Obama's Special Olympics Joke

I didn't watch "The Tonight Show" when the president made an appearance as I don't have a TV on which to watch it. I did, however, listen to the footage of his Special Olympics joke.

Obama had gotten a bowling score of 129, pretty awful. The audience cheered, and Jay Leno told him how good that was--the kind of patronizing approval often given to people with disabilities. And then the president called his own skills "Special Olympics."

I read some of the comments posted on YouTube and realized that boy, do we have a long way to go before people with physical or developmental disabilities are considered on par with the able-bodied.

What I would ask the president and all those who found his joke not a big deal to do is to substitute their own sensitivity into his joke. That is, if you are a woman and he would have said that he bowled like a woman, would you have been offended? What if he would have said he bowled as poorly as a senior citizen or a Latino or an Asian or a gay man?