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| Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States |
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| Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States |
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Until recently, every once in a while, somebody used to send me something defamatory he read or heard somewhere about President Obama. The senders always claimed that the author was some kind of "expert," a newspaper columnist or a famous speaker, or some kind of doctor, probably to give the remarks credibility they supposedly wouldn't have otherwise. They claimed that Mr. Obama was a Muslim or an Indonesian or a narcissist or an egomaniac or something else that they think made him unfit to be President of the United States.
Like I care!
As far as the "experts" are concerned, any damned fool can give a speech or write an article. Even though I didn't vote for him, Mr. Obama was, in fact, the President of the United States. Frankly, I think we should be properly grateful. I don't care what color he is. At very worst, he's been a much better President than I thought he would, certainly immeasurably better than the next one has been so far.
For reasons that are not at all clear to me, people whom I thought I knew started sending me "information" that supposedly "proved" that Mr. Obama was not really the President because he wasn't a "natural born Citizen" as required by Article II of the Constitution. There are all sorts of doctored videos that allegedly "proved" this, some of them really pathetic attempts that would convince only a low-grade moron (such as the people who send them to me), but the fact is that it's a dead issue. All (note all) the cases that have been brought before a court of competent jurisdiction were either dismissed as being unworthy of the court's time, or they were resolved in favor of Mr. Obama's status as a natural born citizen of the US. These include, Berg v. Obama, Martin v. Lingle, Donofrio v. Wells, Wrotnowski v. Bysiewicz, Keyes v. Bowen, Ankeny v. Governor of the State of Indiana, Kerchner v. Obama, Barnett v. Obama, Hollister v. Soetoro, Cook v. Obama, and Rhodes v. Macdonald. Orly Taitz, a famous attorney and dentist, was fined $20,000 for willful misconduct for filing all kinds of ridiculous lawsuits regarding the assertion that President Obama was not eligible to serve as President of the United States. The Supreme Court refused to hear the cases because they have better things to do, so the decisions of the lower courts stand. In the United States, Constitutional interpretation is not an entrepreneurial activity. What was wrong with these people?
Regarding his faith, he admits to having been a member of the congregation pastored by the allegedly reverend Jeremiah Wright of ill fame. I admit that the resemblance between the United Church of Christ and recognizable Christianity is sketchy, but it isn't Muslim, either. It's no secret that his father and stepfather were Muslims, that he lived in a Muslim country for a time and went to a Muslim grade school, but that doesn't make him a Muslim any more than having a Lutheran father and attending public kindergarten makes me a Lutheran. Mr. Obama attended St. Francis of Assisi Catholic school, too, but he's not a Catholic either. My personal feeling is that at this time in history we were fortunate to have a President who understood Muslim beliefs, sensibilities and values (which our current one doesn't), but I really don't care what his religion was, and neither does the Constitution. Article VI, last sentence. Look it up! If somebody doesn't like what the US Constitution says about religion, he's free to move to someplace that has a different one!
Lest anyone accuse me of racism, I might point out that I voted for Colin Powell in 1996 because it was my responsibility to vote for the best man for the job, not one of the turkeys who was actually running. Voting for somebody because of the color of his skin is as immoral as voting against him for the same reason. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being black, it's simply not a qualification for public office any more than being a woman or being rich! Qualification for public office has nothing to do with color, it has to do with appropriate experience and demonstrated ability doing similar things, which only the candidate we didn't subsequently elect had.
Mr. Obama's background was no big secret. Born of a white American mother (who was in a hospital in the state of Hawaii, at the time) and black African father, he was raised in Indonesia and Hawaii and attended Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, from which he graduated magna cum laude, no mean feat for anyone. He was Director of the Developing Communities Project for low-income residents in Chicago, Harvard Law Review's first black president, associate attorney with Miner, Barnhill & Galland law firm, and a lecturer in constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School. He was also an Illinois and United States Senator. All this was known before he ever entered the Democratic Presidential primary in 2007.
What was also known was that he drank, smoked, and admitted to having used cocaine and marijuana. He had never managed so much as a lemonade stand, served a day in uniform, or led a hungry squad to the mess hall.
Which is not necessarily to say anything against him. Barack Obama was the black candidate like John Kennedy was the Catholic candidate. Unlike the miserably unqualified black candidates of the past, loudmouthed bigots like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes, Mr. Obama is a charming, highly-educated self-assured, tall, good looking, soft spoken intellectual. He's the Tiger Woods of politics! White women everywhere were having their pictures taken suggestively rubbing themselves all over his grinning portrait!
Geraldine Ferraro, herself a "token female" Vice Presidential candidate, explained it elegantly, "If he hadn't been black, we'd never have heard of him." There are lots of charming, highly-educated self-assured, tall, good looking, soft spoken intellectuals in Washington, even possibly a few who have graduated with almost perfect grades from Harvard. With the benefit of having grown up in an idyllic, make-believe, multi-racial society where being a real African-American was no big deal, Mr. Obama ingratiated himself with millions of fake African-Americans by writing a book about dreams from his absent father and the Audacity of Hope, which those who primarily consider themselves "black people" substitute for the certainty of knowledge.
The criticism that someone else helped him write these works, even if true, is so much sour grapes. Mr. Obama was smart enough to recognize that there would be those who would consider him "not black enough" and cleverly disarmed them by showing that he was really a disdained, disadvantaged orphan, "black like them." A lesser man with his obvious advantages couldn't have pulled it off! Even Oprah Winfrey, a fellow mega-overachiever and arguably the most influential black woman in human history, confidently predicted that Obama was "The One." Her endorsement alone was thought to have been worth a million votes!
His experience as a community organizer and state senator, while not directly translatable into executive experience, nonetheless gave him political skills comparable to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, with the same results. He's the ultimate African-American icon, a consummate politician, an uplifter of the downtrodden, organizer of the disenfranchised, enabler of the powerless, employer of the unskilled, and defender of the exploited. Said another way, he's a megalomaniac, a wheeler-dealer, an exploiter of the vulnerable, a demagogue rabble rouser favor-peddling communist.
So who else with those qualities comes to mind? How popular was he?
I'll admit, I believed that Mr. Obama was guilty of a fundamental failure to discriminate between "having a job" and "doing a job." He proved this over and over again by talking about "creating jobs" while expediting American industry to send all but the most menial employment overseas and allowing illegal Mexicans access to that. He donated the entire American manned space program (worth millions of highly paid occupations and tens of trillions of dollars of new industry) to Russia, a prime example of his fundamental naivete'. Along with most people who consider themselves "black," he seemed to ignore (or perhaps not truly understand) the difference between the way things are and the way he thinks they are or should be.
When Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, he had the entire legislature to let him run the show as long as he ran it their way. They got the power and votes they wanted, and he got the blame when something went wrong. Fortunately, assigning blame for one's own mistakes is a finely-tuned "black" art. The Democrats put a lot of work into blaming Mr. Bush or "terrorists" for things. Just look at how they managed totally to direct blame for the Gulf oil spill from the person whose responsibility it was absolutely to prevent that - Lisa P. Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency - another black person, a female this time, and a foundling, too!
The sad fact is that for almost all blacks, and most uneducated whites, life is not good! They're a divided country, one that is just downright mean. They're guided by fear, fear of terrorists, fear of losing their jobs, their homes and their dreams, and fear that nobody will know what happened to them if they are somehow erased from existence unless they're talking on their cell phones at the time. They've become a nation of cynics, sloths, and complacents, a society of struggling folks who are barely making it every day. They're just jammed up, and it's gotten worse over the Obama family's lifetime. My most severe criticism of him is that he has cruelly ignored, by providing even more incentives to stay there, the most lucrative opportunity that anyone has ever had to lift those who elected him out of their fetid cesspool of self-imposed misery.
Like no one else before him, including Malcolm X, Mr. Obama could have been a leader for black people. He could have made the point that they are responsible for their own destiny, nobody else. He could have promoted the idea that "being black" is a reason to excel rather than an excuse to fail. He could have told them to make something of themselves, like he did, rather than remain victims of a social tragedy seven generations dead. He could have encouraged them to join the military, get an education, and learn valuable, salable skills. He could have convinced many of them that laziness and theft and prostitution and failing properly to raise one's children are demeaning and unworthy of anyone, whatever his or her color. Hell, at the very least, he could have pointed out to them how to wear their pants and what kinds of things to wear on their heads! Instead, he has done nothing to dispel the same myth that has deprived them and their ancestors of their freedom since before the ratification of the 13th Amendment, that they are simply mindless, powerless victims, and only when their hope that other people do this or that, will things change for the better for them.
Mr. Obama's mantra of "hope and change" was precisely what Democrats in general, and poor (black) people in particular, have wanted since Reconstruction. American voters today are products of the "baby boomer" mentality that teaches that they deserve everything they want and that people who have worked hard and sacrificed for it all their lives ought to give it to them because those people are going to die pretty soon anyway. Fat, chronically ill chain smokers want health care; uneducated unskilled people want decent jobs, and teenagers who can't keep their knees together want child care and a guaranteed lavish lifestyle. As long as Mr. Obama and his cronies promised to give it to them, he was their hero. He was surrounded by far-left academics, adept at confusing the vast unwashed hoards into believing that not having any money, security, power, purpose or future was somehow the fault of a "flawed" America, and that everything would be OK when the "fat cats" were made to pay.
For all his faults, he's really been a very good and gifted head of state. As I said, he has been a better President than I expected him to be. He's highly intelligent, astute, cunning, ruthless and supremely self-confident. He presided over a socialist administration critically infested with Affirmative Action hirelings, left-wing political appointees, and popularly-elected demagogues like himself, and he managed to make it at least appear to be working for the time being.
My greatest criticism, however, is that he failed miserably to provide the leadership his black constituency desperately needed to partake of their rightful share of the American Dream. Somebody needs to convince disadvantaged black people that they need to take responsibility for their own lives and work out their own destiny, as he did, if they want to succeed. Who better than the first black President? But the sad fact is, he cast his lot with those for whom exercise of their own rights was more important than their responsibilities to their country and to each other. At very least, he could have said a few words about the importance of learning how to quit murdering each other, obey the law, and cooperate with the police. He might also kept better control of the Department of Justice that torpedoed Hillary Clinton's campaign.
His failure in this regard has perhaps been most effectually demonstrated by the his support of the National Museum of African American History and Culture of the Smithsonian Institution, designed by David Adjaye, a Ghanaian British (non-American) architect. It's between 14th and 15th Streets NW, on Constitution Avenue. It opened on September 24, 2016, in a ceremony led by the President.
To many black people, this museum represents a certification that Black Lives Matter, like the tee shirts otherwise jobless people hawk outside it, but its very existence is just one more demonstration of the manic determination of too many black Americans to be separate, (African) rather than equal (American). People are even bitching about somebody leaving "symbols of oppression and slavery" in a museum dedicated to "symbols of oppression and slavery!" What the hell?
There is a good reason that there are no German American, French American, Polish American, Chinese American, Vietnamese American or other "something American" museums. Those other people don't want them. They are all represented by the Museum of American History. They aren't marching around protesting that their lives matter, either, because everybody already recognizes that from what they have all contributed to our society!
Whatever else that museum is, as long as it stands it remains a reminder that African Americans are by their own choice, unequal to other Americans. It may well take them another century and a half to recognize that it stands for the same culture of segregation and oppression as the symbols of the Confederacy to which they so vehemently object today.
Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's failure to make things better for black people and other disadvantaged minorities, his tolerance of their lawlessness and divisiveness and anarchy, worked to his and his party's destruction. Their strident claim that their lives mattered just because they were black fueled the belief among his opponents that black people really were what they claimed to be; powerless, essentially useless consumers of resources produced by maltreated white people. Now those white people are fed up and demand all those resources back, whatever the cost, especially to the minorities who didn't know when to shut the hell up and do something constructive for a change.
The simple fact is, like all Presidents before him, Mr. Obama was elected because a majority of the voters wanted him to be President. Many of them didn't know what the President does, and really didn't care. He fulfilled their wildest dreams by getting to be the First Black President. African-Americans were enfranchised by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments without requiring them to act responsibly or pull their own weight, and now all of us are going to pay the price, regardless of how terrible it will be...
...and it's Mr. Obama's, and his supporters', own fault!
"The main problem of a republic is that the voters usually get what they deserve." - Dwight Eisenhower."We have met the enemy and he is us!" - Pogo Possum