The Professor and the Bellhop

[Swede]

West's bitter, petty tirade against Obama has been dismantled around the Web, most notably by Melissa Harris-Perry, writing in the Nation (a piece that caused an enormous Twitter uproar), but no one was up in arms about his anti-bellhop comment. West was upset that he couldn't get a ticket to the inauguration after having campaigned for Obama. (Harris-Perry notes how West and his friend Tavis Smiley also attempted to undermine Obama.)

"We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the Inauguration," West told Chris Hedges. Jealous of a bellhop? West even dragged poor Mama West into it: "My mom says, 'That's something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can't get one, honey.' " That's something, all right.

They know nothing about this bellhop -- whom he knows, where he comes from, how much of his hard-earned money he may have given to the campaign or to the Democratic Party over the years, what he may have done before he was a bellhop or what he does at night, when he takes his cap off. I, for one, would not be in the business of second-guessing the political connections and resourcefulness of Washington, D.C., bellhops. (Socrates, whom West is so fond of invoking, would find this all quite hilarious.)

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