News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
Sen. Harry Reid, in an effort to increase the popularity of the imperiled health care reform bill, on Monday added a provision requiring insurance companies to pay 100 percent of the cost of treatments intended to lighten the skin of African-Americans.
The news came a day after the revelation that in 2008 Reid had said Sen. Barack Obama’s presidential chances were good thanks to his relatively pale pigment and lack of “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”
“It’s not fair that the path to the Oval Office is blocked for my darker-hued friends,” Reid said Monday. “Skin-lightening therapy will open the corridors of power to a new generation of African-American leaders. And thanks to my amendment, this treatment will be free at last.”
Reid said lighter skin and a “more blanco dialect” provides Democrat politicians greater chances of election in a party with “a long history of working to give African-Americans all of the privileges I have enjoyed as a pale, pink-skinned candidate.”
President Obama released a statement praising Reid for “his sensitivity toward those born with mahogany, mocha and walnut skin, through no fault of their own.”
The president embraced “this amendment, and any other expansion of government involvement into the lives of ordinary Americans.”
The Senate majority leader said he’s still crafting a measure that would force insurers to also pay for “a dialect coach” for patients who had their skin lightened.
Reid admitted he can turn off his own dialect anytime he wants, and said he usually does when he’s “simply hanging, or kicking it with my residential boys.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world’s leading family-friendly news satire source.
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/Obama-Copenhagen-speech-solves-climate-crisis-8666528-79570882.html#ixzz0cNCo0QSZ
