Home > the problem with obama: he’s black
The pundits have a million explanations to explain why Obama is winning (mostly centering around the notion that he offers more hope and change than Hillary while being more electable than Kucinich, who offers real change, if not hope), but few can tell you the truth in our racially charged, embarrassed, and scared society. The truth is, he won because he’s black. A white guy with two years experience would be a joke; this is patently, painfully, and obviously obvious to anyone with the slightest concept of reality.
But, the bumptious Obama is a very special kind of black man too. He is not like Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson, or Al Sharpton. He does not rub white America’s nose in its racist past, rather he says, "if you’ll accept me as a black man, with my reassuringly white facial features and speech patterns, I wont bring up your history of racism about which you feel so guilty and your heart bleeds so compassionately. It’s a reasonable bargain too, but only if you’re mostly concerned about healing racial wounds from other centuries that may or may not exist.
Of course, if you’re mostly concerned with an economy that’s heading toward recession, the loss of American business hegemony, skyrocketing health costs, greeting life with abortion rather than love, and, oh yes, Muslin fanatics who have vowed to kill 20 million of us, then the black kid lawyer with two years experience seems like a very silly choice indeed.
One can’t help having ones complacency and smugness disturbed by Max Rodenbeck’s words: "Within a mere 15 years of the Prophet Muhammad’s death his desert followers had conquered all the centers of civilization. They has erased a great and enduring regional power, Persia; reduced its brilliant rival, Byzantium, to a rump state; and carved from their territories an empire as vast as that as Rome at its height. Within 100 years, Muslim armies were harrying the frontiers of Tang dynasty China in the east, while 5,000 miles to the west, they had charged across Spain to clash with the Merovingian princes of what is now France. The triumph was not just military"
Against this backdrop you have our contumacious modern Democrats who hate America, and would have sold it to the Communists, had Republicans not stopped them. Now, surprise, they are weak on terrorism too, seeing it mostly as a manifestation of American cultural, economic , and military imperialism. We can only pray, hopelessly, that Obama wants to talk to modern Iran the way Muhammad wanted to talk to ancient Persia.
Republicans, those who are willing to be honest anyway, of course are hoping that Obama does win the Democratic nomination by just being black and, let’s not forget, by selling the most laughably trite of political shibboleths,"hope" and "change" to the Democratic monkey masses as a cri de cœur. It seems the emotive, Democratic, liberal heart bleeds uncontrollably over past racism much the way a child’s heart might uncontrollably and randomly bleed over an injured animal accidentally found on the sidewalk.
If the Democrats want to take the Obama accident home to their convention, that’s great for Republicans, most of whom realize that Welfare, for example, the most obvious manifestation of the Democratic bleeding heart, was ended 10 years ago because it amounted to a near genocide against the blacks it was intended to help, starting 45 years ago, for something that largely happened in still another previous century.
Republicans can only hope for the self discipline necessary to keep their powder dry until the irrelevancy of events from past centuries that is evoked by Obama’s skin color becomes apparent to the general electorate, after his nomination. Obama is a Rorschach test for Democrats who evokes the worst in them, but a man for whom Republicans have a surreptitious and strategic love. Only he can make the Democratic bleeding heart swoon so suicidally.
To make matters worse, not only does Obama shamelessly appeal to the bleeding heart, he also appeals to the anti American collectivist side of the Democratic personality. Republicans want to be free while Democrats want to be led by a powerful government led by a powerful leader, and so you the wave of hysteria ushering Obama through Iowa and New Hampshire. And this is absolutely fine, except that it’s profoundly anti- American.
Forum posts
17 January 2008, 12:00
Aside from being factually incorrect in several places, this perspective reflects the kind of pervasive confusion regarding not only Obama but the entire political landscape demonstrated by the American public.
First, and most important, Obama has eleven years experience as a legislator (7 in IL and 4 in the Senate) as opposed to two as you mentioned. Or are you employing a heretofore unknown kind of fuzzy math? Then, if you also count community relations and his time as an instructor, you’ve got a reasonably solid resume.
Truman, for instance, had two years of experience selling men’s clothes before the business failed and he went into politics. The inference here is that Hillary has a better resume, when in fact she’s inflated her background as a part-time lawyer with the Rose law firm, her stint as First Lady, and less than two terms as Senator into "35 years of experience."
If you’re going to cite lack of true experience as a political liability, she’s at the top of the list. Oh, I forgot, your theme was Black People. Why?
It’s not quite apparent since you decided to implicitly dance around the issue while insinuating that the legacy of problems associated with African Americans prohibit them from becoming President. Or is it the skin color that truly riles you?
Are you invoking the kind of implicit smear that Bob Kerry did when he talked about Obama’s experiences with secular madrassas, which is a mutually contradictory concept? Or do you feel more comfortable with BET’s Johnson talking about what Obama "did in the neighborhood," insisting, after the hoopla that he meant social work and not drugs? Is this part of the Electronic Character Assassination campaign being run by Hillary’s people?
You deserve credit for this; your character assassination seems to be coming from left field more than from the right or left. Congratulations on covering your tracks, or, most of them anyway.
The abortion reference and the charge that Democrats are contumacious, however, exhibit one part evagelical and one part Neocon. What a mix! Don’t tell me, you represent the Rainbow Coalition on the right?
No, Democrats in general are not contumacious; they’re obsequious. They voted for the illegal and immoral war in Iraq, now costing over $2B a day and manufacturing all those, how would you say it, Islamofascists, or just fanatics?
If that’s truly your concern, then use your writing skills to solicit your Representatives to end this quagmire. You want to get the fanatics, the way Muhammad got Persia? Dream on.
Your Neocon brigade, or would you prefer, Crusaders, haven’t yet caught up with bin Laden and the core of radicals that obviously have you and millions of other Americans needlessly living in abject fear. Besides, Are you implying that the "War on Terror" is going to successfully track down every fanatic in the world and completely eliminate the prospects of 20 Million, or even 20 American, deaths? If so, you’re delusional.
It’s been five years now and Iraq isn’t yet a true government, and isn’t likely to be as the three sects will balkanize further over oil revenues and policies such as De-Baathification. Your suggestion that Persia or any other nation could be dealt with in the same fashion Muhammad conquered (not completely, empirically proven by the way) foreign lands ignores the fact that today they’re Islamic, not pagan hordes. Thus, they’re divided into sectarian and tribal factions, which America has made worse through its PNAC inspired Crusade.
Oh, yeah, and there’s a Civil War that we fostered that won’t end any time soon. You think those people are going to be happy when they take stock of the damage America has done to them over the ensuing years? Or is it the left that’s exclusively screwed up the world?
Finally, your characterization of welfare is now more right wing nostalgia than it is an accurate refelction of what’s really happening in DC. In case you haven’t gotten the memo, the money that went into cheese, before the Contract with America and the Personal Responsibilty Act were pushed through by Bill Clinton, now goes to Corporate America, plus much more. Now, though, through the brilliance of lingusitic sanitization, those funds are called subsidies and tax write-offs. You know, businesses getting paid to not grow corn, etc.
Oddly, in the end you seem to be hankering for a saner world, but the path of unsubstantiated bias, evangelicalism, political polarization, and bellicose sabre rattling isn’t likely going to be the path that’ll get you there. Why not give peace a chance. At least it’s more affordable.
26 January 2008, 02:34, by anon
The problem is not that Obama is black, it’s that there’s so much ingrained racism in whites that, when the chips are down, they just couldn’t face the prospect of a black President. I wish I were wrong!
28 January 2008, 17:04
Why should Obama be referred to as "black?" His mother was white, so he’s half black and half white. The prevailing preference to define him racially as "black" speaks volumes for the inherent racism in the US.
15 February 2008, 04:18
Hey, Ted, you’re one sick little Republi-puppy. You are the guy who writes the
Dumb Democrat http://thedumbdemocrat.blogspot.com/ aren’t you?
No wonder you list one address in NY and one in Connecticut. It’s so nobody can find you.
I think he actually lives in a hole somewhere in Beirut. With Dick Cheney. Shhhh!