My Blood

I am on record many times, both on radio and on stage, saying how much I like Barack Obama on a purely personal level. Although I worked for Senator McCain’s campaign and was, and am, a staunch supporter, from early in the presidential campaign I expressed my admiration for Obama. He is bright, funny, personable, and largely self-made from humble beginnings. The part about “liking him”, though…that has changed.

There is barely a day that passes that something astonishing does not come rumbling out of this White House. It’s hard to keep up with. From the radical views of our new Attorney General, Eric Holder, who supported and aided in what is now the scheduled release of 75,000 felons from California’s prisons, to the new Federal Communications Commission director Mark Lloyd who is busy engineering a new, sleuth Fairness Doctrine, this administration seems increasingly reckless.

Just this week, an announcement that we will essentially dismantle our missile-defense system, in the face off the increasingly real prospect of a nuclear Iran and North Korea, both countries that are ruled by psychopaths. Stunning. The vodka must be flowing in the Kremlin. President Reagan must be spinning in his grave. I remember how surreal the idea of his “Star Wars” defense system seemed at the time. Now, in hindsight, he was a visionary.

This is more than simple “policy” stuff. These kinds of sweeping changes, particularly coupled with our demise as a financial super-power, seem to me to be an almost deliberate effort to make us as vulnerable as possible to the rest of the world. I wonder at times, if Obama’s ascension to the White House is not the ultimate hijacking. Remember the Gandhi-like patience of the 9/11 hijackers? Flight school…years of planning, the patience of spiders quietly spinning their web, self-assured in the eventual efficacy of their work.

So, as if all of this were not enough, and the above is just the tip of the iceberg, the thing that bothers me most about this President and his cronies, is the New Racism they have introduced to America.

I wrote weeks ago about the Henry Gates incident, the Harvard Professor who accused a Cambridge, Mass cop of being a racist. Our President went off teleprompter during a press conference on health care, just long enough to expose himself, when he said that the “Cambridge Police acted stupidly”. Just animation away from being Reverend Wright himself.

Then, just days ago, during a joint session of Congress held to discuss, surprise, health care “reform”, a South Carolina Congressman, Joe Wilson, yelled out “liar” as the President reassured Americans that illegal immigrants would not be covered under this new plan, and that there would be no additional cost, or impact to existing access to quality health care. Joe Wilson was launched to folk-hero status with Republicans and Grand Dragon status with Democrats. Worse still, the President was being dishonest in his description of the reform bill.

While I felt that Wilson was out of line in yelling out while the President was speaking, he apologized promptly and was formally rebuked. Yet that wasn’t enough. Like the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have flocked to Town Hall meetings across the country and marched in Washington on September 12th, to voice their disagreement with the direction in which this country is being led, Wilson, like all of them, has been tagged a “racist”.

Even former President Jimmy Carter, whose brain seems to have turned into a peanut, announced that most Americans who are complaining about this administration’s policies, simply don’t like black people and especially a black president. Joe Wilson, who I believe has four children who are either serving, or have served, in the military, must be biting his tongue. Last time I checked, our soldiers protect, and serve with, citizens of all colors and ethnic backgrounds. How obnoxiously smarmy to play the race card in this way. And our President seems fine with it. He has not addressed it, this prophet of “change” and “hope” and “unity”, even in the face of the most overwhelming evidence of all that we are not a racist country…his own Presidency.

And it is an assault on me and my blood as well. My late father, who served in Germany during World War II, and raised his children to understand the ignorance of racism. The impracticality of judging moral character based on skin color. Not only was he not racist, he was vehemently opposed to bigotry. One of the few people I have ever seen who would not stand for it in conversation, when an untoward comment might be made by someone, he would call them on it. This was long before the Civil Rights movement and long before it was in vogue.

My children have been raised the same way and it is an assault on their character as well. My blood. And it is for this reason that beyond the mortgaging of their future with capricious spending and a corrupt government that continues to operate unchecked, that being labeled a “racist” because I disagree with the philosophy of this administration, angers me more than any of their policy decisions.

I’m confident that I’m not alone here. And I will not forget or forgive what has happened here. For the first time in my adult life, I’m beginning to feel a little racist, and I don’t like it. But our President has me wondering, “is this how black people have viewed me all along?” That all of us, every white American that didn’t vote for Obama or does not now fall in lock-step with his sheep, are racists?

How sad that in just these few months, race relations in America have been driven back decades, and there seems to be no end in sight. How sad, and unusual, that of all the “high-thinkers” and enlightened operatives that surround this President, not a single one has pulled him aside and said, “Sir, perhaps it’s time to take one day off from your health care crusade, and address the other half of the country. Not in your usual diminutive and demeaning way, but with that promise of healing that was the centerpiece of your campaign.” But then again, there would have to be one person who wants that to happen, and there would have to be a President who wants that to happen. I don’t believe we have either one.