Barack Obama is clinching the Democratic Party nomination and has favorable chances to become the next US President. I am not American, but America is so important for world peace and survival, that its elections are, in a way, everybody's business. When the Roman empire decayed, it was very bad for evebody, even for those who were not Romans. England, for example, became unlivable for several centuries after the Romans left. Obama poses some difficult questions:
(1) He has unresolved identity problems, bordering on neurosis.
(2) His economic concepts are infantile, anti-industrial and anti-globalist. He cherishes the pre-industrial, artesanal, village workshop forms of production. He seems to be totally ignorant of the basics of modern market economy.
(3) His social solutions are romantic, idealistic, impracticable. Why you two dont shake hands?
(4) Apparently, he never gave a thought to the Middle East conflict. Having grown up in a Muslim environment in Indonesia, and then in an indifferent school in Hawai, he was never exposed to a pro-Israeli environment.
(5) He is a professional organizer of poor Black neighborhoods in Chicago. He has learned that success is to channel more government money and privileges to the underclass. He will probably spend much time and effort in advancing social and educational programs.
(6) He has pesonally benefited from governmental favoritism and promotion, so he can be expected to deepen these systems.
(7) He is an extremely talented speaker and writer, yet his spoken and written output is scarce and very carefully controlled to advance his political aims. In fact, little is known about what he really thinks.
10 comments:
Here is an interview where Obama pretends to really like Jews and Israel and not admit that he travels in leftist pro-Palestinian circles.
http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/05/obama_on_zionism_and_hamas.php
I'm not sold by this interview at all, but I must admit it is a frighteningly good effort - the man is a very natural and convincing salesman and unlike Hillary, for example, you don't get the vibe that he doesn't believe a word that he is saying - he may be such a good liar that he convinces even himself.
I love his line that blacks and Jews have become estranged "for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate." Why not? Because he got into enough trouble playing sociologist regarding "bitter" lower class whites? Because the answer is that the estrangement was all on the black side - that they pushed the Jews out of the civil rights movement, motivated by "black nationalism" and a desire to exclude all whites, plus a healthy residual dose of church inspired antisemitism (the African-American community and especially the black church is just about the last reservoir of antisemitism in America)?
Obama is the illegitimate son of a 17 years old White American girl and an African student. He has made a political carrier of being an American Black, which he is not. I dont think that in Chicago´s Black neighborhoods where he worked he ever heard or said a good word about Jews. Only a virulently self-hating Jew like George Soros, with his convoluted reasoning, could finance him to become a national figure. I dont think he will be good to Jews.
Obama himself admits (in this interview) that what little association he had with Jews (his with the U. of Chicago, unnamed "Jewish friends") was itself enough to make him suspect with the black community. Conversely, hanging around Palestinians and other Muslims increased his popularity there.
Remember that only 3 years ago, Obama was still a state senator in the Illinois legislature (a very low office) representing only his (mostly black) Chicago neighborhood and his priorities were to get elected by the people of his little district. Aside from his broader identity crisis and his "adoption" into his wife's genuine American Black family, it was very much in his political interest to be identified as a fellow American Black and to adopt the (thinly veiled antisemitic) attitudes of other American Blacks.
Fortunately, I don't think (or at least hope) that this is enough time to convincingly reverse course and become a mainstream centrist figure that is acceptable to a majority of middle to lower class white voters (see the results in W. Virginia). Without this group, he has no chance of winning a general election in November. Obama also compiled a voting record (and not much else) in his brief time in the US Senate which earned him a #1 position in a survey of who is the most liberal (leftist) US Senator (not excluding the Jewish socialist Senator from Vermont), based on an unbiased pre-existing ranking system.
http://nj.nationaljournal.com/voteratings/
The left liberal educated classes (which includes the self-deluding Jews you mention) and blacks of course love this, but are not sufficient to win a US presidential election - this has been proven over and over in the last 40 years - the only Democrats who have won in that period were (a) Bill Clinton , who ran from the center (Hillary is still doing well with that group and (b) Carter, who was an aberration due to Watergate. Every reliable leftist like Obama (Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, even Gore who started in the center but moved left) has lost. Let us pray that this pattern will remain intact.
You would think that Democrats would learn the lesson from the fact that leftists always lose, but their nominating system (which is dominated by leftist groups) keeps putting leftists on top no matter how slim their chances in the general election. And they seem to have done it again.
Now in the past (and even today) the leftist fishwraps and TV networks would do everything to avoid mentioning, even conceal, Obama's leftist history and views. But the internet has reduced their monopoly on information and made it much harder to run the kind of propaganda campaign needed to convince the public that Obama is really a harmless mainstream figure. The only wrinkle here is that McCain is something of an old-school gentleman and seems unwilling to dirty himself . But of course, he must be very careful - anything you say about Obama could be perceived as a racial insult. Hopefully this is all a clever strategy where McCain will remain above the fray and allow others to do the necessary dirty work, even protesting that he is against such efforts.
When wondering Obama´s attitude toward Israel, the most relevant cue is its position within the Democratic Party. He represents the ethnic, Third Worldist, antiglobablist, extreme left wing of the Party, which is the only important anti-Jewish and anti-Israel force in the United States. He has perfected the art of making African Americans believe he is one of them (he is not), and he has ingratiated himself with many mid-stream Democrats (which he is not). If not Rev. Dr. Wright himself, similar figures will play an important role in his government. I wonder how will manage Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez a Tercermundista more extreme than him in the White House.
The US is not Venezuela (yet) and hopefully we will not get to find out.
I remember Venezuela's Hugo Chavez last year address to the United Nations's General Assembly ("The devil came here yesterday and it smells of sulfur still today."). Chavez wouldnt say that about Obama. Would he?
Anon.: The USA is not Venezuela, for sure. It is the world's most advanced, richest country. But Chicago's Altgeld buildings (where Obama "grew up" and made his political career) can be compared to the worst Caracas barrios.
Civilization is a thin veneer. Last night I went with my son to a car wash in West Philadelphia, an older, formerly Jewish neighborhood (the synagogue buildings are still there, all turned to churches, and increasingly, mosques). The car wash is run by Africans (recent immigrants, not "African-Americans") and my son found it tremendously amusing that there in the middle of one of America's largest cities, 5 blocks from his university where the computer was invented, the Africans kept a few chickens that were scratching around in the dirt at the edge of the parking lot, as if they were back in their village in Senegal.
The difference between the US and Venezuela is in the relative sizes of the middle class vs. the degraded lower class that you find in the barrios and the government housing projects. In the Communist formulation, these people have nothing to lose but their chains, so they prefer leaders with redistributionist policies - the distributions will flow in their direction (they hope). In Venezuela, they outnumber the prosperous and so they were able to take power democratically. In the US, they are generally NOT a majority at the national level. At least so far.
Does he think? Does he really think for himself? Or does he just tell people what they want to hear, wherever he is?
Obama does think. He is a good writer and has made much thinking on his roots. In that sense, he is authentic.
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