Late on Thursday evening, President Obama and the First Lady issued a statement to those celebrating Kwanzaa. This was consistent with their statements this holiday season for Christmas and Hanukkah. Considering that anywhere from 2 to 5 million people in this country alone observe and celebrate the holiday, and both the President and FLOTUS are African American, it should be both uncontroversial and expected for POTUS to make a statement.
“Michelle and I extend our best wishes to all those celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season.” —President Obama
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) December 26, 2013
The official statement from the White House was this:
Michelle and I extend our best wishes to all those celebrating Kwanzaa this holiday season. Today marks the beginning of the week-long celebration of African American culture through family activities and community festivities that bring attention to Kwanzaa’s seven principles of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. Though each principle represents the essence of this holiday, they also represent the shared values that bind us as Americans.
As families and communities across our country come together today to light the Kinara, our family sends our hopes for a prosperous and healthy new year.
For the most part, there was not much outrage from the right regarding this press release and tweet. But, it wasn’t for lack of trying by the right-wing’s favorite troll, Ann Coulter. Around the same time that the President was releasing his statement, Coulter posted an article to her website where she decided to explain the ‘true’ origins of Kwanzaa. Basically, it is all the result of the FBI and CIA mixed with ’60s counterculture sprinkled with Marxism and collectivism. Basically, another liberal plot to bring down our society as we know it.
For anyone that knows Coulter, this is pretty much her shtick. She must demonize and whip up a frenzy about anything that can considered liberal or progressive. And, as is typical of her, when it comes to matters of race, especially African-Americans, she needs to make sure to ‘whitesplain’ everything to them. In this case, it is about Kwanzaa.
The very worst part of the article, and what Coulter will obviously defend as ‘humor’ or ‘sarcasm’, came at the very end. After pointing out (without any shred of evidence) that Kwanzaa is ‘celebrated exclusively by idiot white liberals’ and that blacks in America only celebrate Christmas (because, of course, SHE KNOWS), she provided this nice little ‘song’ that is supposed to be sung to the tune of Jingle Bells:
Kwanzaa bells, dashikis sell
Whitey has to pay;
Burning, shooting, oh what fun
On this made-up holiday!
Much like everything that Coulter writes or says, it is all just a confused word salad of jumbled ideas that is searching for an all-encompassing theory about why liberalism is bad. When she is called on her BS, she dismisses it out of hand as just dumb liberals just not ‘getting it.’ The same goes when someone points out a blatantly racist or bigoted statement she has made. She always takes the Rush Limbaugh defense. Essentially, she said it in a humorous context and overly sensitive PC-types are making too much of it.
This will be the case here. That is, if anyone even cares. In the end, Coulter has gone so far down the rabbit hole that even conservatives tend to not listen to her anymore. She is so one-note and absurd that she has a tough time finding anyone other than Fox News to bring her on. And even with Fox News, you can tell most of the hosts don’t take her seriously anymore. She has gone well past her expiration date but nobody on the right has been able to tell her its over. Instead, they just stop picking up the phone.
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