Obama Motivation?

While President Obama is smart enough to grow into the office, his bizarre behavior thus far gives cause to wonder not only about that matter, but also to wonder about what aspect(s) of his life have had the greatest impact on his philosophies and consequently his approach to governance. In the face of the deep recession, with unemployment rising through the year to a current 9.8%, he’s seen that Michelle Obama has shopped for days in Paris (her own private U.S. jet, secret service and whatever else) and used three U.S. jets and all appropriate security measures, vehicles, and paraphernalia for a “date in New York.” This has cost millions of dollars.

As if that weren’t enough, with some 15-million or so looking for work, he decided on the spur of the moment to wow the IOC Commission in Copenhagen into giving the 2016 games to Chicago and just took to the air after already sending Michelle Obama on “her” plane and despite the fact that Mayor Daly and a contingent from Chicago were already on-scene making the case. Placing his and the country’s prestige on the line, he made both him and this country into laughing-stocks. It has been amply proven that IOC decisions are based on the worst sort of corruption, and he should have suspected that Chicago had been ruled out long before Copenhagen.

Concerning influences, an inescapable fact is that he sat in Jeremiah Wright’s church for 20 years and listened to anti-American and hate-the-white-man rhetoric. Wright wrote this in the Nov.-Dec. (2007) issue of the Trumpet magazine, run by his daughters: "The government runs everything from the White House to the schoolhouse, from the Capitol to the Klan, white supremacy is clearly in charge…". Connecting the U.S. government with the Klan is a slap in every American's face. Much of the rest of Wright's rambling hate-filled speeches/writings such as his allusion to garlic-nosed Italians have been well-documented.

Dr. James Cone, the designer of Black Liberation Theology, is Wright's mentor. To see where Wright is coming from, I listened to nearly all of Cone's one-hour-plus lecture, Strange Fruit: the Cross and the Lynching Tree, given at Harvard in October 2006 as part of the Ingersoll series, which Harvard has placed on the Internet. I listened/viewed a couple of other snippets of Cone in other venues, an interview and panel-discussion presentation, also available on the Internet. Cone makes much of what he calls "white supremacy" and the "cross." He insists that white Americans (supremacists) can understand the cross only in the context of the lynchings of blacks in this country, comparing those lynchings to the crucifixion, mentioning 5,000 of them.

According to Cone, the white supremacists can obtain forgiveness only as they provide reparations to blacks. Wright, the keynote speaker at its convention in 2007, is a darling of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), thus putting Obama squarely in the must-position of declaring how he feels about this matter, since Wright has been a mentor of sorts to Obama. Obama hasn't said, or at least plainly enough, but he's saddled with the problem.

Nor does it help that Wright is obviously pals with Louis Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, and in 1984 went to Tripoli with him to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. Farrakhan stated that the U.S Government sabotaged the levees on Lake Pontchartrain so that black folk would be killed by a levee-break, such as the failure of the levee during Hurricane Katrina in 2005. He claimed to have the proof but he never produced it.

The Trumpet, begun by Wright and/or his church in 1982 and whose editor and publisher became Jeremiah Wright's daughters, awarded Farrakhan its Empowerment Award in 2007, something Obama had to know about…but has he said anything about it – approval or disapproval? In a Nov.-Dec. Trumpet article, Wright is quoted: "Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th- and 21st-century giants of the African American religious experience."

So...does Obama see his election as the vehicle for inculcating “payback (reparations) time,” a sort of “in your face, America...We won?” Is his profligate spending for himself and his wife (actually outrageously expensive mini-vacations on the public dime) in the face of tragic overall adversity his way of saying “let them (the hoi polloi) eat cake?” How could reparations be more fully and quickly integrated than to drag the nation into an unforgiving socialism, redistributing the wealth from those who create it to those who have the votes to confiscate it?

And...does the fact that Obama was born into Islam play a role in how he views the nation/world, not to mention his connection with Wright, to whom he devoted an entire but unsuccessful “makeover” speech in Philadelphia last year? The jury’s out, but the evidence thus far is that Obama intends for his promised CHANGE to completely reverse the private enterprise system that has driven this nation into the top spot globally but from which, on his watch, it is sliding. Sad!

And so it goes.

Jim Clark