What’s clucking up at the Henhouse?

Fox News Says Gabby Douglas’ Leotard, Other US Olympic Uniforms Not Patriotic Enough

Bless us, a grown man is talking smack about a teenage girl, so it’s got to be about fashion. He must be very butch. So says the assistant principal:

[David] Webb noted that gymnasts “adjust their uniforms within boundaries sometimes,” but he still had an issue with the “anti-American feeling.”

…

“If you want to be in the Olympics, you’re playing for your country,” said Webb. “The Chinese are wearing red predominantly as that’s their national color, if you will, so why not us with the red, white and blue? There’s a meaning behind the red, white and blue that has been lost.”

Gymnasts sometimes push up their long sleeves and judges sometimes penalize for it. The rules are very strict. Last night, Gabby Douglass was chewing gum in the stands and I was as shocked as if I’d seen her eating actual food.

Has the gold medal. And detention, apparently.

Believe it or not, Webb, who should be arguing about hall passes in the Mr. Blackwell Middle School in Nowhere, Pennsyltucky, is in a state of high dudgeon over little pink leotards. I mulled over the pink uniforms too, but I wondered how the designers got away with it. The elite athlete of questionable patriotic fervor is a teenage girl; in the general population, teenage girls carry pink phones in their pink purses and wear sweats with the word PINK plastered on their tiny teeny butts. Teenage girly-girls wear pink and our women’s gymnastics team is composed entirely of teenage girls whose femininity is seriously and publicly policed by the US Gymnastics Federation and the Olympic authorities. Some committee okayed these uniforms made by the blistered hands of tiny Chinese slave-children. Just kidding. I’m sure they were slave-adults.

Not on the team but still pretty, which counts bigtime in gymnastics.

Also: it never crossed my mind that Alicia Sacramone might have been the intended wearer of the fuschia leotard. No. Not at all. No. She looks great in fuschia.

Assistant Principal Webb again:

‘What’s wrong with showing pride?” Webb asked. “What we’re seeing is this kind of soft anti-American feeling that Americans can’t show our exceptionalism. Frankly, if they are offended about our showing our exceptionalism then they have that right and I don’t care. And neither do most Americans.”

Gymnastics has rules against showing your exceptionalism. Or your cootchy. Don’t do that. It’s a big deduction.

What is this frustrated jerkwad talking about, anyway? Four other girls were dressed the same unpatriotic way. He doesn’t mention them. Maybe he wanted Gabby Douglass to roll a tank down the vaulting runway and end every routine with a military salute? This is stupid and inappropriate and in keeping with Mouthbreather-Americans’ fetishization of all things military and flaggy. Yes, this is an international event, but the point of the Olympics is peaceful competition between nations. That point is lost on a lot of people. So what the fuck is this guy doing in turning one teenage girl’s outfit into a nightmare of thwarted hypernationalism? And doesn’t it sound a lot like what the Henhouse cluckers say about President Obama?