Obama Lies

I have to thank Arthur Silber for linking to this Earl Ofari Hutchinson piece on the myths about black fathers. It seems that Mr. Brilliant Speech Writer and Law Professor can't research simple facts that were presented in Newsweek magazine.

"A month before Obama made this stereotypical and plainly false assertion, Boston University professor Rebekah Levine Coley, in a comprehensive study on the black family, found that black fathers who aren’t in the home are much more likely to sustain regular contact with their children than absentee white fathers, or for that matter, fathers of any other ethnic group. The study is not an obscure study buried in the thick pages of a musty academic journal. It was widely cited in a feature article on black fathers in the May 19, 2008 issue of Newsweek. There was no excuse then to spout this myth. The facts are totally contrary to Obama’s knock."

Who needs facts where black people are concerned. Glen Ford said as much in today's issue of Black Agenda Report.

"But there are large regions of the white body politic in which it is not only acceptable, but damn near required, that politicians demonstrate their impatience with the alleged moral shortcomings of Black people. Barack Obama trolls for votes in those foul waters, at the cost of Black people's dignity."

That statement isn'treally surprising. Glen's most important points are about the the sick relationship between Obama and black voters.

"African Americans are expected to circle the wagons at the merest hint of racist threats to the candidate. Any slight to Obama, real or imagined, must be met with massive Black response, while Obama's disregard of Black priorities and sensibilities is endlessly forgivable. At the commonsensical level, the entire Obama-Black folks relationship is so bizarre as to seem insane. The candidate has been imposed on the African American polity by corporate forces in the Democratic Party, of which he is a loyal, Harvard-vetted operative. He constantly swears fealty to the white American civic religions of American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny, both rooted in race supremacy. He has proven his devotion to this ghastly Euro-American mythology and worldview, through public denunciation of liberation theology and ritual separation from one of its major institutions. He bows to imperial power and its endless expansion, fully aware that, as Dr. Martin Luther King phrased it 40 years ago, the military will 'draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube, draining all hope for creation of a just society.' "

Seem insane? Glen is being too kind. It is insane. Black people applauded Obama's speech far outside the walls of that church. Most of us just don't care what he says or does. We will support him as he leads us to war or to jail or the unemployment line or the poor house or to the gates of hell itself.

There is nothing but more pathology to come between now and November. I can barely stand to think about it.