Category Archive 'Rich Lowry'

14 May 2015

Michelle Obama’s Microaggressions

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Rich Lowry adds another large one to the First Lady’s list of personal affronts.

Michelle Obama gave a commencement address at Tuskegee University that was a ringing call for the graduates not to be discouraged by her whining.

Much of the first lady’s speech was what is right and proper for a Tuskegee commencement, drawing on the story of the determination and skill of the Tuskegee Airmen. But she devoted a long passage to her own struggles that was off key and characteristically self-pitying.

Few women in modern America have been the focus of as much adulation as Michelle Obama, a Princeton University and Harvard Law School graduate who was making almost $270,000 by the time her husband was elected senator. She is routinely lionized for her beauty and her public spiritedness.

Yet, the first lady often strikes an aggrieved note when talking about her experience in America (her notorious comment in 2008 was that “for the first time in my adult lifetime I’m really proud of my country.”). Her gloss on the famous Wallis Simpson line is apparently that you can never be too rich, too thin or too easily offended.

At Tuskegee, she related a series of inconsequential gibes or perceived insults mostly from 2008 that, for her, loom large enough to share with graduating seniors years later.

The first lady cited a controversial New Yorker cover during that campaign of her sporting an Angela Davis-style Afro and a gun. The image was meant to satirize “misconceptions and prejudices” about the Obamas, in the words of the publication’s editor, David Remnick.

The first lady said “it knocked me back a bit.” Give her this: Few of us know the pain of being featured on a cover of one of the nation’s most respected magazines in a spoof meant to illustrate how our critics are mean-spirited loons.

(Remnick went on to further demonstrate his hostility to the Obamas by writing an admiring 672-page biography of the president.) …

In her Tuskegee address, at least Michelle Obama urged the graduates not to be daunted by slights (and more meaningful obstacles, like rotten schools). She commended to them the example of herself, “the fully-formed first lady who stands before you today.”

Even though Michelle Obama didn’t mention the word, what she was discussing was “microaggressions.” It is the trendy term on college campuses for often inadvertent offensiveness, such as Barack Obama, once upon a time, being mistaken for a waiter when he wore a tuxedo at an event.

The idiocy of the concept of the microaggression is its underlying premise that only people who belong to certain select groups ever suffer indignities or humiliations, when they are, of course, endemic to the human condition. George Orwell once said that every life seen from the inside is a series of defeats.

Read the whole thing.

20 Dec 2006

Rich Lowry Quaffs the Media’s Kool Aid, and Pronounces It Good

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As the anti-war left’s victory, and America’s defeat, seems increasingly inevitable, there has been an unseemly scurry on the part of leading elements of the neocon, and even conservative, punditocracy in the direction of seats on the apparently winning side, the side of Defeatism.

Nobody wants to be found rooting for the losing side anymore. It hurts one’s own image in the community of fashion to be found in association with failure.

National Review’s Rich Lowry yesterday joined the stampede, and tells us we should have been listening to the New York Times all along.

The conservative campaign against the mainstream media has scored notable successes. It exposed Dan Rather’s forged National Guard memo and jumped all over Newsweek’s absurd report of a Koran-flushing incident at Guantanamo Bay. The mainstream media is biased, arrogant, prone to stultifying group-think and much more fallible than its exalted self-image allows it to admit. It also, however, can be right, and this is most confounding to conservatives.

In Iraq, the media’s biases happen to fit the circumstances. Being primed to consider any military conflict a quagmire and another Vietnam is a drawback when covering a successful U.S. military intervention, but not necessarily in Iraq. Most of the pessimistic warnings from the mainstream media have turned out to be right — that the initial invasion would be the easy part, that seeming turning points (the capture of Saddam, the elections, the killing of Zarqawi) were illusory, that the country was dissolving into a civil war…

In their distrust of the mainstream media, their defensiveness over President Bush and the war, and their understandable urge to buck up the nation’s will, many conservatives lost touch with reality on Iraq. They thought that they were contributing to our success, but they were only helping to forestall a cold look at conditions there and the change in strategy and tactics that would be dictated by it.

You wouldn’t find members of today’s chattering classes, left or right typically, remaining to die in the last ditch in any of history’s famous last stands, would you?

One can only too readily picture:

Unilateral Spartan Intervention at Thermopylae a Diplomatic and Strategic Gaffe

as the column title for an editiorial written by young Thersites, editor of the Hellenic Review.

Here’s a white feather for Mr. Lowry.


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