OBAMA-CURIOUS GEORGE TEE AN INSTANT COBB COUNTY CLASSIC
Non-racists in Cobb County, Georgia, must be so proud of their national media hits, especially when one involves a Marietta bar owner hawking a T-shirt depicting Barack Obama as a monkey. No word whether its creator, Mulligans proprietor Mike Norman, got the idea to adorn a mock Barack shirt with the image of Curious George from listening to Rush Limbaugh or if it was just a side effect of a life lived with his head up his ass.
"It's time to put an end to this," Rich Pellegrino, a Mableton resident and director of the Cobb-Cherokee Immigrant Alliance tells the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That there is such an alliance speaks volumes in a town that owes existence to a humongous land grab from the Cherokee Nation under the Indian Removal Act in 1832. Bygones. Well, until Norman got himself a giant message board in front of his bar, anyway. His past messages include: "I wish Hillary had married OJ," "No habla espanol—and never will," and the classic "I.N.S. Agents eat free." Norman tells AJC "I'm saying out loud what everyone in this town whispers." But the fact that they're whispering it these days and not blasting it through megaphones atop police horses constitutes progress in Dixie.
Put another feather in the cap of the county that was the home of the conservative Republican Revolution but receives about 60 times more federal funding than the average county, the home to both whiteguy politician archetype Newt Gingrich and gun maker Glock, the county that tried to slap stickers in public school textbooks that defined evolution as "a theory not a fact" before a judge outlawed the practice. Also, it's in Georgia.
By Tyler Gray 05/13/08 2:00 PM