Michelle Obama is compared to Aunt Esther for two reasons, one the their similar expressions and the second is that Michelle is considered by many to have a similar demeanor.... This comparsion would not have been as effective with any other woman.. Anything perceived to be negative will be attached, adhere to the standards set by this forum and be prepared to DEFEND them. There is no problem with the comparison, there may be a problem with how it is presented.... Such as foul abusive language.
Let me provide a counter-example. During the campaign, there was a skit on Saturday Night Live about reporters from New York being ignorant of Alaska and being asked to go up there and report on Sarah Palin. During that skit, there was a comment about one of the reporters wanting to see if Todd Palin was molesting his daughters. That’s been repeated as an example of the horrible insults made against the Palins during the election.
I saw that skit and interpreted it very differently. I saw it as making fun of the reporters and the ignorant over-the-top things they were believing about the Palins and it was a comment, along with the rest of that skit, about how ignorant they were about anything outside of their cushy big-city left-wing environment. In other words, I think one could make a rational case that that joke wasn’t as awful as convervatives have made it out to be. But the target and intent don’t matter because conservatives saw it in the much larger context of the unreasonable attacks on Palin and it looked a lot like those other attacks, thus it was interpreted as yet another over-the-top attack on the Palins.
While these sorts of things may make perfect sense to the people making the jokes, the larger context matters and unfortunately there is a larger context here, not only in the form of untrue left-wing stereotypes of conservatives as racist but also the over-the-line comments that show up when I open up a thread about Mrs. Obama and see a half-dozen or more messages deleted by the moderator or actually see them before they are deleted. Aunt Esther alone? Maybe entirely justifiable and perhaps even funny. Combined with monkeys, Aunt Jemimah, and screeds about how ugly she is? Not so good in that light.