A short video clip is circulating cyberspace that appears to show president Barack Obama saying “gotta have them ribs, and pussy too.”
Of course, this video seems to have surfaced in response to a recent controversial video clip featuring Donald Trump making various lewd remarks about women. In that video, Trump uses the term “pussy” with its more colloquial (and offensive) meaning, and many people sharing this clip of Obama are asserting that the president is equally as bad as Trump for using the same term.
However, while the video of Obama is real, there are very clear and important differences between the two incidents, namely the Obama clip has transparently and knowingly been taken out of context.
While Trump was indeed making derogatory remarks about women, Obama was not. Obama was reading an excerpt from his book ‘Dreams of My Father’ back in 1995. Upon seeing the full clip (link below) you can see that Obama was not demanding “ribs and pussy too.” In fact he was recounting a conversation he had with another person, and the line was spoken by another character in the book.
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Further claims that this video has just been “leaked” or it’s “breaking news” are simply false. The entire video of president Obama reading his book has been available online for years, and you can see it on YouTube here. Skip to around 14.45min to begin the relevant section where this line was said.
The relevant portion of the clip is transcribed below.
One of the guys sitting nearby must have overheard us because he leaned over with a sagacious expression on his face.
“You guys talking about Malcolm? Malcolm tells it like it is. No doubt about it.”
“Yeah,” another guy said. “But I’ll tell you what. You won’t moving to no African jungle anytime soon. Or some goddamn desert somewhere sitting on a carpet. With a bunch of Arabs. No sir. You won’t stop me eating no ribs, either. Gotta have them ribs. And pussy too. Don’t Malcolm talk about no pussy. Now you know that ain’t gonna work.”
I noticed Ray laughing and looked at him sternly.