It's the end of August, so National "Public" Radio felt the need to drag out the old Democrat spin: "Whatever happened to Obama's tan suit?" On Friday's All Things Considered, they had to spend eight minutes considering that Obama-hating Republicans created a phony scandal over a fashion faux pas.
That wasn't all. They also made Obama's "infamous" tan suit the top story in their Saturday edition of their podcast Consider This. Co-host Adrian Florido set the silly stage:
ADRIAN FLORIDO: On CNN, then-Representative Peter King, a Republican, took issue with the fact that President Obama was speaking to the press in not traditional dark gray or navy attire, but in a summer outfit, a tan suit. Conservative commentators ran with it. Here's Lou Dobbs on Fox Business.
LOU DOBBS: The president is so neatly attired normally that I think it was shocking to a lot of people.
FLORIDO: For the record, Presidents Reagan and Clinton also wore tan suits. Online, people joked, "yes we tan" or "the audacity of taupe." The absurd scandal eventually died down, but it has lived on in our nation's memory.
The liberal-media trick of the day was to pretend the Republicans were pushing an "absurd scandal." Under Trump, they manufacture mini-scandals daily, like renaming bodies of water or whether the president improperly fed fish in a koi pond.
Then Florido turned to Chicago Sun-Times reporter Lynn Sweet, who has been wasting her time trying to find the actual tan suit, which Obama said he donated to charity. She advertises a special email for people who think they might have it -- tansuit@suntimes.com. The Republican fashion police were conducting a racist exercise?
FLORIDO: Why do you think we still remember this scandal, if you want to call it that, so clearly? What has made the tan suit controversy live on in our memories all these years later?
SWEET: When I talked to Colleen Shogan, who's the former archivist of the United States, and I asked her a question like that. She said that perhaps the tans suit controversy was, quote, "emblematic," close quote, of the challenges Obama faced as the first African American president of the country. He was under a great deal of scrutiny about acting presidential. And that's why this episode lives on.
Oh really? Speaking of racism, NPR did a story in 2018 on First Lady Melania Trump's outrage in beige on an African tour: "A series of beige outfits Trump wore on her trip to Africa has been under scrutiny — not because critics find them unfashionable, but rather, because they say the clothing references harmful colonialist attitudes about the continent."
NPR also displayed how all the lefties giggle over the tan suit by noting Obama appeared Larry David's Trump-hating/Obama-loving HBO "comedy" Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Happiness, where Larry insists he wear a tan suit to his press conference:
SWEET: And if I may add, people listening to us may have thought they just saw that tan suit in a recent episode on HBO's Larry David show, where he mocks historic events...In the finale, in the last skit of all things, President Obama plays himself in a very comic schtick about why he wore the tan suit to begin with.
OBAMA: You sure about this?
DAVID: Never been more sure about anything in my life.
OBAMA: OK. I'll be back.
DAVID: People are going to be talking about this for a long, long time.
Liberals are going to talk about this every August. At the five-year anniversary, CNN and MSNBC celebrated the "biggest scandal" of Obama's presidency. This is the 12th anniversary, but the reason for this occasion was the Obama Presidential Center opening this year. They noted that Stephen Colbert and David Letterman both wore tan suits for the occasion.
