Thursday, January 08, 2009

Obama Veggie Tales



The above photo illustration appeared on the Drink The Kool-Aid blog back in November with the caption:
The changes to the White house (sic) are aleady (sic tu) starting! Barack Obama ripped out the White house Rose Garden and replaced everything with a Watermelon Patch! Oh Lordy!
That rather racist trope is part of a long list of patently offensive changes Barack Obama would make at the White House that had been circulating the internet for months. Said list was inspired by a joke Obama told on a late night talk show (as retold by fair and balanced Fox News):
"I hear there's a bowling alley and obviously that hasn't gone too well," Obama told comic Jimmy Kimmel in a satellite interview from Philadelphia on Sunday. "So we're getting rid of the bowling alley and replacing it with a basketball court in the White House."

Obama was referring to his disastrous attempt at bowling a few weeks before Pennsylvania's Democratic primary in April. The party's presumptive nominee for president is much more at ease on the basketball court.
Then in today's Washington Post food section an article titled "A White House Veggie Garden? We Can Only Hope." told of locally grown food advocates pushing for Obama to set a good example with his frontyard.
Voices in the local-food movement have formed a chorus urging the Obamas to dig up a good chunk of the South Lawn for a garden to feed the first family and local food banks.
{snip}
Writer Michael Pollan has suggested a five-acre fruit and vegetable garden, which isn't so much a kitchen garden for a big house as it is a truck farm.
An organization called Eat The View is spearheading the campaign and their website features this hypothetical image of Barack breaking ground on the project.


Now here's my qualm. I find it amusingly ironic that an overly earnest group of radical vege-activists unwittingly plays into the preconceptions of rabidly anti-Obama bigots. Does that make me a racist?

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