There is a minor furor over Barack Obama's comment on "Tonight" about his bowling score. He said something about being ready for the Special Olympics. That angered some people - or so I hear. I don't stay up late enough nor do I have enough interest in "Tonight" to watch the show, even though I knew Obama was going to be appearing. I lost interest in "Tonight" once Rickles stopped being a guest host.
The thing that's strange about it is that "Tonight" is taped for broadcast. It isn't a live program, much as they want you to believe it is, so anything offensive or odd could be edited.
So, he says that his bowling score would qualify him for the Special Olympics and we're supposed to find it insulting or offensive in some manner. Meanwhile, if he had said, "My fucking bowling game sucks" it would have been cut out and the offensive word omitted from the final broadcast.
They chose to let the Special Olympics comment run, which tells me that Obama's people may have either missed it or cringed just enough to wonder if they should have asked the producers to cut it out. Either way, it was left in, which tells me that they didn't mind that he said it. After all, he's the president, and if he says, "Cut the damned thing out" I would guess that they would have to.
"If you don't, I'm going to go all AIG on your asses and tax you 90-percent, so you'd better cut it the fuck out." Something like that.
It's interesting to me that some people are offended by the comment. I'm guessing that the principal offendees are the folks in charge of the Special Olympics. I wonder why they felt the need to call it the "Special Olympics." My guess is that those people don't want to be thought of as special. They probably would like to meld into society, but we won't let them.
We have had some preliminary basketball tournament games at our local community center. I see them from the overlooks and I've watched some of the games. Mostly, I'm happy to see them enjoying a sport and participating in something that they otherwise wouldn't have the opportunity to do because they don't run as fast and aren't as coordinated as people who don't put "special" in front of their games.
Meanwhile, I'd consider anyone special who could dunk a basketball or dribble a ball from one end of the court to another because I can't do it. But we don't call the NBA the "Special NBA." We call it the "Special Olympics" because those people are supposed to be special, but I think they're kind of like the rest of us: Basically uncoordinated - not very athletic - a little slow-witted and they like to play games whether they're any good at them or not.
That's not special. That's actually kind of normal.
5 comments:
I like the Jersey train of thought. I miss my Jersey life! I like looking through the "special" blog sites!
Having a sister who is "special needs" I was not in the LEAST offended by the comment... SHEESH... Get a GRIP peeps...
BTW... DMB is on the horizon!! whoohoo!!! 'WATER--GIMME WATER''
huggs xoxoxoxoxo
When people are lacking in humor, they'll feel offended by your sheer presence, let alone a self-ironic comment.
I hadn't thought of it this way, Anthony. It's not that I was especially offended by the comment; I just thought of it as something the President probably would not have said if he'd had a second longer to filter the words.
That said, I'd rather have him making a slip of the tongue than saying something born of a deeper, much more profound lack of empathy for the people he's leading. We certainly had enough of that over the past few years, haven't we?
If the Tonight Show edited out that verbal slip, you can be absolutely certain that someone in the audience that night would have had a video up on YouTube within hours of the uncut version, and that would have caused an even bigger shitstorm because they would have said the Obama team was attempting to hide it.
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