Seething

In between all the talk and helping Joyce clean out the coffee pot, I've been reading Obama's speech (text here; video here), and by the time I was at the end of it, I was seething.

Before I get to that, I have to say the Obama team has some outstanding speech-writers and a client who is particularly gifted in delivering their work. Given the hurdle Obama had to jump with this speech ... well, it's a good thing that black guys can jump, and jump he did, making a valient attempt at damage control.

But in the end, the speech was nothing more than a clumsy effort to tie black racism to white racism, saying that we're all as bad as Rev. Jeremiah Wright, so why don't we all just get together and be racist together for the greater good? And it was the end of the speech that just made my skin crawl: The story of Ashley, the white Obama volunteer who came to work for him because of the "injustice" of having her mom lose her health insurance and suffer through cancer and financial hardship.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along
the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare
and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally.
But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Is that how he thinks whites think? That we would blame blacks or Mexicans for this particular set of circumstances? That it's "injustice" to have to be self-reliant? Holy cow! I thought Obama was supposed to be a guy who transcended the old stupidity, but here he is wallowing in it.

We are told that Ashley's problem isn't racism but corporate greed, and therefore that the answer to Ashley's problem is ubiquitous government. And this socialist message is supposed to reassure us that Obama hasn't drunk deeply of Rev. Wright's Kool-Aid?