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March 22, 2007

Barack Obama is not Tiger Woods

Although the biracial [Barack] Obama is frequently lumped with the multiracial golfer Tiger Woods as evidence of the socially healing power of interracial marriage, their attitudes are quite different. Woods turned down Nike’s suggestion that because African-American celebrities are so popular today, he should identify himself solely as black. He didn’t want to disown his mother. Woods instead calls himself black and Thai, or, at times, “Caublinasian,” in tribute to his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian ancestors.
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[Obama] cherishes every cause for complaint he can discern against white folks. He is constantly distressed at being half-white. Obama says he “ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” even though he surely realizes that his media-sensation status stems from how much white people love highly accomplished blacks who speak with white accents. He wouldn’t be a serious candidate for president at age 45 if he weren’t part black.
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The message much of white America hopes to send to black America by electing Obama is: Don’t Be So Black. Act More Barack. Perhaps this explains why blacks haven’t been all that enthusiastic.
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Obama was accepted into posh Occidental College in Los Angeles, which then had a black mayor, Tom Bradley. But Oxy wasn’t black enough, so in search of a community to belong to, he transferred to Harlem … well, to be precise, to that prestigious university on the edge of Harlem, Columbia. (A recurrent theme in Obama’s career is Power to the People gestures and Ivy League results.)
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Most authors who write about African-Americans’ social problems appear to know nothing--and don’t seem to want to learn anything--about Africans. Our pundits and academics assume that the social history of black Americans traces to that day in 1619 when the first slaves were herded on to that dock in Virginia, but no farther back. We could call it the Black Blank Slate theory.

In refreshing contrast, in Obama’s account of race and inheritance, the continuities between Africa and African-America are clear. Kenya seems like an incipient Chicago housing project, preserved only by its inability to afford the welfare state that has ruined the inner city. His aunt’s Nairobi home is “just like the apartments in Altgeld, I realized. The same chain of mothers and daughters and children. … The same absence of men.”

"Obama’s Identity Crisis: Although he presents himself as a healer of differences, the presidential candidate’s own racial struggle paints a conflicted portrait," by Steve Sailer, The American Conservative, March 26, 2007

Yet an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has revealed that, for all Mr Obama's reputation for straight talking and the compelling narrative of his recollections, they are largely myth.

We have discovered that his father was not just a deeply flawed individual but an abusive bigamist and an egomaniac, whose life was ruined not by racism or corruption but his own weaknesses.

And, devastatingly, the testimony has come from Mr Obama's own relatives and family friends.
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A family friend said: "He is haunted by his father's failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken lecher."

"A drunk and a bigot - what the US Presidental hopeful HASN'T said about his father...," by Sharon Churcher, The Daily Mail, January 27, 2007

Rev. Jeremiah Wright - Techonrati

"Obama Disses His Pastor," Get Rid of the DLC blog, March 7, 2007

The Obama Messiah Watch - Timothy Noah, Slate

Posted at March 22, 2007 09:37 PM | Categories: Politics

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