Now that Hillary Clinton has become a dead woman walking, the radical right is revving up its fear and smear machine for double duty in targeting Barack Obama. One of its early volleys was the Rev. Wright attack ad during the North Carolina primary. Another one that’s now being blasted through the creepiest corners of the far right reaches of cyberspace is a truth-challenged video entitled “A Viral Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama.” This little missile of misinformation is a sickly mix of swift-boat-and-Willie Horton-style bad, old-fashioned Republican mudslinging. “Let’s connect the dots. With the assistance of Dr. Cone, Rev. Wright and other divisive figures Barack Obama has been discipled in a racist, Marxist, quasi-Christian, anti-Semitic ideology for over 20 years,” says creator/narrator Lome Baxter as he begins his summation of why America shouldn’t even consider Obama as its leader. “After that much indoctrination, is it surprising that he won’t wear an American flag? Is it surprising that he won’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem? Is it surprising that his wife has never been proud of America until it looked like her husband had a shot at beating Hillary?”
This is a just a sneak preview. Compared to what's coming, the Bhillary tactics were mere spit balls. So put on your hip boots, raincoats and caps and protective eye-gear folks because not only will stuff happen, it’s about to hit the fan.
Warning: do not watch Baxter's video on a full stomach--unless you are bulimic.
Barack Obama burst on the national scene four years ago during the Democratic National Convention. His personal history and vision on race was fresh and appealing to millions in America. That’s pretty much where he’s been and what he’s represented until six weeks or so ago when viral videos of Rev. Jeremiah Wright themselves burst on the national scene. Obama responded to the “shocking, stunning” words of his former pastor by giving one of the most profound speeches ever given on race in America. Even most of the detractors of the Democratic Party frontrunner praised the brilliance of his speech but then….they argued, he needed to do more. Obama needed to not only denounce what the man said, he needed to denounce the man. A few days ago, after Rev. Wright came out of his self-imposed public exile and elaborated on his “stunning and shocking” words, Obama did just that. Well, as it turns out, that’s still not enough for Obama’s detractors. They want him to explain why he stayed in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ for so long. Why Rev. Wright remained his pastor for so long. In effect, they want him to prove the unneccesary. When my post, Wright Here, Wright Now, went up on the ebonyjet.com website, there were plenty of comments. One from a reader who identified himself as Andy Shep—after several exchanges between him and me—concludes, “Mainstream America is not going to embrace the anger that Wright has made visible. If they feel that in his heart Obama resents them, or would appoint people to higher office who resent them, they will not vote for him.” Our ebonyjet back and forth is below. But first, I’d like to present a Vimeo video entitled, White People, Get Over Yourselves. In the viral video, Dan Charnas, a young white man, says, “In America, black people have always endured white peoples’ negative, prejudiced opinions about them.” Charnas later says, “America is run by an undereducated, white majority. Black people have just had to deal with it.” Check out the video, and then read the prevailing mainstream America opinion as it appeared on ebonyjet.com.
Andy Shep says:
anyone who believes that AIDS was invented by the government to kill black men hates people who look like me. It is not in my best interests to vote for someone who hates me. There are those of you who know better and have stayed silent, because of that men like Wright don't even know how inflammatory they are. You can believe all white men to be racists and murderers and you can become president, I don't think you can do both. Obama has not denounced Wright enough.
05.01.08 at 10:20 PM
Monroe Anderson says:
AndyShep: The bar seems to keep moving on Obama's denunciation of Rev. Wright. What would be enough? Have you any suggestions? Or, would God Damn Rev. Wright satisfy you?
05.02.08 at 3:03 PM
Any Shep says:
Obama's problem is the timing of his comments distancing himself from Wright seem to coincide with bad polling data. White people see it as a political move. An eloquent speech that addressed what Wright said, why Wright may have said it, and why he was wrong could turn the negative into a positive. There is White resentment over Black anger if he addresses it he can win by a landslide. Many still believe he privately agrees with Wright, including Wright, and he's known him for 20 years.
05.02.08 at 7:43 PM
Monroe Anderson says:
Any Shep, let me see if I understand this correctly. Whites resent it that blacks are angry because, after all these years, there is still racial discrimination, economic inequity and white privilege in America?
05.02.08 at 8:27 PM
Andy Shep says:
Wright is just a product of anger, and because of his anger he can't move forward and won't let anyone else move forward either. Wright was not angry alone. Mainstream America is not going to embrace the anger that Wright has made visible. If they feel that in his heart Obama resents them, or would appoint people to higher office who resent them, they will not vote for him. You can live in the problem or live in the solution.
I invite you to comment on what Dan Charnas, Andy Shep or I had to say right here on this blog or comment on the ebonyjet.website on my exchange with Shep.
Now that Bill Clinton has forever demolished
the curious notion that he
was the first black
president, it may be that there actually were six black commander-in-chiefs before him. Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower may have all had black ancestors, according to a report in the North Star News. The newspaper quotes black historians who researched the ancestry of our presidents. Early on in American history, the “one-drop rule” was instituted. That meant if one drop of Negro blood could be traced back in a person’s ancestry, then no matter how white they looked, no matter how white they had been raised, no matter what, they were black. Of course, the reality was just the opposition. Enslaved African women were getting equal doses of white blood for their offspring when their white slave masters and overseers routinely raped them. Those half-white children were born into slavery and were in turn impregnated by white masters and overseers. The offspring of the mulattoes and their white masters were called quadroons. Another white master dip in that genetic pool a generation later produced octoroons. Somewhere along that racial recession, those kind of black people started becoming white. They escaped the plantation, moved elsewhere and blended into the dominant white society. Following that historical racial development, according to the North Star News, one historian says Dwight Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover Eisenhower, was black. The painting above by my wife, artist Joyce Owens, is of Louise Evans, a former slave from North Carolina who was interviewed and photographed during the WPA era. You wouldn’t know the woman was black to look at her. There are many more of you out there. Applying the one-drop rule, a fourth of all Americans who think they are white may, in fact, be black. Now back to our white/black presidents. Here’s how the April-May 2008 North Star News begins:
Barack Obama May Become The Seventh Not The First, Black President
If Sen. Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination for preside
nt and goes on to win the White House, he would be the seventh, not the first black man to occupy the oval office, according to three black historians whose work to uncover the racial backgrounds of U.S. presidents has been largely ignored until now. Black male historians have written extensively that Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Dwight Eisenhower had black ancestors. These historians are Joel A. Rodgers, Dr. Leroy Vaughn, and Dr. Auset Bakhufu. Black historians, however, were not the first to write about the five presidents' racially mixed families. White historians and political opponents also wrote about the men's black ancestors, but the books were either destroyed, went out of print or are hard to find. A common theme associated with the earlier black presidents is that they all passed for white, sometimes destroying family photographs and letters, to hide their racial backgrounds. Sen. Obama cannot obviously pass for white because of his dark skin color. Obama makes it clear he is the son of a Kenyan economist and white female anthropologist. Interracial relationships between black women and white men explain the racial backgrounds of some of the presidents, but not all. Sexual relationships between black men and white women have produced offspring. Andrew Jackson, the nation's seventh's president, was the son of a black man and an Irish woman, according to historians. Interracial relationships between black men and Native American women also produced racially mixed offspring. Rodgers, who died in 1966, wrote the book The Five Black Presidents, and Dr. Vaughn devotes a chapter to the five black presidents in his Black People and Their Place in World History. Rogers and Vaughn agree Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Harding and Coolidge had black ancestors. Dr. Auset Bakhufu, author of The Six Black Presidents' Black Blood: White Masks includes Eisenhower. Despite author Toni Morrison's 1998 New Yorker magazine article that claims Bill Clinton is the nation's first black president because of his womanizing and frequenting McDonald's restaurants, Clinton is not listed.
To read the rest of the article at northstarnews.com, click here.
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