Bigfella

You appear to be having a problem getting your smears straight Gunnut. Allow me to help.

When Obama's parents married in 1961 close to half the states in the Union still legally forbade interracial marriage. The fact that pre-civil rights racism would have denied the possibility of Obama's very existrence would seem like the sort of thing that might leave an impact on a fella.

His father may not have been a goat herder, but that does not mean he did not grow up herding his father's goats (which is his ACTUAL claim). His grandfather was indeed a landowner. He was also a cook for the British (as Obama's stepmother confirmed). They suffered a different kind of racial oppression, but they suffered it nonetheless.

The point Obama has made numerous times is the unlikelihood of his very existence and his subsequent life. Seems fair. How many young men born on the shores of Lake Victoria under British occupation, or young girls born into segregated Kansas might imagine meeting, marrying & having a child whose career has been, by any standard, a remarkable one. This is a story of achievement that Obama is always quick to point out would be possible only in America (funny how no one ever calls him on that particular exaggeration).

The fact that all you can see in this is class warfare says everything about you & nothing about Obama.

__________________
Win nervously lose tragically - Reds C C

Parihaka

I would but what is the point. It's one of the endearing things about American society that they seem to regard such stories as remarkable and follow them with the 'only in America' byline.

gunnut

So something that happened before I was born impacts me as well? Really? Should I scream and jump up and down about how Chinese were discriminated against for decades in the US before the civil rights movement? I wasn't born yet but that's beside the point.

That's irrelavent. He's in the US now. What his family suffered through on another continent in generations before is irrelavent to this discussion. If it is, then I should scream and jump up and down about how the Hans were butchered by the Mongols in the 12th century. Or how the Hans were subjugated by the Manchus in the 17th century. Or how the colonial powers invaded China in the 19th century. Or how the Japanese murdered millions of Chinese in the 20th century.

And yet he attends a church for 20 years pastored by a guy who hates the very same country that gave him this achievement. He has the guy who hates American to marry him. He has the guy who hates America to baptize his children. He calls this guy his closest spiritual advisor.

This is not class warfare. This is divide and conquer. This is all the liberals see. Different groups of people and what we should call them.

Class warfare is practiced by socialists. Oddly enough half of Obama's speech was on socialist agendas. We don't care about his skin color. We care about how much he hangs out with people who hate America and how much socialist agenda he has.

You would have a problem if a guy running to be the prime minister of your country attends religious meetings for 20 years hosted by someone who despises Australia and the whiteys who rule it.

__________________
"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Bigfella

[quote]Gunnut, I sometimes wonder if you are actually as ignoorant as you act, or if you are just deliberately dragging your feet to make the informed amongst us work harder. Neither is particularly endearing.

When Obama was BORN there were still about 20 states that forbade interracial marriage. The recalcitrant 16 had to be forced to change by Federal law in 1967 (Obama was 4). Two of those states retained the racist laws in their constitutions for decades - the last one was removed in 2000.

So, is it just possible that living in a nation where a significant minority of the population had to be dragged kicking & screaming to acknowledge your right to exist could impact a person? I would think so.

What the current generations of conservatives likes to pretend is that once the laws were removed everything was fine. All that discrimination was 'in the past'. All those racist people stopped acting on their beliefs in the million ways they still could.

The suggestion that Obama has not experienced the negative consequences of those attitudes would be laughable if it were not so popular in some quarters.

As for your own experience of American life, if you experienced ongoing discrimination because of your race then you can be as angry as you want.



Again, how you approach the world is up to you. I have a freind who won't buy Mitsubishi cars because people flying aircraft made by that company spent several years shooting at his father. He doesn't discriminate againt Japanese people, just that company. My uncle, who spent 3 years in Japanese POW camps & 2 years on the 'Death Railway' is a little less forgiving. We all deal with our familie's experience of the world in different ways.

As for Obama's family, you were tapping into a distorted view of his Kenyan family as 'privileged'. I was cutting you off at the pass. Mission accomplished.


Your interpretation of Wright. Not mine. Not aware Wright was a political advisor.

Funny, you were the one who said he was practicing class warfare. Guess you changed your mind.

As for your bizarre contention that 'class warfare' is the sole province of 'socialists', too delusional to waste time with.



You & most of the people piling on to Obama on this board had a problem with him long before you heard a word from his pastor. This just gives you a bigger stick to beat him with.

As for what I would think. Fortunately I live in a country where religion is still a private matter, even among our political leaders. Fortunatey Australian voters are generally mature enough not to discriminate against our candidates based on their religion or lack thereof. We prefer to focus on their politics. In my time I have voted for athiests, agnostics & various stripes of Christian (I think). Actually, I don't know much about the religious beliefs of some of the people I've voted for.

Were I faced with someone whose spiritual advisor believed those things I would want to know a lot more about what the candidate himself thought before making a decision. Of course, you are not faced with such a person, you are just choosing the most simplistic interpretation of Wright's comments to buttress your own dislike of Obama.

Our current PM (who I voted for) is a member of a religious sect that has encouraged conquest, violence & murder, sided with tyrants, stolen children from their families, participated in discrimination against various races & religions, women & homosexuals. It has also aided & abetted genertions of child molesters. Of course, our current PM is a practicing Catholic. (for the record, many of the nasties I have listed hapened in my lifetime, all within the C20th).

*Note: to avoid the inevitable criticism (as if) I found some of what Wright said personally offensive, particularly on AIDS & Hiroshima. I found the way he expressed himself on all points offensively provocative. However, I think I understand what he was trying to achieve and it doesn't square with the inch-deep analysis being flung about here & elsewhere.

Dreadnought

Points I have a problem with in his sermen.

1) Racial issues. Why is it that when the word slavery comes up it is always focused on the U.S. Slavery's VERY origins go back much farther and much deeper then the U.S. But it seems when the issue is raised the U.S. is at fault first and foremost. Not the very countries of origin for slavery nor the very first country to market slavery but the U.S. is at fault none the less.

Why not blame the match for the fire. Or blame the gun for the shot that killed somebody. Why can't all assume responsibility for their actions and stop blaming the "government for their woes". They (We) have it 1 million times better off then the majority of countries out there and still we refrain from assuming our own responsibility and continue to point the finger at the government.

2) The attack on Pearl Harbor. I think on this issue the good reverand needs his head examined fairly well. That about sums it up.

3) Government created the HIV virus to kill off BLACKS. That has to be the most idiotic thing I have ever heard. Funny how the government created virus seems to attack whites,hispanics,blacks,indians both male and female genders as well and with no segregation upon what you do for a living rich and or poor. Well reverand what say you to that? The HIV virus is a form of cancer and has been around since the beginning. Science had not given it an official name yet but none the less has been around that long in the form of cancer itself. What say you to that reverand?

For the man to state this and them condem my country is a joke. He is a racist and he preaches racism to those that would listen to him. He offers zero proof of this "white man " conspiracy and comes off looking like the fool he is. Did he damage Obamas chances.. IMO he certainly did and now everybody seems to be back peddling away from his remarks. I wonder why.
Maybe just maybe they realize what a mad dog fool he really is.

Yeah this man needs to preach to people.

If the man was trully interested in helping his congregation then he should step down, publicly deplore the accusations he has made and then redeem himself by telling his own congregation that what he said was racist and wrong.

Maybe people think everbody is overreacting at what he said but mind you this... When a world event happens (most of the time for the bad) where do people turn. First to the government to actually see with their own eyes that something is being done about it and Secondly to the spiritual side of themselves through interaction and prayers and their following to seek comfort.

__________________
Fortitude.....The strength to persist...The courage to endure.

gunnut

Funny, I wonder about you as well.

He was not born in the deep south, so it's unlikely he has experienced any of the racist laws there with his "brothers and sisters." My thing is he plays this "black suffering" thing but his family and himself have not endured the true racism he talks about.

And that was done by the republicans. The Civil Rights of 1964 was filibustered by a democrat senator with his democrat pals in the Senate. The lead filibuster was one named Albert Gore. The father of Rev. Al Gore of the Global Warming Cult.

People will do what they want. You have your biases. We can't help it. We removed racist laws. What more do you want? What do you propose? Let's say Obama is elected president. Then what? Do you think all the racists will disappear from America just because we have an African president?

I did not say he has not experienced any. I said he probably has not experienced the type of racism he talks about in his speeches.

I may have experienced discrimination because of my skin color. But I give people the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they just had a bad day when they met me. Maybe they have some difficulties in their own lives. I know I get very crabby when I'm in a bad mood. Racism is the last thing that I will call people when I meet someone I don't agree with.

Yeah they have personally suffered through the Japanese atrocity. That's something I cannot say for myself. Obama cannot say that he has suffered through slavery. No black Americans today can say they have personally suffered through slavery. Most can't even say they've suffered through pre-64 racism.

His family was not royalty, but they certainly weren't ordinary people in Kenya.

Again, you are the company you keep. Those attitudes rub off on people. I probably won't have a good time hanging out with you. Neither you, I. We hang out with people we agree with. It's a more pleasant experience.

No I haven't. He practices class warfare because he's a socialist. I said his speech about race was not class warfare only in the first part. The first part was trying to explain why Wright has those views and how racist the "typical" whiteys are.

Too delusional that you can't even respond? You're delusional yet I still responded.

That's correct. But you have to check one of my previous posts where I said Obama will have a problem with his "Afro-centric" church about a month before this thing blew up. I'll look for that post for you.

edit: Here we go. I predicted this about a month before it blew up.

I don't care about the religious background. What I care about is the, dare I say, patriotism, of the said candidate. I have a problem with people who are firebrand anti-americans. For example, most of the Hollywood types and most San Francisco democrats.

How much more clear can Wright be when he said "the government designed AIDS to kill black people" and other assorted looney comments?

Good for you to have voted for someone like that. Would you be looking into the Nationalist Socialist Party next?

What I have a problem with him is that he's very serious. He's very serious at blaming the whiteys for everything wrong with the black community. He never bothered to take a minute to look in the mirror. Sure, blacks have been discriminated in a terrible way for hundreds of years. But where do we draw the line? When should they take some responsibilities for their plight? Maybe you haven't lived in this country so you don't understand what our "black" leaders are doing. All they do is blame white America for their sufferings and want more government programs to "right the wrongs" of slavery. They don't go out to tell their people "hey, let's work hard and earn our respect. There are bigots out there but we can't help it. Our destiny lies in our hands, not in theirs." A very common view in the black community is that any successful black is a "sell out." Anyone who doesn't live in the slum is a "house n*gger." It's easier to blam others than to work hard. Wright is perpetuating this view with his "blame Amerikkka" sermons.

Ironduke

A snippet from an article on the Daily Telegraph Page. I think the author makes a great point:
Barack Obama's desperate desire to belong - Telegraph

__________________
The Buck Stops Here

Ironduke

Jeremiah Wright was a top-level advisor in the Obama campaign until the videos appeared in the media. As has been stated numerous times, their relationship was much closer than pastor and congregant.
Wright can be as angry as he wants.

However, he preached that United States government invented AIDS and infected blacks with it as a means of committing genocide against blacks.

He preached that on 9/11, the chickens came home to roost clearly inferring that the US got what it deserved, citing US policy regarding Israel, Hiroshima & Nagasaki, and so on.

He preached that the United States perpetrated yet another conspiracy with the CIA distributing crack cocaine into black inner-city neighborhoods to destroy the black community.

Obama brushes them off as being merely "controversial." That's extremely weak. A controversy, by definition, can only exist where there is truth or plausibility in both sides of an argument. Wright's assertions don't contain truth or plausibility. They consist of lies, false, fringe conspiracy theories, and a healthy dose of racism. They perpetuate a culture of victimhood, by asserting the white man is infecting blacks with AIDS and supplying them drugs, instead of trying to instill a culture of responsibility with safe sex practices and drug abstinence.

They go far beyond controversy. There's absolutely no excuse for them and Wright bears culpability for perpetuating such false and harmful lies.
For somebody who didn't even know that Wright had a top-level position in the Obama campaign until the day those videos surfaced, I'm not surprised that you'd make such a wrong assumption.

Anybody who has been following the presidential campaigns closely was already well aware of Obama's pastor problem. Wright's ideology and connection to Obama has been a known quantity for quite some time.

The videos merely illustrated what was already known, and spread that knowledge almost universally to a very wide audience. It was the knowledge of the qualities of Wright that drove ABC to seek out the tapes of his sermons. Just because you were ignorant of this don't assume that everybody else was.

JAD_333

I assume you're referring to American conservatives, in which case you are mistaken. There may be a conservative here and there who believes that once Jim Crow law were off the books, everything is fine, but for the rest of us, that is not at all true. We expected racial inequality to continue beyond
corrective legislation for the simple reason that a minority of Americans opposed integration every step of the way.

Not laughable at all, because it's true. He is like a modern day white who cannot fathom the mindset of slaveowners or segregationists. Obama is like anyone who didn't live through the worst of it, white or black. He reacts intellectually. That is, he knows the abuses of segregation because he was told about them. That is a far cry from the emotional POV of someone who experienced them all their lives.

Anger is a fashion. There are better ways to heal wounds than to keep reopening them. I am willing to be patient until the pent up anger dissapates, but don't say we conservatives think racism is all in the past.

__________________
To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education. (Plato)

JAD_333

I'd tend to cut Obama some slack here and perhaps you would if you were less strict in your definition of the word 'controversial'. Like the word 'absolutely', it often misused. Controversial commonly signifies sharp disagreement between two sides that both claim to know the facts. I would still like to ask Obama if he would also characterize Wright's AIDs theory as 'absurd'. To think it all started as a Soviet disinformation program.

kmchugh

Bigfella, for someone who lives in Melbourne, you seem to have made quite a study of the US. I commend you on searching out the facts, but remember that what you read can only take you so far. The facts for those of us who live here are a bit different that what you perceive. One statement in your last post screamed to me that you are only familiar with part of the story.

Hogwash and other comments. To one degree or another, all of us live with racial discrimination. I live in the South, specifically in Arkansas about 8 miles from Memphis, Tennessee, and I am white. The population of Memphis is about 50/50 white and black. For the most part, we all get along very well, though of course there are those ignorant Caucasians who continue to be racist. But the opposite is true as well. I am white, and I encounter anti-white racism every single day. It ranges from simple rudeness (daily) to outright threats of violence (somewhat less frequent). The last Memphis mayoral election provided a clear example of this bias.

Willie Herenton recently won reelection for mayor for his fifth term. Prior to becoming the mayor, Herenton was the superintendent of Memphis schools. By almost any measure, Herenton has proven himself to be incompetent in any leadership role in the public sector. Memphis, which is not a large city by any standards, has one of the highest crime rates in the US. Among blacks, by the mayor’s own admission, there is a 35% high school drop out rate. Memphis has almost reached the point of bankruptcy. There is an ongoing flight of middle and upper class citizens, both black and white, out of Memphis to surrounding areas. Herenton’s answer to nearly every problem is to find a way to increase the taxation of what he calls the “rich” in order to fund his latest idea. And many of his ideas are self serving, such as the scheme that brought the Grizzlies NBA team to Memphis, even though Memphis simply does not have a large enough population base to be able to adequately support a professional sports team. And I have not even discussed the sweetheart deal he gave to Fed-Ex to get them to fund an unnecessary sports arena to house the Grizzlies. And, as alluded to by the WSJ editorial above, he’s now looking to demolish and rebuild another sporting venue.

I could go on and on, but the point is that this man has, over the course of 17 years as mayor, run the city of Memphis into the ground. Yet he won an unprecedented fifth term as Memphis mayor, and did it largely through race baiting. He relied on the racist members of the black community, who will vote for a black incompetent long before ever voting for ANY non-black candidate. The one thing he did not do was win by a majority. He won, barely, by a plurality.

America's little known secret isn't that racism exists. It that not all the racists in this country are white. Racism exists across the board, and all of us will run in to it at some time or another. The key is what one chooses to do when one meets this ignorance. One can choose to be angry and vindictive, which accomplishes nothing, or one can choose to overcome the ignorance, and achieve one’s own goals in spite of whatever ignorance you may encounter. Can it be done, here in the South? You tell me. I have a new boss, she’s a black woman. She’s pretty good, too.

__________________
If you didn't pay any taxes, it's not a rebate. It's welfare.

Bigfella

One of the problems with running against the mob on a thread like this is the inevitability of one person trying to reply to many. I simply don't have the time to answer each & every one in appropriate detail, so I'll just do what I can.

kmchugh,

Thank you for your kind remarks. I have been fascinated with your fine country since I was a child. We have family in California & dear freinds there & in Michigan. I have visited several times, though sadly not recently. I have studied American history & politics for many years at University & I am currently doing a PhD that is nominally in the field of American History (it is on aspects of the Vietnam War - happy to discuss if you feel like being bored ). I try my best to get things right, though I don't pretend to always do so.

To your comments, I am under no illusions about the presence of racial prejudice across ethnic groups in America. I am also under no illusions about some of the origins of that prejudice. The unfortunate tradition of judging people en masse on the basis of physical appearance or ethnicity is only a few generations from being the rule, rather than the exception in both our societies. I am pleased to say that no one in my family has suffered such discrimination within living memory. I doubt that any person of color in either of our societies could make such a claim, and I think that is an important factor in understanding some aspects of black society. I think that for either of us to counsel such a person to 'turn the other cheek', no matter how well intentioned we may be, comes close to an insult.


I agree that it it potentially destructive for any group to bloc vote, especially if it is in support of mediocrity. I do, however, understand why many blacks may still feel the need for 'unity'. As you are no doubt aware, such sentiments began as a form of defence & continued as an attempt to assert themselves in a society where they felt at best indifference, at worst outright hostility. Blacks no doubt observed that other ethnic groups, including much lauded migrants, made their entree' into American society in just such a way. It can be hard to let go of an apparent source of safety even when it clearly has negative consequences.


One of the great ironies of all this is that I see Obama as the first black leader since King capable of reaching beyond his own people and beyond the 'usual suspects' among liberal whites. I don't see him falling back on the old prejudices. I see him as someone capable of coaxing black America into the mainstream. It saddens me to see the determination with which some people want to turn him into Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Unlike the two of us, he CAN counsel black Americans to 'turn the other cheek' and be taken seriously. In the past few months I have read every concievable type of attack on Obama, and also on his family. Even the anti-Bush hysteria, appalling as it was, focussed on the man himself. What concerns me about the current situation is that if Obama's candidacy is seen to be derailed for reasons other than disagreement with his political beliefs it will simply reinforce among blacks all the negative prejudices that allow someone such as your local Mayor to flourish.