Comedy Central launched a new sketch comedy show this spring called “Key and Peele”. The show’s two hosts, both bi-racial black men, focused a lot of the program’s sketches on pop culture, racism and politics to varying degrees of funniness. Key and Peele’s most famous sketch is “Luther the Anger Translator” which pokes fun at President Obama’s seemingly unflappable calmness in the face of ridiculous criticism and hate from Congress on down to knucklehead reporters:
In order to let America know that he truly does get angry, Obama (played by Jordan Key) hires Luther to be his “Anger Translator” and tell America what he really feels behind the calm measured words he usually says in public. Here’s an example:
Obama: “On the domestic front I want to say to my critics, I hear your voices and I’m aware of your concerns.”
Anger Translator Luther: “…Maybe if you could chill the hell out for like a second then maybe I can FOCUS on some s**t!”
If Obama had actually hired Luther in reality he would be having a much better week and no one in America would know the name Neil Munro.
Munro is a reporter (and I use that term generously) for the conservative site Daily Caller and he interrupted the president with a ‘question’ while Obama was explaining his new immigration policy last Friday at the White House. The ‘question’ from Munro was “Why do your favor foreigners over Americans” in the middle of Obama explaining why he is using an executive order to offer amnesty to illegal immigrations who were brought to the U.S. as children by their parents.
Needless to say most reporters found this to be a pretty extreme breach of protocol (didn’t Munro learn that you don’t interrupt people while they’re talking, especially the President) at the same time he got an answer and won the weekly “Shameful Irony” award.
Munro, who chastised the president for initiating a policy that would hurt American workers, claims that he is an Irish immigrant himself who used to work in the British press. Hey: doesn’t that mean he stole that Daily Caller job from some hard working American?
Of course the real story here is the silly Rorschach test that comes from these types of political dust-ups during the slow summer months of campaign season. Republican sites blew up after the kerfuffle claiming that Obama “Snapped” at a heckler and lost his “Cool”.
But, this isn’t news – Republicans have been pushing that meme for years: that Obama is this crazy Black man on the edge, always a millisecond away from flipping out and beating down Whitey in broad daylight. Every exchange he has with a reporter is supposedly the burning a fuse on the cannonball bomb that is Obama’s untapped violent Kenyan emotions.
The truth is probably a lot less sexy and a bit more racist. If you consider that the three most obnoxious examples of public conduct towards Obama this story makes a bit more sense. You have Congressman Joe Wilson, Governor Jan Brewer and now Neil Munro – what binds these folks in their incredible inability to use their inside voice? In each instance the president was talking about immigration. And maybe for some folks listening to this Black President talk about Brown people is just too much to bear.
You can disagree, but something a little extra is going on for these folks to be so disagreeable.
In the end, Munro will become a new conservative pin-up boy for being rude under the guise of asking tough questions and speaking truth to power. And Barack Obama will go back to the non-angry so-cool-that-ice-won’t-melt-in-his-mouth-kind-of-president that some people love and others have never been able to get with. The truth is most of this could be solved if he just hired Luther. I can only imagine his translation of the president’s words last Friday.
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