So I wasn’t the only person disgusted by Obama’s speech at Morehouse College. Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic:
I think the stature of the Obama family — the most visible black family in American history — is a great blow in the war against racism. I am filled with pride whenever I see them: there is simply no other way to say that.
[…] But I also think that some day historians will pore over his many speeches to black audiences. They will see a president who sought to hold black people accountable for their communities, but was disdainful of those who looked at him and sought the same. They will match his rhetoric of individual responsibility, with the aggression the administration showed to bail out the banks, and the timidity they showed in addressing a foreclosure crisis which devastated black America (again.)They will weigh the rhetoric against an administration whose efforts against housing segregation have been run of the mill. And they will match the talk of the importance of black fathers with the paradox of a president who smoked marijuana in his youth but continued a drug-war which daily wrecks the lives of black men and their families. In all of this, those historians will see a discomfiting pattern of convenient race-talk.
I think the president owes black people more than this. In the 2012 election, the black community voted at a higher rate than any other ethnic community in the country. Their vote went almost entirely to Barack Obama. They did this despite a concerted effort to keep them from voting, and they deserve more than a sermon. Perhaps they cannot practically receive targeted policy. But surely they have earned something more than targeted scorn.
What was it Maya Angelou said? When someone tells you who they are, listen.
B0 has been the same forever. The first election he ran in he won by getting a Rove-type Harvard Law School buddy to come up with the idea of invalidating registered voters likely to vote for the very popular incumbent. It was a small city election in a black neighborhood, a few hundred or a thousand votes made the difference, and the maneuver was done too close to the election to have enough time to respond to the vote challenges. So he managed to steal that election from a black woman. Alice (don’t remember the last name).
He’s always been one who’d kick his own grandmother to the curb if it served his purposes. Ta-Nehisi Coates is pretty slow on the uptake.
When the moderate left begins to hammer you, you’re toast. Let’s just hope this clown doesn’t start a war like all of his predecessors have when their popularity began to sink. Clinton even blew up a baby milk factory to win the public back.
This is the same offensive nonsense Obama spouted in that “great” speech at some convention or other. Blame the “ghetto” dads for no jobs and lousy schools. It was so racist as to make me puke, while others were touting his brilliance. What the hell did he know – or does he know to this day – of life in the inner city? Nada, that’s what. Nor does he care.
Goddam it. We now have the Chicago machine in full force running the government – spying on all of us all the time and digging up dirt to use whenever any one of us asserts truth to power. We didn’t know this then? Or when he voted for FISA? Or when he stole votes from Hillary?
Better late than never, I suppose – but sometimes it’s just too damn late.
imhopeless – your Clinton-hate is showing again….