Harvard's Niall Ferguson recently defended a column that he wrote for The Financial Times in which he compared President Obama to Felix the Cat. In a disparaging tone not infrequently deployed by Harvard professors, he says:
So it's racist to compare President Obama with Felix the Cat? Oh dear, the seemingly dead body of political correctness just twitched. Let's try logic, shall we?
- Black cats are proverbially lucky.
- Felix the cartoon character was a black cat, not an African-American cat - in other words, he was not one of the (quite numerous) 1920s figures in popular entertainment that mocked the mannerisms of the descendants of slaves.
- Obama is a lucky president -- so far. Compare his first six months with Carter's and Clinton's if you don't get that bit.
- As for the word "black", it's the same one used by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, among others.
The piece made an important point about the biggest threat to Obama's presidency: the seemingly uncontrollable deficit. That's the issue the Huffington Post should be focusing on, not politically correct claptrap.
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