Copyright by John T. Reed
The media has reported that over 90% of U.S. blacks support Barack Obama. I said that a few may do it because of his resume, character, and positions on the issues. In other words, those few blacks would support Barack Obama if he was a white guy named Barry O’Brien who also had a razor-thin resume, a left wing voting record, and a desire to “spread the wealth around.”
The vast majority of the rest of the blacks who are supporting Obama are doing so for one reason: his father was an African. In other words, they are racist. Colin Powell is apparently one of those racists.
Colin Powell endorsed Obama on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, 10/19/08.
Why did he do that? Many others believe it was racist including Rush Limbaugh. Others like O’Reilly have at least raised that question indicating they saw such a possibility. O’Reilly said it was part animosity toward the Bush Administration and Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. I suspect that’s true, but only part of it. I saw the endorsement speech. I concluded Powell’s affection for Obama was purely racist.
You can see the video and transcript of the endorsement yourself at http://www.groundreport.com/Politics/Powell-Endorses-Obama-Criticizes-McCain-VP-Pick-Ca.
I am going to quote portions of it and show why I say it makes no sense other than racial.
| Powell Speech | Reed Comment |
|---|---|
| I have some concerns about the direction that the party has taken in recent years it has moved more to the right than I would like to see it, but that’s a choice the party makes. | What’s that got to do with McCain? Conservatives are extremely unhappy with him. He has taken the Republican party toward the center with his various maverick positions. Which Republicans did Powell work for? Reagan and two Bush’s. He claims McCain is to the right of Reagan?! |
| And I’ve said to Mr. Obama, you have to pass a test of ‘do you have enough experience?’ | Obama not only has less experience than any presidential candidate in history, he is far behind whomever has the second least experience. He has never held an executive position, that is, one where he managed other people. He dabbled in teaching in law school. He was a 23-year-old editor of an international trade newsletter. All his other jobs were essentially campaigning behind various do-gooder fronts. |
| I have especially watched over the last 6 or 7 weeks as both of them have really taken a final exam with respect to this economic crisis that we’re in and coming out of the conventions. | Huh!? First, who is interested in Colin Powell’s take on how to manage an economic crisis? What the hell would he know about it? Check his resume on Wikipedia. It’s all military, national security, and Secretary of State. No domestic or economic experience or training. Secondly, what did either McCain or Obama do regarding the crisis? Nothing. Both made a couple of phone calls. Both voted yes on the bailout. McCain shot his mouth off a little. Obama displayed a cool, calm, and collected demeanor. In fact, neither McCain nor Obama has a freaking clue about economic crises. The current crisis is unprecedented. Few people on earth, if any, know what to do. Reduced to substance, Obama said nothing and did nothing other than vote yes. To put it another way, Obama merely showed that he learned the lesson from the deodorant commercial: “Never let ’em see you sweat.” There was no “final exam” to use Powell’s phrase. That will come on Inauguration Day. God help us no matter which one gets elected. |
| And I must say that I’ve gotten a good measure of both, and in the case of Mr. McCain, I found that he was a little unsure as to how to deal with the economic problems that we were having. And almost every day there was a different approach to the problem. | McCain was unsure. Who wouldn’t be? 47-year-old Obama doesn’t know any more about it than 72-year-old McCain, if he even knows as much. His silence on the matter is just another example of his being “present.” He’s like the guy at your company who got promoted to big boss because he stood back and avoided ever doing anything that might piss anyone off. Others tried to take action and were passed over because someone did not like the action they took. |
| I don’t believe [Sarah Palin]’s ready to be President of the United States, which is the job of the Vice President. | He cites no evidence. This is nothing but a Democrat party talking point. Essentially, it’s an intellectually-dishonest debate tactic known as “name calling.” He simply declares her unready, but offers no facts or logic to back it up. Sarah Palin probably would not get an interview if the most important job in the world were filled like important executive positions normally are. But the same is more true of the other three major candidates. She has more executive experience (mayor and governor) than the other three put together. |
| Mr. Obama at the same time has given us some more broader inclusive reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He’s crossing lines-- ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines. He’s thinking about all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values. | Bull! Obama is making strong efforts to register blacks and get them to the polls. That’s racist. He also called his grandmother “a typical white person” and rural voters desperate people who are clinging to their guns and Bibles. He keeps describing McCain as “out of touch” which is code for too old. He said “they’re” gonna tell you I’m black. In fact, he is the only one who keeps saying that, not “they.” Obama and his people are constantly playing the race card, calling almost every criticism of Obama racist, including criticism of his association with white terrorist Bill Ayers. If Obama did not have a black father, none of us would have ever heard of him. He would not be the Democrat presidential candidate. So said Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman major party VP candidate. She was quite correct. The Obama campaign has been based primarily on race since the beginning. |
| I’m also troubled by…what members of the party say, and is permitted to be said, such things as, ‘Well you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.’ Well, the correct answer is, 'He is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian.' | That’s a barefaced lie. An old woman said that at one of McCain’s town hall meetings and McCain instantly corrected her. It was all over the TV. I believe that Obama, McCain, Hillary, and George W. Bush are closet atheists. In other words, Obama is neither a Christian nor a Muslim. You would not have been at any risk of being run over by any of them if you stood in the church doorway when they went to college or spent their early adult years. I think they just pretend to be Christians because it is required in elective politics. If they quit politics you would once again be safe in those church doorways. |
| But the really right answer is, 'What if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?' | Powell is babbling here. The answer to his unnecessary question is that there is something wrong if he is Muslim or was and falsely says he never was. It’s an honesty question. Also, a lot of Americans are rightly concerned that many Muslims, including many in the U.S. think God wants all Americans and other infidels killed and plan to fulfill that wish. They are also rightly concerned that one avowed Muslim tactic is to infiltrate Western societies by shaving off their beards and seeming to be non-religious. Like I said, I doubt Obama believes in God, let alone the Muslim version of God. |
| And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know, but I’m troubled about the fact that within the party, we have these kinds of expressions. | There are 300 million people in the U.S. In presidential elections, about half of them vote Republican since the Reagan elections when a higher percentage did. To say that you are not going to vote for McCain because unnamed persons in his party—that is some of the 150 million Republicans—said something Powell did not like is ridiculous. Of course, you could say the exact same thing about the nut job Democrats who call for the death of Nancy Reagan and Dick Cheney, the gang rape of Sarah Palin, etc. |
| I think he is a transformational figure, | How so? Because he’s half black? Apparently. There is nothing else about him that suggests transformation. His accomplishments other than graduating from affirmative-action Ivy League universities have been less than mediocre—so microscopic they are invisible. His legislative record is run-of-the-mill leftist. He promises to change everything, but he has never previously changed anything in his 47 years. |
Also, compare Powell’s life with that of McCain and Obama and ask what aspect of Powell’s experience caused him to support a Democrat against a Republican. I put the similarities with McCain in red and those with Obama in blue.
| McCain | Powell | Obama | |
|---|---|---|---|
birth year |
1936 |
1937 |
1961 |
military career |
midshipman/officer 27 years including Vietnam |
ROTC cadet/officer 39 years including Vietnam |
0 |
party |
Republican |
Republican |
Democrat |
race |
Caucasian |
Jamaican |
Mulatto |
federal service |
Congressman from 1982-1986; Senator since 1986 |
National Security Advisor under Republicans Reagan, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs under George H.W. Bush, Secretary of State under George W. Bush |
Senator since 2005 |
invasion of Iraq 2003 |
favored |
favored |
said he opposed in a speech |
accent and grammar |
no accent; normal educated American grammar |
no accent; normal educated American grammar |
faux, uneducated, Deep South black accent and grammar (I heard a 2001 recording of Obama speaking. He had no accent then. Real accents are learned in childhood. Obama apparently acquired his current accent as a fake affectation after he was in his 40s.) |
cocaine use |
none known or likely |
none known or likely |
admitted cocaine use |
Do you see anything in that list that indicates Powell has more in common with Obama than McCain? The only thing I see is race. Most people would think Powell’s Jamaican parents come closer to Obama’s Kenyan father race-wise than to McCain’s Caucasian parents. Otherwise, McCain and Powell have not only had very similar lives, they have almost been side by side in their government service serving as military officers at the same time in Vietnam and elsewhere and serving in Washington at the highest levels of the federal government in the 80s and 90s.
Another reason I see for Powell supporting Obama over McCain is they are both what Shelby Steele calls “bargainers.” (Steele is a black American author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.) Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote about Obama and Jeremiah Wright.
Steele says that prominent blacks fall into two categories:
• bargainers (Obama, Oprah, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, and I presume Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice)
• challengers (Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright)
He also says some, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, fall into a third category, who ignore their race and behave as individuals. Seems to me that’s the only way any of them should act.
Bargainers, according to Steele, tacitly agree not to say “shame on you” and embarrass whites about slavery and segregation in return for white support of the individual in question.
In his 10/31/08 column, Thomas Sowell seems to say that Powell has changed sides—abandoning the “bargainer” mode that got him promotions, fame, and high positions in three white administrations for a new “challenger” persona that makes him more popular with blacks. Sowell notes that, in his memoirs, Powell said he opposed racial quotas. Ha! If there were no racial quotas, no one would have ever heard of Colin Powell. He would have been a high school principal in a bad neighborhood in New York City or something similar.
But Sowell says that at the Republican National Convention, Powell not only demanded racial quotas and preferences, but he did so with a raised fist. I missed that. What a two-faced weasel! Apparently Powell was a closet anti-white racist throughout his 40-year career of sucking up to white bosses. Now, in his 70s, he has come out of the closet and revealed what he is really about. He also criticized Tiger Woods for saying he did not like being labeled “black.” (Tiger Woods is only 25% black. He is also caucasion, Native American, Thai, and Chinese. Unlike Obama, Woods denies none of his ancestors.)
Sowell also faults Powell for the “moral crime” of letting a New York Times reporter go to jail for refusing to identify who told him that Valerie Plame worked for the CIA and for letting Scooter Libby go to jail for remembering events differently from a reporter. Powell knewall along that it was his subordinate Richard Armitage who told the Times that Plame worked for the CIA. But Powell remained silent and let those two people go to jail needlessly.
I also think both Powell and Obama are affirmative-action empty suits. Powell is a hyper wimp who opposed Desert Storm when he was head of the U.S. military. That was the 100-hour war to throw Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait which he had invaded. Even the U.N. approved the expelling of Saddam from Kuwait by military force! Powell wanted to rely on economic sanctions. Saddam Hussein would still be there if we had.
Although he had a 39-year military career and held all the top jobs the military has to offer, a career Army officer of that time said Powell “left no footprints.” That is, he came, he got positions and promotions, but he did not do anything other than preside. Sound familiar? In other words, Powell voted “present” when he was in those high positions.
Powell says he just decided to support Obama, that he was undecided until 10/19/08. Yeah, right. I say he decided in favor of Obama the day he learned his skin color and that nothing Obama ever said or did or promised would have changed that support.
I believe Powell endorsed Obama because of the race of Obama’s father, but I also believe that this racism on the part of Powell and the vast majority of the 90% of blacks who support Obama is very different from the normal way the word “racist” is used. Racism usually means that the racist believes his race is superior to the other race. That was the brand of racism exhibited by the Nazis and by white supremacists.
But black support for Obama seems to be an upside-down version of that: a desperate group inferiority complex that may be salved if one of “their people” wins the highest office in the world. This in spite of all the gains made in recent decades by American blacks, not the least of which is Colin Powell himself. He was the first black to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the first to be National Security Advisor to the President and the first to be Secretary of State. Furthermore, he was named to those positions by three Republicans: Reagan and the two Bushes. His Secretary of State successor was Condoleeza Rice, a black woman also appointed by a Republican Bush.
Yet, after all the progress by blacks in general and his own extraordinary individual progress, he throws the Republican party that gave him those positions under the bus in a heartbeat. He supports the Democrat party that has not given blacks such positions because, as has been famously reported many times, the Democrats actually do relatively little for blacks because they know they can take black votes for granted. Democrats just talk the way blacks want. When judged by their actions, they treat blacks far worse than Republicans.
But none of that matters to Powell. That fact that Obama’s father was a drunk, bigamist, serial impregnator and abandoner of his many wives and children matters not. The fact that Obama’s mother was white and that Obama was raised entirely by whites and an Indonesian stepfather matters not. The mere fact that Obama’s absentee biological father was a native of Kenya, Africa trumps all. It trumps Powell’s loyalty to the men and party he served. It trumps Obama’s razor-thin resume. It trumps Obama’s leftist ideology which is the opposite of the ideology Powell allied himself with when his career was benefiting from those alliances. It trumps Obama’s associations with many people whom Powell would never have associated with.
Indeed, it is interesting that both Powell and Obama associated with people—Republicans in Powell’s case and radicals in Obama’s. Early on, they used those associations to advance their careers. Then, when they no longer needed the associates in question, they dumped them without the slightest hesitation or apology.
An Obama election will not deliver blacks to the promised land. On the contrary, this election has revealed, surprisingly to non-blacks, how far the inside of most black minds is from a post-racial world. Blacks will know they have truly arrived in the post-racial world when the black support for a black or quasi-black major candidate reflects that candidates’ character, experience, training, and positions on the issues, not his skin color—when the percentage of blacks who support a major black candidate is around the normal black support level for non-black candidates in races where neither candidate is black—namely about 50%.
I urge voters to decide, not like Powell, purely on the basis of the color of Obama’s skin, but rather like Martin Luther King hoped: by the content of the candidates’ character. I already voted absentee. I voted Libertarian to say to the two major parties, “I am not happy with either of you. Move in the Libertarian direction.” I have only voted for a major party candidate for president twice in my life: Democrat in 1972 and Republican in 1980. I have no dog in the McCain-Obama fight. Neither of them should be allowed within a mile of the presidency.
I have called these men words that end in “ist:” racist, athesit, leftist. But I often wonder if there is only one “ist” that applies to the likes of Obama or Powell or Hillary—that all of their behavior is opportunistic and they only resemble leftists, for example, because that is what will advance their career at a given moment.
That word is “careerist.” One on-line dictionary defined that as,
Pursuit of professional advancement as one's chief or sole aim
The Wikipedia article says,
Careerism is not simply the desire to succeed. In the work place, careerist individuals are often seen as conniving workers who will stop at nothing to succeed.
The word “sociopath” also comes to mind with regard to people like Obama or Hillary.
It is defined by the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual: "The essential feature for the diagnosis is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood." Deceit and manipulation are considered essential features of the disorder.
Here are the symptoms from that article. A person with the disorder need not have all of them; only some of them.
* Persistent lying or stealing
* Recurring difficulties with the law
* Tendency to violate the rights and boundaries of others
* Substance abuse
* Aggressive, often violent behavior; prone to getting involved in fights
* A persistent agitated or depressed feeling (dysphoria)
* Inability to tolerate boredom
* Disregard for the safety of self or others
* A childhood diagnosis of conduct disorders - this is not a symptom but "a history of"
* Lack of remorse, related to hurting others
* Superficial charm
* Impulsiveness
* A sense of extreme entitlement
* Inability to make or keep friends
* Recklessness, impulsivity
* People with a diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder often experience difficulties with authority figures
Sound like anyone we know?