The Glade 4.0

The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.

Strong reported that Ackerman even once “urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, ‘Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.’”

Barack Obama, Segregationist

Posted By Roger L Simon On October 3, 2012 @ 12:06 am In Uncategorized | 23 Comments

I have never been able to put my finger on exactly what it was that I so disliked about Barack Obama. As a former sixties civil rights worker, I should have been attracted to, or at least inspired by, the first black presidential candidate and president, but I never was.

Sure, I didn’t care for a number of his policies and the narcissistic showoff stuff (those Greek columns) was a bit overdone, not to mention the obvious lies about his relationship with his mentor Jeremiah Wright and the less obvious prevarications about his relationships with William Ayers and others.

But I suspected something more substantive, more significant, was troubling me. And it was finally revealed in Obama’s lengthy 2007 speech [1] to a black audience just made available in its unbowdlerized form by Fox News and the Daily Caller Tuesday night. I had my “aha” moment.

Barack Obama is a segregationist.

How else do you explain a statement like “We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned business, in our neighborhoods”? [emphasis mine]

That is not what most of us had in mind when we were involved in the civil rights movement. Naïve us. Our intention was that everyone should get to live wherever they wanted, even those suburbs. They were open to all. Forget ghettoes and barrios. Equality, brother, equality. How did that old Babs Gonzales [2] song go — “We got a New Frontier, a man in the moon, but we ain’t got integration [3]”?

Oh well, integration was a nice idea once upon a time, but to Barack Obama in 2007 it was already seriously outdated, if it ever had any value. And why should it? An integrated society is not easily broken off into equally easily manipulated interest groups like African-Americans or Hispanic-Americans.

Segregation pays — at the ballot box.

It is also one of the fastest and most reliable routes to power.

Now I’m not trying to say that Obama is a segregationist like Orville Faubus or even a cheap race hustler like Sharpton. He is something different and obviously more complex and subtle, but in the final analysis he relies on the same reactionary racial estrangement as the other two.

Indeed, our president is the reverse of what he appears to be, pretending to bring the races together when he profits by driving them apart. In that sense, he is similar to Yasser Arafat, talking one way to the West and another to his Palestinian brothers.

Yes, we all know that almost all politicians engage in such targeted speechmaking, but the lengths to which they go while doing it, the extremity of the differences in what they are saying between audiences, take the measure of the man or woman.

In Barack Obama’s case, it’s pretty extreme. In the Hampton University speech, Obama sounds like a character out of Ralph Ellison’s classic Invisible Man [4], pandering and preaching divisive nonsense about Hurricane Katrina, which he surely knew wasn’t true.

Or did he? Actually, he seemed to be making a “separate but equal” argument regarding the treatment of Katrina victims and those of other disasters, itself reminiscent of the days of segregation. But I don’t think he was really doing that either, at least not consciously. Again like one of Ellison’s characters, he was convincing himself of his general righteousness while revving up the crowd telling them lies they clearly wanted to hear.

That’s not a hard thing to do, when you think about it. Trouble is — the audience changes and a man could get schizoid. Nevertheless, Obama had at it that night with the singular determination of a demagogue. And he went “off book” to do it. The complaisant media of course chose not to report any of it and relied only on the printed text.

That was then and this is now. The Daily Caller has brought back the speech in its entirety, five years after the fact.

Listening to it, I had the sense that the world had come full circle within my lifetime. Right was left. Up was down. Segregation was now “progressive” and integration was, well, racist. More proof — if we needed it — that Orwell’s Animal Farm is one of the greatest books ever written.

Is this really their October surprise? "Reporting" on a video that was already reported on years ago?

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics ... ive/57539/

Obama gave the speech in the middle of a hotly-contested presidential primary season, but his remarks escaped scrutiny. Reporters in the room seem to have missed or ignored his most controversial statements. The liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan linked to what he described as a “transcript” of the speech, which turned out not to be a transcript at all, but instead the prepared remarks provided by the campaign. In fact, Obama, who was not using a teleprompter, deviated from his script repeatedly and at length, ad libbing lines that he does not appear to have used before any other audience during his presidential run. A local newspaper posted a series of video clips of the speech, but left out key portions. No complete video of the Hampton speech was widely released.

Ok, I'm honestly puzzled. Having watched the video, what exactly do you find objectionable about any of his comments?

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

I'm finding it really tough to give a **** about either candidate. They're both utterly awful and whichever one we get is going to be terrible for the country.

But they're going to be terrible in different areas. I'll take the one that'll be less terrible with social issues. Those are far harder to get back when they've been restricted.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

If there were any chance Republicans would be more fiscally responsible than Democrats, that might mean something.

In comic strips the person on the left always speaks first. - George Carlin

The coordination of the conservative press on this video makes me think the conservatives are in fact racist. Its like the old saying about people who are extremely homophobic are the most likely to be gay.

Conservatives say that liberals are obsessed with race. Bill O'Reilly avows it, as does Bernie Goldberg. Noemie Emery wrote in The Weekly Standard about "the liberal obsession with playing the race card." Says Ann Coulter, "liberals and white supremacists are the only people left in America who are neurotically obsessed with race. Conservatives champion a color-blind society." In more elevated conservative forums the critique is that academics and media types are constantly inserting racial analysis where it doesn't belong, as if it's the only lens through which to look.

There are instances when liberals actually do put undue emphasis on race. Academics and journalists too. But in the age of President Obama, a strong case can be made that the right is as obsessed with racial subjects as the left, if not more so. The latest example came late Tuesday, when The Daily Caller published a video of Obama speaking about Hurricane Katrina in 2007 to a largely black audience.

...

What does it take to make five-year-old remarks the biggest story of the moment in conservative media? A racial angle. That's all it ever takes. Since 2009 there's been a conservative obsession with proving that the real Obama is a black radical who has it in for white people. That intention runs through the conspiracy theories that Michelle Obama was caught on tape talking about "whitey;" the Breitbart.com story about Obama hugging a critical race theorist while in law school; Newt Gingrich's demagoguery during the Trayvon Martin case; Rush Limbaugh's insistence that in Obama's America it's permissible for blacks to beat up whites on school buses; Dinesh D'Souza's insistence that Obama is a Kenyan anti-colonialist; and other stories too.

These conservatives don't care that President Obama's actual record on racial matters is anything but radical. Nor do they care that his reelection poses zero threat to white people as a class. It isn't any proposed policy change that gets them going. There isn't any sound, substantive reason that they focus on racial controversy. They're just race obsessed. Racial angles are constantly emphasized in right-leaning media because that's what the conservative audience wants, every bit as much as the average New York Times reader wants a very different sort of race-focused journalism.

...

"This guy is whipping up race hatred and fear," Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller said on Fox News. So according to Carlson, Obama said some stuff in 2007 that should totally shock us because nothing like it has been part of his rhetoric as president; those words would remain totally obscure if not for Carlson; but it's Obama who is "whipping up race hatred and fear," for telling a black audience that the federal government did less for Katrina victims than other natural disaster victims, in part because they were poor and black. For conservatives, complaining that college administrators do less to accommodate students because they're white is perfectly respectable commentary, and anyone who says otherwise is enforcing political correctness; but a specific critique of disaster relief dollars shortchanging blacks is "whipping up race hatred," and labeling it beyond the pale isn't political correctness run amok at all.

...

If the New York Times was constantly searching for archival footage to prove that Mitt Romney doesn't like black people, or that he is "whipping up race hatred," the conservative media would accuse them of frivolously ignoring the actual issues that this election ought to turn on. It would say that they were exploiting the racial anxieties of Americans to tarnish the character of a man whose long record of public policy-making shows no evidence of racial animosity or radicalism.

When it comes to racial demagoguery, the right has become everything it says it hates about the left.

So your counter-argument is that government spending is destroying the economy?

the members of this board demonstrate this point nicely.

how many times have we seen Hannibal, Uncle Fester, Nitefox or one of the others insist that someone is accusing someone of racism.... when no one mentioned it.

The objection becomes clear if you start with unassailable assumptions that (i) systemic racism / racial bias does not exist and has not existed for 30-40 years, (ii) wealth and class have no explanatory power with respect to policy choices and (iii) these facts are clear and obvious to any honest observer. Thus, if black people today have no legitimate grievances related to race and poor people have only themselves to blame for the cycle they're stuck in, then Obama's suggestion that there were issues underlying the LA riots beyond the rioters being bad people is just making excuses for violent criminals, and his suggestion that the response to Katrina reflected an empathy gap on the part of policy-makers and media elites is just cynical race-baiting.

I'm saying that there are two spheres to political parties: their economic opinions and their social opinions. I find both candidates' economic opinions untrustworthy and untenable. So judging them by those guidelines, I find them to be a wash. Which leaves me with judging them by their social views. I find the Republicans' to be completely vile, and the Democrats' to be far more palatable.

Racism is the left's version of Creationism. You can find no shortage of black people who go to their own, segregated churches, and hear from the pulpit every week how Jesus is going to save them from the white man. It's politics tied into religious fundamentalism. Yet it gets a pass from the left because it keeps blacks voting liberal/democrat. Religious fundamentalism is ok when it's A) leftist and B) engaged in by a minority.

So it's better for Steve and Bob to be able to get married than for either of them to have a job to support each other?

So it's better for Steve and Bob to be able to get married than for either of them to have a job to support each other?

Farsky's point is that he feels neither party is more likely to ensure economic prosperity for the average American, so with little difference in that area, only social issues will determine his vote.