Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer “Felt Threatened” By Obama

After waving her finger in the president’s face, Brewer tries to play the victim.

Without a doubt, the snapshot of Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer waving her finger in the face of President Barack Obama Wednesday has surfaced as the most circulated photo of the week. It’s so popular that Los Angeles Times Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist David Horsey drew an illustration of the incident.

In Horsey’s version, Brewer confronts the president to demand his immigration papers. (Brewer championed a controversial 2010 bill to crackdown on unauthorized immigration in Arizona, known as SB 1070). In actuality, Brewer requested a meeting with Obama after he landed at a Phoenix airport. He responded by saying that she mischaracterized a meeting they had in 2010 in her book, Scorpions for Breakfast. Before long, Brewer began pointing her finger at the president, and he left her on the tarmac in mid-sentence.

Mediate reports that Brewer evidently did misrepresent her previous meeting with Obama. In Scorpions for Breakfast, she writes that Obama behaved in a condescending, professorial manner with her, but immediately following the 2010 meeting at the White House, Brewer described her encounter with Obama to reporters as “very, very cordial.” She also remarked then that she felt encouraged that there would be greater dialogue between the state of Arizona and the federal government on the immigration issue. Given the tendency of some Republicans to exaggerate, Mediate suggests that Obama begin recording the conversations he has with conservatives from now on.

The fact that his latest encounter with Brewer was videotaped certainly worked to the president’s favor. According to Lawrence O’Donnell, host of MSNBC program “The Last Word,” Brewer did most of the talking during the encounter. Add in the fact that she pointed her finger at the president, and it’s difficult to see Obama as the aggressor in the situation. That’s exactly how she tried to portray the president, though, leading some to accuse her of playing into racial stereotypes of black men. “I felt a little bit threatened, if you will, in the attitude that he had, because I was there to welcome him,” she said

Yep, Brewer is just a nice little old white lady cowering in fear of the big, bad black president. Not. Buying. It. When people feel threatened, they don’t usually engage in aggressive body language like finger pointing. Even Fox News appears to have called Brewer out for being a drama queen, pointing out “Brewer’s tendency to embellish her recollections for dramatic effect.”