Tipsheet

A Revealing Anecdote?

Over at NRO, Jim Geraghty calls our attention (via Tom Maguire) to a possibly revealing anecdote about Michelle Obama: At the hospital where she worked, she altered the hospital's research agenda to prevent the HPV vaccine from being offered to black teenage girls locally, on the grounds that the program was reminiscent of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

I myself have noted that there is something deeply disturbing about society's apparent acceptance of the idea that, in some cases, little girls as young as 9 need to be vaccinated to protect them from a virus that's sexually transmitted.

But Mrs. Obama's concerns apparently aren't that young women are being sexualized too soon.  Rather, they focus on a racial grievance that, while legitimate and terrible, is long past -- and they seem to indicate a certain level of paranoia that would be unfortunate in a First Lady.

If Michelle Obama were a member of the GOP, and she had objected to the HPV vaccine on moral grounds, you can bet your life that the MSM would be busily trying to find a young black woman in Chicago who contracted HPV -- and who might have been protected from it if the research project that Mrs. Obama stopped had, in fact, gone through.