American Realistan

I’m not a supporter of Barack Obama. But if, as it now appears, the people select him to be the next president, then he would be a choice I could abide - provided he is saying what he really means.

This has been my problem with Obama since the 2004 Democratic Convention. His keynote address was a very stirring performance, causing my prior blogger incarnation to rave about him being a future president. Unfortunately, his votes to confirm Condi Rice as Secretary of State despite her blatant incompetence and some of his other pro-Bush votes has cost him my support - and me my enthusiasm for him and his ambition.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the end of the world for Obama. Not yet anyway. But there is a growing concern that, for Obama, that time is drawing nearer with each speech and with each primary victory.

David Sirota is patting Barack Obama on the back for taking a more populist stance in his campaign:

In his victory speech last night, Obama hammered the North American Free Trade Agreement, previewing a major economic speech today. Here are some excerpts:

“It’s a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years…So today, I’m laying out a comprehensive agenda to reclaim our dream and restore our prosperity. It’s an agenda that focuses on three broad economic challenges that the next President must address - the current housing crisis; the cost crisis facing the middle-class and those struggling to join it; and the need to create millions of good jobs right here in America- jobs that can’t be outsourced and won’t disappear.”

If Obama sees his opportunity in voicing a progressive, populist message on trade, then that’s a good thing. That means that we have a leading presidential candidate who sees being a populist and a progressive as a major opportunity. Obama is sure to be berated by national pundits for going populist - it’s precisely the kind of message that drives well-heeled Establishment propagandists across the partisan spectrum crazy.

Being berated is the least of the problems Obama may be facing if the American people choose him to be the next president (all disclaimers regarding a pre-electoral Cheney-Bush putsch not withstanding). Several people are seeing a more dire fate awaiting him. Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing thinks Barack Obama would be assassinated if he became US president, as does world champion boxer Bernard Hopkins, who said:

People may say it is time for change but when it comes down to it, I don’t think America is ready for that type of heat. [Obama’s] life would be in jeopardy. If he gets the nomination they won’t let him become president, but if they do, it will be for a short time, maybe less than a month or two…

It may be that there is more to this than a mere racial issue. Columnist Earl McRae of The Ottawa Sun is ‘Shocked at the level of hatred’ aimed at a man even staunch Republican and two-time Bush administration official Colin Powell supports:

I see the image I don’t want to see. I see the image that is the terrible sickness in the great republic. I see Barack Obama one minute smiling, the people crying his name. I see Barack Obama grab his chest and his eyes widen and his mouth opens and the crowd screams as Barack Obama, black candidate for the presidency of the United States of America, falls to the ground dead, an assassin’s bullet inside him.I see the consequences of the sick and unsound because Barack Obama is black and to be black, and catapulting towards the presidency on charm, intellect, and popularity is unacceptable to the racist paranoid and scary in America the beautiful, their hatred exacerbated by the fact his middle name is Hussein, his stepfather was Muslim, he was once educated in a Muslim school.

America’s sickos on the right and the left assassinated presidents Abraham Lincoln, John Garfield, William McKinley, John Kennedy; they tried to assassinate presidents Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan; they did assassinate presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy; they did assassinate black leaders Malcom X and Martin Luther King; they attempted to or did assassinate a number of senators, governors, mayors.

As McRae points out, many public figures have been assassinated. One thing that most of these victims had in common was a lean toward empowering the people, something that an entrenched power elite would seek to derail before any real damage could be done to them and their perquisites.

Such was the case with Martin Luther King. His final public address, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”, given the evening of April 3, 1968, had to have been the reason the trigger was pulled. The very powerful words of that speech called upon black Americans to realize their power, not just in a philosophical way, but in concrete terms. King called upon blacks band together and boycott certain national products and businesses in favor of local black-owned businesses. As he recalled a previous assassination attempt, and related the experience he had flying from Atlanta to Memphis, and told his audience that he knew of the dire threats being made against him there, he had to have known that the positions he espoused would cause “the power” to be applied to him personally. How else can one explain his closing remarks:

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life—longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land. And so I’m happy tonight; I’m not worried about anything; I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

It would lend credence to the following assertion published on April 6, 2002 in which the Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson claimed his father, Henry Clay Wilson assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. “It wasn’t a racist thing; [Henry] thought Martin Luther King was connected with communism, and he wanted to get him out of the way.”

Considering that anti-communism was the “official” philosophy of the age, one can see that being applied to every threat facing the “established order”, including a strike by black trash collectors against their white employers for better wages. While communism has since been replaced by Islamicism as the boogie man used to frighten the mentally deformed, the method of dealing with perceived threats to the “established order” remains unchanged today, as Canadian Earl McRae notes:

No doubt right now in America some person, some group, is thinking of how to assassinate Barack Obama, and no one should be surprised at one of the demented reasons given for fearing him: That Barack Obama is the new “Manchurian Candidate,” that Barack Obama — as captured Korean War U.S soldier Lawrence Harvey in the 1962 movie was brainwashed by the communists and programmed in his subconscious through a playing card to assassinate a right-wing presidential nominee — is a plant by America’s Islamic enemies to destroy the nation from within.They do not want to hear that Barack Obama is as much an American as they are, and who has had to explain more times than he should have that he is not a Muslim, but a secular Christian. They do not want to hear that he is a better American than they are, these right-wing extremist fascists in the land of America who no doubt believe it’s God’s will Barack Obama not get to the White House, no method of deterrence out of bounds, in their zealotry to protect and perpetuate Roy Rogers, John Wayne, Mom’s apple pie, and the cross of Jesus in every home.

Delusions are the hardest thing for reality to break through, and these most of all. It doesn’t matter that Rogers and Wayne have both ridden into that final sunset, nor that Mom’s apple pie might contain deathly chemicals, or that Jesus would be ashamed of their actions against their fellow man. The delusions tell them that they are correct, and that is all they need to know.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 14th, 2008 at 1:33 am and is filed under Politics, Social Issues, Bush TWO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.