Posted on 04/19/2009 1:43:04 PM PDT by reaganaut1
The Washington Post informs us of the presidential visit to Latin American with a headline “Race a Dominant Theme at Summit.” It then goes on to describe how Obama resonates with those leaders of “indigenous” heritage in Latin America.
Something here is not quite right. Our president ran on a platform of racial transcendence, but he now heads south to talk race ("The president put it [race] on the table very explicitly" at the opening ceremony, said a senior Obama administration official who participates in closed-door meetings with the president.”) with some leaders who have explicitly employed racially charged stereotypes, such as Chavez’s use of “Go to Hell, Gringos,” or Brazil’s president Lula's reference to “white blue-eyed” bankers who caused the financial meltdown.
Yet rather than discouraging such racial polarization, the president of a racially diverse, melting-pot America, finds the emphasis on racial identification useful for his global transnational agenda (or as the Post put it more mildly, “Obama has mentioned his race as part of a Latin America agenda broader than the Bush administration's, which focused primarily on promoting an economic policy of free trade, government privatizations and lower public debt. The mix became known as the Washington Consensus, a term used as an epithet in much of Latin America.”)
What does “broader” mean? Many of us do not see the likes of Chavez, Ortega, Morales, et al. as victims of much of anything, but rather savvy autocratic would-be dictators bent on using stale tropes like colonization and racism to explain away their own miserable failures as leaders, and to advance their own agendas of personal aggrandizement. The more they see an American president apologize abroad, the more they rant about the U.S. past in search of more apologies.
A common denominator with Obama's easy emphasis on racial divides—when juxtaposed to past evocation abroad of his Muslim sensitivities and middle name, serial apologies about American sins and pathologies, and constant denunciation of his predecessor—is a sense that the past tradition of America is culpable and therefore not his own—made explicit in his response to Daniel Ortega's diatribe that he was just three months old during the Bay of Pigs troubles, and by extension not responsible for American transgressions. Again, separately all these new approaches are in themselves understandable, but in the aggregate they form a disturbing pattern seen earlier with the off-handed remarks about "typical white person," the stereotyping of rural Pennsylvanians along lines of class and race, and the 20-year long patronage of a clearly racist preacher.
At some point, Obama needs to take a hiatus from this racialist identification, and, like a Sec. Condoleezza Rice, transcend race, let achievements and policies speak for themselves, and thus rise or fall on the content of his own character.
“we” won’t get beyond race, because the politicians use race to divide us into warring groups. “we” won’t be getting beyond race any time soon.
We will NEVER get beyond race.
The left won’t allow it.
Call it Southpolitik. Like Ostpolitik (Egon Bahr/Willy Brandt). He is going for a "Change Through Rapprochement" strategy, modeling himself as a Third World leader seeking a Third World "victims of oppression" bloc. They want Obama for the UN, so this is his coming out party tour.
As with his efforts to explain the Dag Hammarskjöld/Hans Kelsen neo-Kantian theories of international cooperation to Ahmadinejad and Kim Jong-il , he is already looking for a Nobel Peace Prize (which they will give to him to usher him into the Secretary General's throne at the UN). They think this is funny.
*Samuel Huntington Alert.
No.
Next question...
AMEN! The thing I like about the Freep and many conservative gatherings is that I’m always judged for what I believe in rather than for what ethnicity I am, other than the usual shocked looks I get when I’m at an RNC booth or at a tea party. That shock simply goes away as soon as they realize that we share the same beliefs. However, most, if not all liberals I know in my VERY liberal state suck up to me based on race or the fact that I’m “disabled”. It’s sickening.
I love the fact that there are black conservatives, white conservatives, any kind of conservatives that are out there. But we don’t see ourselves as “black” or “white”. We’re all the same. We just have one thing in common: we all proud of being Americans (Sorry socialists, our founding fathers named our country “America”, so you can shove your “U.S. National” bullshit up your you know where) and we love this country like no other thing in the world except for our families and our God.
Let me know if you want in or out.
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If that is true there will be no end to the Bush bashing, capitalism bashing and America bashing: it'll be one big orgy of hate -- spread peace through hate. He'll play victim card like the race card until he gets what he wants.
“........let achievements and policies speak for themselves, and thus rise or fall on the content of his own character.”
With Obama’s character or lack thereof, the only card he has to play... is race.
They have already taken the country trillions into debt to try to prove their ideology. How much more will be spent for victimology, collectivism, and Fabian socialism over the next four years?
“...that the past tradition of America is culpable and therefore not his own — made explicit in his response to Daniel Ortega’s diatribe that he was just three months old during the Bay of Pigs troubles, and by extension not responsible for American transgressions.”
Ergo, NO REPARATIONS for slavery!
LOL, no. The rats and race hustlers will never allow it. They have too much invested.
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