First Lady's Hamburger Sends Right-Wing Sites Into a Tizzy

For some reason, Michelle Obama's recent trip to Shake Shack warranted a story in the Washington Post, and a poll about whether or not the First Lady, an advocate for healthy eating, was a hypocrite.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic called it "the dumbest story ever written in all of human history." But Salon's Alex Pareene sees something darker both in the choice to run the story and the reaction it received in the right-wing blogosphere.

"The Post probably just ran the stupid story to begin with because they know Obama's anti-childhood obesity campaign is catnip for the right wing," he writes. "Matt Drudge is obsessed with Michelle Obama and his weird fantasy idea of her as a threatening, angry, anti-white black woman (who is also a liberal nanny-state tyrant). "

Added Pareene, "the tone of the Michelle Obama coverage, and the commentary it generates, is pretty unmistakably racially tinged. (In addition, obviously, to being usually blatantly sexist.)"

Presidential wives have come in for criticism when they waded (or were thought to have waded) too far into shaping policy. (Think Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton.) Laura Bush focused on childhood literacy, which is pretty innocuous and the kind of pet cause that's hard to politicize. Who's for illiteracy, anyway?

One might think that fighting childhood obesity would be the same kind of cause. Apparently it isn't.