THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE, PART II

It's old news now, but this weekend I was reading The New York Observer's article about Barack Obama's Saturday Night Live appearance -- and about the difficulty SNL's writers say they're having coming up with jokes about Obama. ("It's like he's up against a steamroller and he's done as well as he can," says one writer. "What's funny about that?")

When Obama himself was scheduled to appear on the show, he did agree to appear in the opening Halloween party sketch -- but he nixed at least one other idea:

One proposed skit ... was for the "Weekend Update" segment of the show, in which Mr. Obama was asked to deliver an O.J. Simpson-esque "If I would have beaten up on Hillary" speech.

(The campaign wisely turned it down.)

Again with the O.J. Simpson?

This is the same nonsense we got last month from Maureen Dowd, who read Clarence Thomas's book and transformed him into O.J. Why are so many of us incapable of thinking of a prominent black man without thinking of other black men -- particular our most famous (and infinitely amusing) violent black man?