Obama Impersonator Pulled Offstage at GOP Meeting

Reggie Brown’s act was cut short this weekend at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans after he made a number of racially tinged jokes about Obama and proceeded to make fun of a few Republican presidential contenders, reports the Washington Post.  “My mother loved a black man and, no, she was not a Kardashian,” Brown said. He also made a joke about how First Lady Michelle Obama celebrated all of Black History Month but he only celebrated half the month. In addition, Brown showed a picture of Fred Sanford and his sister-in-law Ethel from the show Sanford and Son and said that’s what the Obamas will look like when the president leaves office.

He also criticized some Republicans and continued pushing into questionable territory. For example, to criticize Tim Pawlenty’s move not to criticize Mitt Romney at a debate, Brown said that CNN’s “John King serviced him up a ball softer than Barney Frank’s backside.” And he also said that Newt Gingrich’s approval ratings are dropping “faster than Anthony Weiner’s pants in an AOL chat room.” Brown was eventually escorted off the stage when he was setting up a joke about Michele Bachmann. “I just thought he had gone too far,” said RLC President and CEO Charlie Davis. “He was funny the first 10 or 15 minutes, but it was inappropriate, it was getting ridiculous.”

Over at Wonkette, Kirsten Boyd Johnson writes that while several media outlets make it sound as if Brown was booted from the stage because of the racial jokes directed at Obama, the video seems to suggest otherwise. “He actually got all the way through those ‘Obama is black’ jokes  — including one about how they should rearrange the room according to pre-Civil Rights Act regulations, and everyone laughed — before” he began to get booed for insulting Republicans, writes Johnson. The Atlantic’s Joshua Green says the act was “more tone deaf than offensive.”