Diane explains the watermelon.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

Inland GOP mailing depicts Obama’s face on food stamp.

The latest newsletter by an Inland Republican women’s group depicts Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama surrounded by a watermelon, ribs and a bucket of fried chicken, prompting outrage in political circles.

The group’s president, Diane Fedele, said she plans to send an apology letter to her members and to apologize at the club’s meeting next week.

“It was strictly an attempt to point out the outrageousness of his statement. I really don’t want to go into it any further,” Fedele said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “I absolutely apologize to anyone who was offended. That clearly wasn’t my attempt.”

“I didn’t see it the way that it’s being taken. I never connected,” she said. “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else.”

When asked later to explain the “just food” part of the above explanation, Diane Fedele, came up with the following totally plausible defense:

Ok… first I didn’t realize that the “F” in KFC meant FRIED, because over the last few years the company has gone out of its way to re-brand itself as Kitchen FRESH Chicken and there’s noting racist about FRESH chicken as everyone loves fresh chicken… in the same way that not JUST Jews love money and I have some non-Indian friends who give things to other people and then subsequently take them back again. If I had known that the chicken in the bucket were FRIED and that people would’ve taken offense, I would have absolutely substituted it with a benign image, like, say… hominy grits or collard greens.

And honestly, I thought the ribs were a meatloaf and there’s nothing racist about a meatloaf, right? Now, maybe if it was a STOLEN meatloaf, that would be racist, but even I know that not just black people steal things. Hispanics steal a lot too. And some orientals.

Kool-Aid is just Kool-Aid and so there’s no big deal about that. I mean, you could argue that its been spiked with a forty of Olde English 800, but there’s NO WAY to tell that from the illustration.

OK, OK… now about that round fruit in the upper right corer. See, I swear it was going to be a lime or a kiwi, but I couldn’t find an illustration that really made me happy… you know how that happens to a person. And then I came across this one image… and because of my new eyeglasses and the fact that I was distracted by some gas I was having I thought it was a honeydew or a cantaloupe. But in no possible was I trying to conjure hateful racism symbolism. Now that I’m aware that watermelons have been used to demean Africans American’s I will ABSOLUTELY TAKE DOWN the historical illustration (right) which I currently have hanging above the crip in the twin’s nursery.

I must say I believe her. Its pretty clear that Diane Fedele is a good person who had NO IDEA what she was doing. I mean, what nefarious intent could be implied by the honest question that preceded the Obamabucks image…

“Obama talks about all those presidents that got their names on bills. If elected, what bill would he be on… Food Stamps, what else!”