Obama's 'Dog' Remark Reveals That He Is Secretly Black

Did you notice that on Labor Day Barack Obama went "off-TelePrompTer" and made a kind of petulant remark about the fact that nobody likes him anymore? The "powerful interests" who oppose him "talk about me like a dog," he says. Like everything Obama says that isn't a direct quote from the Bible or Dale Carnegie, this phrase aroused suspicions from people on the right! A dog, eh? What could he have possibly meant by this word? Something terrible and anti-American? Well, obviously; this is Obama we're talking about. But what kind of anti-Americanism are we dealing with here? That's the legitimate debate we'll be having, after the jump.

If you are a "visual learner," here is the actual video, courtesy of the obsessive Final Cut Pro jockeys at Talking Points Memo:  

Now obviously the first thing you think when you hear someone bad-mouthing dogs is "MUSLIM MUSLIM MUSLIM." So "Blog Smith" follows this video with the pithy quotation (from Bartlett's ?) "Two of the worst insults in Islam feature dogs and shoes." And so also opines the Michelle Malkin commentariat! 

• "Because Obama is a muslim, his dog reference has signifigance. In western, christian society, dogs are well thought of, but in islam, dogs are almost forbidden. They are seen as unclean and prohibited."

• "Yes, this is probably his Indonesian/Muslim early upbringing speaking. Americans might say, 'Treat me like a dog,' but in my 56 years I have never heard the expression, 'They talk about me like a dog.' It just sounds weird here.

• "No doubt about it, this was a very Muslim thing to say. Pretty soon he'll be urging us to hit George W. Bush with our shoes."

(Side note:  should we hit George W. Bush with our shoes? We didn't even realize this was an option!)

Anyway, the nerds over the Language Log put their professional linguist powers on the case to determine if this was a secret Muslim phrase slipping out. Using an extremely specialized linguistic analysis tool known as "Google," they found several instances of the phrase "talk about me like a dog." The contexts might surprise you!

• The Jimi Hendrix song "Stone Free" contains the lines "People try to pull me down/ they talk about me like a dog/ talk about the clothes I wear."

• Bobby Brown gave an interview to Ebony in 1994 in which he said "The press has really destroyed my name. They don't know me and they talk about me like a dog. It's lies!"

• A passage from an anthology of African-American sermons includes the sentence "Roll your eyes at me; cuss me out; talk about me like a dog, but you ain't getting in, because, Satan, I know where you want to go."

• In 1996, San Antonio Spurs star David Robinson said of one of his opponents that "I know the fellas are going to talk about me like a dog if the guy comes in here and embarrasses me."

What is the common thread here, hmmm? Could it be that our President is nothing more than a person of color? We realize that this conclusion is shocking, but we at Wonkette feel that America should not be sheltered from the truth. Conservative commenters clearly need to start hanging around with more black people, so that they can recognize these black "dog-whistle phrases" when they hear them. [ Language Log / Blog Smith / Michelle Malkin ]