Your President Obama said something seriously stupid and offensive, before millions (assuming it's accurately reported - couldn't quite hear what he said from the clip). There's always that danger in a folksy, man-of-the-people, informal TV interview.
Some of the defences of his remark in both the USA and the UK are beyond bizarre (I looked at the comments on
CNN and
TimesOnline). These particularly impressed:
Since tards all want equal rights, maybe they can go fight in Iraq and finish the war Geroge started? Or maybe we can have tards run AIG and see if they can do a better job than those big shots did? Face it folks, we are not all equal.
if someone has something to say aboput president obama then they need to get a life.....do you know how many people a day say the word retarted or slow people it is not funny at all and it is sad ...Obama didn't mean anyhting by it and i watched the show it didn't seem like he was really making fun of them at all
Sure, he made a joke about himself. Don't you think that disabled people can also make jokes about themselves.
Live and laugh and be happy. Just watch the man go!
Come on, be fair. He wasn't mocking disabled people, he was openly declaring that in many many ways, disabled people can be as good as or better than the American present.
(OK, some or all of these could be satirical but, sadly, I don't think so.)
Though, I do agree with all the comments saying that anyone (including the president of the USA) is entitled to make a mistake, and certainly should not be judged by one off-the-cuff remark. He apologised, and good for him. The problem is that large numbers of people are
denying that there was anything wrong with the remark.
For the purposes of self-deprecation, Obama used the Special Olympics as a symbol of laughable sporting ineptitude (a more subtle interpretation would be that it's a wider metaphor for people in any field who aren't worthy to be judged by normal standards - don't know whether that makes it better or worse). I don't suppose he was stating a
conscious belief that every mentally disabled person is a sporting klutz, but it probably does reflect some
unconscious prejudice. Just as, for example, the school dinner lady who accidentally short-changed my (Jewish) son, and excused herself by saying "I wasn't trying to Jew you", probably had no
conscious prejudice that all Jews are thieves and embezzlers.
It's actually a bit worse than if he'd simply called himself a retard, or a spaz, as he's specifically insulting the Special Olympics organisation along with (by implication) all mentally disabled people.
