Mugged (39 page)

Newsweek
’s Mark Hosenball called Obama on his baldfaced lie, noting that “even before Obama cited ‘reports’ of the threats at the debate, the U.S. Secret Service had told media outlets, including
Newsweek,
that it was unable to corroborate accounts of the ‘kill him’ remarks.” Hosenball also said that “according to a law-enforcement official, who asked for anonymity when discussing a political matter, the Obama campaign knew as much.”
⁶¹

Obama thus became the second U.S. president to knowingly lie about his fellow Americans by accusing them of racism during a major presidential campaign event being watched by—in Obama’s case—sixty million viewers.

The Obama campaign responded to
Newsweek
’s inquiries about the
candidate’s lie by saying that even if the report wasn’t true, “what is true is that the tone of the rhetoric at McCain–Palin campaign events has gotten out of hand.”
⁶²
It was just like what radical lawyer William Kunstler had said of the Tawana Brawley hoax: “It makes no difference whether the attack on Tawana really happened. It doesn’t disguise the fact that a lot of black women are treated the way she said she was treated.”
⁶³

The Obama campaign was a welter of race-mongering dirty tricks, from outright lies, such as the “Kill him!” fairy tale, to hothouse-flower racial sensitivities, such as the commotion over Hillary Clinton’s Bobby Kennedy remark.

It never mattered if any of the Obama campaign’s charges of racism were factually true. They should have been true. To cite facts in such circumstances is to impose crime lab statistical analysis on works of imagination and musical charm.

I read Obama’s books to help me understand just what it is that makes black people so afraid. Their demons. The way ideas get twisted around. It helps me understand how people learn to hate.

The above paragraph is a precise paraphrase of what Obama wrote in
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance,
explaining why he read Joseph Conrad’s 1902 classic,
Heart of Darkness,
with “white people” switched out for “black people.”
¹

Obama’s childhood consisted of a
Beverly Hills, 90210
existence at the prestigious Punahou School in Honolulu (2006 winner of “greenest” school in America!). And yet he still managed to develop a racial hair trigger. Reading about Obama’s race fixation in the middle of suburban banality is akin to reading Hitler’s obsessive musing on his Germanic identity.

Obama’s autobiographies—there’s more than one!—are bristling with anger at various imputed racist incidents. As biographer David Maraniss says, Obama sees the world through a “racial lens,” presenting “himself as blacker and more disaffected than he was.”
²
He’s spent his life hungry for reasons to be angry.

Obama tells a story about taking two white friends from the high school basketball team to a “black party.” He says they “made some small talk, took a couple of the girls out on the dance floor,” but Obama found it disturbing that “they kept smiling a lot.” (Probably like Rachel Maddow around a black guest.)

Then, in an incident reminiscent of the darkest days of the Jim Crow South…they asked to leave after spending only about an hour at the party! If having your friends want to leave a party before you do is racist, I’m practically Emmett Till.

In the car on the way home, Obama says one of his friends empathized with him, saying: “You know, man, that really taught me something.
I mean, I can see how it must be tough for you and Ray sometimes, at school parties…being the only black guys and all.” And thus Obama felt the cruel lash of racism! He actually writes that his response to his friend’s perfectly amiable remark was: “A part of me wanted to punch him right there.”
³

Listen, I don’t want anybody telling Obama about Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” line.

Wanting to punch his white friend was the introductory anecdote to a full-page psychotic rant about living by “the white man’s rules.” (One rule he missed was: “Never punch out your white friend after dragging him to a crappy party.”) Obama’s gaseous disquisition on the “white man’s rules” leads to this charming crescendo: “Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger.”
⁴

For those of you in the “When will Obama play the ‘N-word’ card?” pool, the winner is anyone who chose page 85 of Obama’s first book. Congratulations! As is usually the case, no one involved had used the N-word except the victim-wannabe Obama.

Another illustration of the racial “hang-ups” of white people, according to Obama, was a tourist to Hawaii who, upon seeing Obama swimming as a little boy remarks, “swimming must come naturally to these Hawaiians.”
⁵
It was essentially a verbal lynching. But it was not racism when his Kenyan father praised little Obama for doing well at school, saying, “It’s in the blood, I think.”
⁶

Luckily, Obama married into a family that was also on red alert for incidents of racism to pass down as part of the family lore. Here’s the one that was worthy of inclusion in Obama’s book
Dreams from My Father:
His wife’s six-year-old cousin was told by some nasty little white boys that they wouldn’t play with him because he was black—as opposed to the four billion other reasons kids say they won’t play with other kids.
⁷

The story swept like wildfire through the entire Obama extended family. They’d been waiting twenty years to feel the rush of racial victimhood and finally a six-year-old cousin-in-law of Obama’s gave them their racial validation!

At Princeton, Obama’s future wife, Michelle Robinson, wrote her thesis on—guess what? “How I Feel About Being a Black Person,” which was fast becoming obligatory for every black college student. She wrote to four hundred black Princeton alumni, but only ninety considered the topic of “Being Black at Princeton” worthy of a reply. Robinson expressed disappointment
that the ones who did reply didn’t have more racial resentment, but had simply gone out and become successful. Being at Princeton was so alienating that Robinson sought to replicate the experience by going to Harvard Law School.
⁸

Of course she’s angry at her country. She’s angry because she knows America, black and white, is snickering at her behind her back. Here she had the opportunity to get a first-class education at one of the world’s most prestigious institutions, and all she could think to write about was being black.

In
Dreams from My Father,
Obama explains that the reason black people keep to themselves is that it’s “easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.”
⁹
Here’s a little inside scoop about white people: We’re not thinking about you. Especially WASPs. We think everybody is inferior, and we are perfectly charming about it.

He shared with his readers a life lesson on how to handle white people: “It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied, they were relieved—such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”
¹⁰

This forms the entire basis of Obama’s political career more than a quarter of a century later.

Note that he was talking about his own mother in that passage. In his much-heralded “race” speech during the 2008 campaign, Obama disparaged the white grandmother who raised him, describing her as mired in racial stereotypes. But as Obama says: “Any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning.”
¹¹
Say, do you think a white person who said that about black people could become president? White Americans voting for this guy was like a chapter out of
Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them
.

The postracial president, who was supposed to allow the country to move past race, mau-maued white America from day one of his campaign.

Indeed, the only firm evidence that there are any actual racists left in America is the fact that so many white people voted for Obama. They must have felt guilty about something. Not harboring any racist impulses, I was free to vote Republican.

Obama’s 2008 campaign Web site appealed to every group in America. But not white men. There was a section for Latinos; women; First Americans;
environmentalists; lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people; Americans with disabilities; Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and on and on and on. But there were no sections for either white people or male people.
¹²
His sole appeal to white men was to offer not to call them racists if they voted for him.

Obama’s pandering calculation went like this: