Timothy Noah has an absurd posting on how a WSJ puff piece asking whether Obama is too skinny to be president is really “a coded discussion of race.” (Dreher and Sailer on this silliness.) The first thing I thought of was Eddie Murphy’s character in Bowfinger counting the number of times the letter K appears in a script to decode its racist content:
Kit: The letter K appears in this script 1,456 times. That’s perfectly divisible by 3.
Freddy: So what? So what you saying?
Kit: What am I saying? KKK appears in this script 486 times!
But it’s even worse, because Noah (who’s white) asked an actual black person — Michele Martin, who hosts Tell Me More, a pretty good NPR show that deals with racial issues — and she apparently hadn’t received the secret code book.