Obama rodeo clown: All in good fun?

last updated 8 January 2015

Sometimes, clowns are no laughing matter, said Philip Rucker in WashingtonPost.com. Rodeo clown Tuffy Gessling caused a national furor last week when he staged a show at the Missouri State Fair featuring a fellow clown wearing a President Obama mask and a broomstick that looked like it had been shoved up his backside. As “Obama’’ was chased by a real bull, Gessling whooped and hollered over the loudspeaker, “Obama, they’re coming for you this time! He’s going to getcha, getcha, getcha!” And “Yahoo! We’re gonna smoke Obama, man.” The overwhelmingly white crowd went wild, screeching with laughter when “Obama” played with his lips. A three-minute amateur video of the show went viral, with liberals condemning the clown act as racist and conservatives hotly insisting it was all in good fun. Fair spectator Perry Beam, however, said there was nothing fun about seeing a crowd roar as the black president ran for his life. “It reminded me of a Klan rally,” Beam said. “It had that hateful aspect.’’

Oh, lighten up, people, said James Taranto in WSJ.com. “For his offense against the Dear Leader,” Gessling has now been permanently banned from the Missouri State Fair. But nowhere in the Clown Commandments is political humor forbidden. In fact, making fun of presidents is a rodeo tradition: I didn’t hear a peep from the progressive lynch mob when a George H.W. Bush dummy was impaled by a bull at a 1994 New Jersey rodeo. It’s our national right—“nay, duty”—to pick on presidents, said David Weigel in Slate.com. That was certainly the rule with George W. Bush. Liberal rock and movie stars routinely condemned him from the stage, and at anti–Iraq War rallies, posters depicted him as a war criminal. The huge overreaction to Gessling’s “dumb-but-legal political joke” only tells the Obama haters they’re right about the Left’s double standards.

At first, I also thought the cries of racism were unjustified, said Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. But then I took another look at the video. I saw Southern whites cheering lustily as our first black president is trapped, unarmed, in a ring with a charging bull and baited by a jeering announcer. Given our nation’s history, that little tableau inevitably evokes “the mob-inspired lynching of black men,” and it’s not at all amusing or light-hearted. In this case, “memory conquers humor.”