Saturday, April 8, 2023

Much ado ...

 So Angel Reese will apparently join her LSU teammates on the traditional White House visit, and I guess we can exhale now. This presumably includes the family of the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, whom Reese dragged into the middle of the silliest kerfuffle to come down the pike in a good while.

This kerfuffle happened because the First Lady, Jill Biden, attended the women's national title game between LSU and Iowa. And then, said, gosh, both teams put on such a terrific show maybe they both should be invited to the White House.

This wasn't an official invitation, mind you. It was just the First Lady trying to be nice, Which was perfectly obvious to anyone with half a working brain cell.

But you can't say anything these days, no matter how innocuous, without someone taking it the wrong way. Hell, it's practically become an art form.

And so Caitlin Clark of Iowa spoke up and said, nah, only winners get to go to the White House. And Reese  -- and, to a lesser degree, some of her teammates -- got all insulted by Jill Biden trying to be nice, saying the First Lady had disrespected them and what-not.

Reese even said she wouldn't be going to the White House now, and that maybe she'd go visit the Obamas instead.

(To which Barack likely replied in private: "Hey, leave me out of this.")

But she changed her mind eventually, maybe because her head coach, Kim Mulkey, whispered a few choice words in her ear. Such as, I don't know, Stop being a dopey college kid, Angel. Or maybe For God's sake, the woman was just trying to be nice, quit acting like she hit you in the face with a pie. Get over yourself.

And, look, maybe part of Reese's over-the-top reaction was because she is a dopey college kid. College kids generally are not fully-formed humans yet. It's why some of them walk to class in shorts and flipflops when it's snowing sideways and the windchill is Ice Station Zebra. 

Maybe, too, this was the residue of Reese being slammed for taunting Clark in exactly the same way Clark had taunted Louisville a week earlier. Everyone thought it was cute when the white girl did it. Everyone loves those stories about Larry Bird and Michael Jordan and heaven knows how many other male basketball stars taunting opponents, too.

But the black girl?

She got savaged for it. Mostly by old white guys, of course, which means there was both a racial and a gender element to the whole hypocritical business.

Anyway, here was Reese mere days after that, getting all butt-hurt about the First Lady trying to be nice (and a bit clueless, since it's doubtful Jill Biden knows the protocol for inviting teams to the White House). Would Reese have reacted that way had the aforementioned crapstorm not happened?

Maybe. Maybe not. But if the Blob had to choose, he'd choose Door No. 2.

Especially after the Assembled Media turned the White House thing into A Major News Story. Another Big Mac crafted from a nothingburger, in other words.

Nobody does it better.

No comments:

Post a Comment