Dustup over Obama daughters’ school Pearl Harbor Day ‘Japanese’ menu

posted at 10:55 am on December 8, 2011 by Howard Portnoy
[ Double Standards ]   

Yesterday was December 7, a day that Franklin Roosevelt declared would “live in infamy.” To be sure that this seventieth anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor had the requisite amount of infamy, a local Washington news station, WUSA-TV, reported that Sidwell Friends School in D.C. would be serving Japanese food at lunchtime. The Washington Post picked up the story, precipitating a minor chain reaction of outrage on the right followed by I’ll-see-your-outage-and-raise-you from the left.

An ingredient in the report that undoubtedly gives it legs is the fact that First Children Malia and Sasha Obama are enrolled at Sidwell Friends. Talk about your guilt by association.

Ellis Turner, associate head of the school, maintains that the menu is developed by an independent contractor and that the Asian theme was an unhappy coincidence. That seems entirely plausible. Upon closer inspection, yesterday’s lunch menu featured only one nominally Japanese dish—teriyaki marinated chicken strips. (The dessert, fortune cookies, is barely Asian, let alone Japanese.)

This story is a non-starter, or at least it should have been. And it would have been had not “voices of reason” on the left paused to tsk-tsk over the disproportionate response from those on the right. The Huffington Post expends a few column inches to the story that includes a link to a blog whose bottom-line take is (drum roll!) that conservatives are racists.

Late in the day yesterday, WUSA rejoined the fray it had started, devoting a segment of its recurring feature “Let’s Be REAL” to an editorial on the story (video here). Reporter Derek McGinty began his lecture of those who took offense by observing, “This was not about the food” but about “what we as Americans pay honor to.” I would argue that it is probably both.

A larger issue that liberals fail to grasp is that their criticism of the right for making a mountain out of a molehill is bidirectional. They become as easily if not more incensed over non-issues when the stakes appear to warrant it. Last February, there were vocal protests from the left over U.C. Irvine’s “racist” decision to serve chicken and waffles on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day. Nor was there derision directed at Aramark Corporation, which runs the university’s dining hall, when it announced its employees would undergo “sensitivity training.”

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