use the term “Baby Mama.” But clearly they had no choice.

Meanwhile, over at her personal site, Michelle “Fox News’ Ethnic Shield” Malkin defends Fox News’ use of the “Baby Mama” phrase by essentially making two arguments. First, Michelle Obama once called Barack Obama her “baby’s daddy,” and as we all know, a married woman factually and correctly calling her husband her child’s father is exactly the same as a major news organization calling a potential First Lady some chick what got knocked up on a fling. Second, the term “baby-daddy” has gone out into the common culture; heck, even Tom Cruise was called Katie Holmes’ baby-daddy, you know, when he impregnated her and she subsequently gave birth while the two were not married, which is exactly like what happened between Michelle and Barack Obama, who were married in 1992 and whose first child was born six years later.

So by Malkin’s reasoning it’s perfectly fine for Fox News to call Michelle Obama the unmarried mother of Barack Obama’s children because an entirely different phrase has to her mind entered the common culture, and there was this one time that Michelle Obama once uttered something that sounded like that entirely different phrase, which is not the phrase that Fox News used. But wait! Malkin also points to someone in her comment thread saying that one time, Michelle Obama actually used the phrase “baby daddy”! No apostrophe! It’s in a comment thread, so it must be true. Therefore, Michelle Obama apocryphally using a piece of urban slang makes it perfectly okay for Fox News to use an entirely different piece of urban slang. And that’s why, you see, it won’t be a problem for Bill O’Reilly to refer to Barack Obama as “my nigga” on the next O’Reilly Factor.

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Originally posted by aka Mycroft:
You know things are bad when even the National Post accuses you of being right-wing propagandists:

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