When is 'funny' not so funny?

I found the other cartoon that MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell refused to show on his February 15, The Last Word. The images are disgusting and racist.

The other half of the cartoon was one in which a very brown skinned, pink lipped, plump Michelle Obama is sitting at a table eating from a platter of hamburgers and fries. A Ketchup bottle is also on the side.

Michelle tells President Obama, her husband: "I've stepped up my efforts to control America's eating habits by telling restaurants to lower portion sizes and fat content."

A skinny President is deeply tanned, with ears the size of no recognizable human. He has a tiny amount of vegetables on his plate. Giving Michelle a talk-to-the-hand, he tells her : "Michelle, I want to get re-elected. What you're doing is only going to annoy a lot of people."

Anyone who believes this crap is doing so because they want to believe this is the real Michelle Obama. They have no evidence that she stuffs herself like a pig. The President and First Lady are two of the physically fittest people to ever grace the White House.

O'Donnell said he would not show the rest of the cartoon "because it is a racist obscenity." In his view, President Obama was depicted "in a half man, half animal form, with ears that don't exist in the homo sapien species."

An online poll conducted by New York Daily News, February 15, says that 42% of those who participated said the cartoon was totally offensive; 54% said it was funny, and 4% were not sure how they felt. I read some of the remarks and they all said it was funny. Someone wrote, "People are too uptight, thinking the cartoon is racist." Someone said O'Donnell is racist because of his response.

I have never seen or read this kind of blatant disrespect for any president in America's history. Right wing hatemongers see this as satire. What has been written and said about President Obama and his family falls in line with tabloid smut.

The cartoonists, Batton Lash and James Hudnall, must have had negligent parents who did not teach them that respect is a desirable character trait. Maybe they cannot acquire the taste to treat African Americans with respect, particularly the President and First Lady.

In defense of the obnoxious “cartoon” Hudnall said on biggovernment.com: "Batton and I are not so much conservatives as libertarians. We’re believers in small government because, as I outline in my political thesis, it’s the only workable form. President Obama is very much a big government fan. He has tripled the debt and deficits in his first year in office. His new budget would add another three trillion. These are things we don’t like about him. We also don’t like the lies. Which seem to be second nature to the man.

“So last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything.”

For the love of life I cannot see the connection in what these two said, and the president running the country. They implied that President Obama is a pathological liar. I am happy to see that Michelle and Barack Obama are cut from a stronger cloth than those whose aim is to disparage them. Their parents taught them well. Respect for others, and self-respect does not allow for wallowing in the mud with pigs.

The “mild cartoon” that Lash and Hudnall defended has been scrubbed from the site for now. The above images were on Andrew Breitbart’s biggovernment.com.