I figured I wasn't going to touch this, since all of the big blogs, the TV media, the newspapers, the radio jockeys, and every race baiter in America were talking about Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Sergeant James M. Crowley and the president's ill-informed, asinine, and, frankly, bigoted comments last night.
But then I made the excellent decision of deciding to click over here, and, well, the first comment has led me (and now you) here:
We reported on last Tuesday's council meeting yesterday. As Nolan Finley reported:
It was a tragic circus, a festival of ignorance that confirmed the No. 1 obstacle to Detroit's progress is the bargain basement leaders that city voters elect. The black nationalism that is now the dominant ideology of the council was on proud display, both at the table and in the audience.
Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home."
We've finally located the video of that racist rant.
My hopes for Detroit's future faded as I watched the tape of last Tuesday's council meeting, the one that considered the Cobo Center expansion deal.
It was a tragic circus, a festival of ignorance that confirmed the No. 1 obstacle to Detroit's progress is the bargain basement leaders that city voters elect. The black nationalism that is now the dominant ideology of the council was on proud display, both at the table and in the audience.
Speakers advocating for the deal were taunted by the crowd and cut short by Council President Monica Conyers, who presided over the hearing like an angry bulldog; whites were advised by the citizens to, "Go home."
Opponents were allowed to rant and ramble on uninterrupted about "those people" who want to steal Detroit's assets and profit from the city's labors.
A pitiful Teamster official who practically crawled to the table on his knees expressing profuse respect for this disrespectful body was battered by both the crowd and the council.
When he dared suggest that an improved Cobo Center would create more good-paying jobs for union workers, Conyers reminded him, "Those workers look like you; they don't look like me."
Desperate, he invoked President Barack Obama's message of unity and was angrily warned, "Don't you say his name here."
Even the nutroots at the Daily Kos realize just how out of control Detroit is. One of the comments at the Daily Kos wondered why Obama had not spoken out against this council meeting. Another comment answered that question by saying that Obama cannot speak to every individual situation. That's funny. Obama can't speak to this meeting, but he and his henchman Robert Gibbs can find the time to call out Rush Limbaugh, by name, for doing nothing other than exercising his First Amendment right.
I have a more plausible explanation as to why Obama hasn't spoken out against the blatant racism displayed at the Detroit City Council meeting. I blogged about it last week. Read it here. The short answer is that Obama is in agreement with the racist sentiment. Here's his economic goblin Robert Reich spewing the same racist philosophy. Obama didn't call him out either.
Mr. Finley referred to watching a tape of the meeting. Where is it? I have not been able to find it. But I still have this video of a Detroit Council Meeting from last April. The face of hope and change?
Obama was part of an army of lawyers forcing banks to loan money to deadbeats who had no intention of ever paying back their loans. How did he do it? He accused the banks of being racist. Now THAT'S the Barack Obama we once knew.
Are you catching all the commentators, articles, polls and other mediums claiming latent racism will cost Obama votes on election day? It seems to be all over the news the past two days. Last night, after a google search, I counted no less than 50 different articles released in the past 3 days raising the specter of racism and harmful effects on Obama's chances in November. The question is why all these stories now? This is nothing other than a concerted attempt by the media and Obama's minions working on a wink and a nod from one another to remind white voters that they're racist if they don't vote for Obama. The white man's guilt trip he laid on voters worked very well for Obama in the primaries, and with him slipping in the polls, the time is now to lay that guilt trip again.
With tripe like this coming from her mouth, there is no wonder Americans are so ready to believe the "Whitey" tape exists. The following is nothing more than uppity speak for "whitey is the devil":
"no doubt in my mind that as a member of the black community, I am obligated to this community and will utilize all of my present and future resources to benefit the black community first and foremost."
It's like he had a crystal ball and could see Obama's spiritual advisers...
"There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs."
Booker T. Washington - 1911
It looks like he could see Obama as well. Booker didn't feel guilty. And neither do I.
What can it be that has kept Obama in Wright's pews, and at Wright's mercy, for so long and at such a heavy cost to his aspirations? Even if he pulls off a mathematical nomination victory, he has completely lost the first, fine, careless rapture of a post-racial and post-resentment political movement and mired us again in all the old rubbish that predates Dr. King. What a sad thing to behold. And how come? I think we can exclude any covert sympathy on Obama's part for Wright's views or style—he has proved time and again that he is not like that, and even his own little nods to "Minister" Farrakhan can probably be excused as a silly form of Chicago South Side political etiquette. All right, then, how is it that the loathsome Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him? Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?
This obvious question is now becoming inescapable, and there is an inexcusable unwillingness among reporters to be the one to ask it. (One can picture Obama looking pained and sensitive and saying, "Keep my wife out of it," or words to that effect, as Clinton tried to do in 1992 when Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader quite correctly inquired about his spouse's influence.) If there is a reason why the potential nominee has been keeping what he himself now admits to be very bad company—and if the rest of his character seems to make this improbable—then either he is hiding something and/or it is legitimate to ask him about his partner.
I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in the 1980s, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews that "when God puts you in the ovens—it's forever!" I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.
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