Crime, smog, traffic, graffiti and all they have to show for it is their crappy newspaper

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One in a series that takes a look at what's going on up at the L.A. Times.


The paper of record for Southern California continues to beclown itself: first it was an endorsement of California's high-speed rail program based upon the Egyptian pyramids and now a caricature of Michelle Obama is deemed racist.


The following image appeared on the conservative blog Gateway Pundit last week:

Here's the Times "Culture Monster", Christopher Knight breaking it all down for you in case you didn't notice the obvious racism:

A baldly racist depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama that appeared Tuesday on a right-wing website is based on a 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty (1740-1786). The full-length painting hangs outside Paris in the Palace of Versailles.

The Internet image grafts Obama's face onto Gautier-Dagoty's lavish depiction of the French queen, dressed in full regalia. It also replaces the draped left arm of the young monarch, then barely 20, with a muscular black arm and shifts the position of the right hand to place it in front of a world globe.

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an "uppity Negro," which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era. Obama, born into a working-class Chicago family whose roots are traced to the pre-Civil War South, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, prior to holding several high-level positions in the academic and private sectors.

Thanks for the mini-bio, Chris. We suppose that was given to someway and somehow prop up your ridiculous racism charge.

Fairly or not and rightly or wrongly, the First Lady has aquired an image of an imperious and priviledged individual. It's no stretch then to caricaturize her as a modern day Marie Antoinette. That's racist? No. It's not.

So, boiling things down to its most elemental, what Knight apparently thinks is racist, then is that a black American woman is caricaturized as a.. black American woman.




Commenter to the article, Isaac Bishop Junior, makes great points regarding projection, intellectual bankruptcy and the identity politics that absolutely consume the liberal-left:

An absolutely ignorant, irresponsible, uninformed piece of yellow journalism, and an example to the rest of the leftist media. Knight, you've outdone yourself, and you stand as an example of why the newspaper is rightfully destined to die out as a media outlet. As both an American that happens to be black, and a Conservative, I find nothing racist about this image. However, I do find plenty of racism in you. Like all leftists, you hide behind skin color as a shield. You make ethnicity and sexual orientation the center of all political conversation, showing that if anyone has an obsession with it, its the left (i.e.: people like you). This hit piece you've scrawled is nothing more than another clear indicator that the liberal tank is on "E", and you've no intellectual ammunition left to fight with, so, as opposed to debating issues, you argue nonsensical BS, like this. I remember the last time this happened, in regards to the "jokerized" Obama picture. The left touted this as an example of 'right-wing hatred' and 'racism', only to have it found out that a leftist "Palestinian" did it. Where were you, then? Hiding under your desks, plotting another outrage to manufacture. It is no wonder California is the cesspool it is, today; with your writings enabling it, they'll never climb out of the sewer they've voluntarily walked themselves into.

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