If you missed it when it debuted on the Interwebz last month, prepare to be embarrassed for Kansas congressman Bill Otto (Republican, duh), who composed an Obama diss track after returning from a family reunion in the Ozarks.
("Rapping" starts at 3:14)
Shockingly, some people were offended by this. The controversy explained after the jump...
Otto posted the video on YouTube last month, but it came down Thursday after a fellow legislator called it as "disturbing" and suggested it was evidence of bigotry. Otto said the criticism is unfounded.Who's excited for the upcoming collaboration with MC Rove?
He said his adult daughters took the video down, using his passwords, because they didn't like him being called a racist. He said he told them that taking the video down made his situation worse.
"People are going to think that this was done by people to shut me up," Otto said in a telephone interview from his home in LeRoy, a small town about 75 miles south of Topeka. "I'm getting hate e-mails from Maryland to California, but, hey, that's part of the game."
Heidi Beirich, research director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, saw Otto's video as part of ongoing criticism of the nation's first black president that is "racially tinged."
The center, based in Montgomery, Ala., monitors hate groups and saw more than 200 reports of hate crimes in the weeks following Obama's election. "It's totally racially insensitive," she said.
