Ukraine Prays and Obama Plays

During the 2004 United States Presidential Campaign, the giddy, sycophantic press delighted in boasting how cool, calm, and intelligent Barack Obama was.   The object of their affection certainly agreed.  In The Promise, award-winning author, reporter, columnist and television analyst Jonathan Alter wrote that in the summer of 2007, when speaking to David Axelrod, the great and powerful Barack boasted about his presidential qualifications: “The weird thing is, I know I can do this job.  I like dealing with complicated issues.  I’m happy to make decisions.  I’m looking forward to it.  I think it’s going to be an easier adjustment for me than the campaign.  Much easier.”

Convinced of his superior capabilities then, Barack Obama apparently has not felt especially burdened by demands of the job. Consider how the President has handled the Ukrainian crisis:

March 6, 2014

The Supreme Council of Crimea votes unanimously to join the Russian Federation and to accelerate their referendum to March 16.

March 7, 2014

Barack Obama leaves the Whitehouse for a golf weekend in Florida.  The Daily Mail observed that "He checked his family into the Ocean Reef Club, a private, by-invitation-only membership club that is more of a gated, self-contained community sprawled across 2,500 acres on the northern edge of Key Largo. The property has two championship golf courses. There's also a swimming lagoon, tennis courts, a spa and fitness center, shopping and more than a dozen restaurants among the club's varied offerings.  Accommodation costs up to $2,500 per night.”

March 18, 2014

A Simferopol military base is stormed by Russians or their sympathizers and a Ukrainian soldier is killed. The Ukrainian premier asserts that his beleaguered nation now is under armed assault. 

March 18, 2014

Barack Obama appears with Andy Katz on ESPN where he is interviewed about his predictions for the NCAA basketball finals.  This amounts to picking the winners of 63 games and, therefore, requires a most significant investment of time and energy, especially if someone, let's say a President of the United States, doesn't want to be embarrassed by selecting some obvious losers.

Rather than stress too much over Ukraine, then, Barack Obama goes golfing in Florida and high-fiving with like-minded "hoops" lovers on ESPN; all the while, the Kiev government searches desperately for support against Russian storm troopers massing on Ukraine’s borders.

Please note that on November 30, 2013 in a post entitled Barack Vladimir Putin Obama: To Change America, I wrote the following:

Recall the infamous March 26, 2012 “open-mike” clandestine muttering in Seoul, South Korea, between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev as they met to discuss critical, sensitive U.S.-Russian relations.

Obama: On all these issues, but particularly missile defense, this, this can be solved but it’s important for him [Putin] to give me space.

Medvedev: Yeah, I understand. I understand your message about space. Space for you…

Obama: This is my last election. After my election I have more flexibility.

Medvedev: I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir.

Barack without a teleprompter.  Barack just being Barack, the real Barack, a man who, like Vladimir, regards elections as a hindrance to his unfettered power exploitation.

In addition to exposing Barack Obama’s disrespect for electoral limits on his power, consider what else that interchange communicated to Vladimir Putin.  It told Putin that Obama could not deal face-to-face, man-to-man with Vladimir, the real Russian decision maker, but had to communicate through a second-rate intermediary.  It told Putin that Obama is duplicitous, always trumpeting about democracy but secretly loving autocracy when autocracy means making unilateral decisions that ensure he will get his own way.  It told Putin that Obama loves clandestine, shadowy deals and fears openness and sunlight.  Most important for Ukraine, the open-mike documented Obama's eagerness to avoid conflict in order to appease the Russian Bear.

The Guardian in their September 17, 2009 in article entitled, "Obama abandons missile defence shield in Europe" underscored Barack's willingness to forsake allies and his reluctance to assertively handle Russia:

Barack Obama has abandoned the controversial Pentagon plan to build a missile defence system in Europe that had long soured relations with Russia....A few weeks ago, in a cri de coeur to Washington, several senior eastern European officials and public figures wrote a public letter to Obama complaining that their security interests were being ignored by the west to improve relations with Moscow.... Russian experts said Obama's decision could only be seen as an unambiguous concession to Moscow, adding that it would severely disappoint the new Nato countries of Eastern Europe.

You can bet that Vladimir's and Barack's emissaries are squirreled away in some hidden enclave right now, looking for a face-saving way that enables Obama to give Putin what he wants while maintaining a pretense of having gotten something in return.  I pray that Europe will refuse to accept a half-measure, a sham solution, which permits Russia’s rape of Crimea to be a prelude to raping all of Ukraine later.

Five White Girls Brutally Attack a Black Couple in Philadelphia

On March 25, 2014, five white girls were arrested and charged with assaulting a 19-year-old black Temple University student and her boyfriend as they peacefully walked along the avenue.   When the young man tried to repel the attack, one of the girls struck the black woman in the face with a brick so violently that she subsequently needed surgery.  The girls then ran away.   

Oh.  Sorry.  I got that wrong.  The attackers were black and the victims were white.  Of course, none of the news accounts that I read mentioned those racial realities, despite clear evidence in the surveillance video.  Had blacks actually been the victims and whites the attackers, you can be sure that race would have been trumpeted all over the media, followed by outrage, and protest marches.   

Sam Newhouse, reporter at www.metro.us/philadelphia, suggested that the same attackers are being investigated for two other neighborhood assaults in which young female college students were punched in the face.  Once again, the race of the victims was not disclosed, but you can bet that they are white.   Newhouse mentioned that “Temple sent out an email Monday, warning students to avoid isolated areas and to keep aware of their surroundings.”   

Anyone who has read this blog knows that I have discussed black-on-white racial violence many times.  So why did I bother to mention the most recent “routine” inter-racial attack?  It is because the very same day that I saw the brick attack piece I read a psychology journal article entitled, “Reducing Implicit Racial Preferences: I. A Comparative Investigation of 17 Interventions.”   

The article described a “research contest” [I am not joking, a research contest] comparing various strategies for reducing “implicit racial prejudice,” another subject addressed by me in this blog.  As I have explained previously, implicit racial prejudice is racial bias located in a person's unconscious with researchers deciding who is biased and, often, why.

Guess what.  The “study” [and I use that term very loosely] only scrutinized the unconscious prejudice of whites toward blacks rather than looking at prejudice in both races.  Why?  Because this study and the hundreds, if not thousands of others like it, is not science; it is racial manipulation.  [See my blog post "Experts in Self-Serving Racial Manipulation"]  The investigators have an anti-white opinion that they are hell-bent on proving.  And, as you know, if you design a study to prove a point and play with the data long enough, you will “discover” exactly what you wanted to discover in the first place.

Now for the punch line, if you’ll pardon the expression.  The authors write that “21 of 27 successful attempts at reducing implicit preferences linked positivity with Black people and negativity with White people… For example, participants in the Vivid Counterstereotypic Scenario [4] imagined being assaulted by a White man and rescued by a Black man.” 

Wading through the psychobabble, this means that when an individual views a fanciful scenario with blacks as heroes and whites as villians, he is less likely to have what the researcher believes is UNCONSCIOUS prejudice against blacks.   The lesson for the race mongers is clear: relentlessly barrage white people with racial propaganda that simultaneously depicts virtuous black people and wicked whites ones; ignore any black wickedness and any white virtue; do this long enough and a brave new world of racial harmony inevitably will result.

So, while real white people are being attacked in the streets by real black people, your tax dollars are going to educate and fund the research of persons who are trying to make white people feel guilty about their supposed unconscious bias against blacks.  There is virtually no attempt to determine the extent to which blacks contribute to real, overt physical racial aggression.  And there is no effort to bring the races together to honestly look at the negative attitudes both of whites toward blacks AND of blacks toward whites in order to find effective ways to reduce them.

A Simple Act of Race-blind Compassion Worthy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Every January in association with Martin Luther King Day, Americans repeatedly hear King's admonition that we should judge each other by the content of our character and not by the color of our skin.  Unfortunately, the rest of the year, media is awash with stories of bias, partisanship, and outright racial animus.  Most troubling is that our so-called leaders, white and black, often inflame rather than promote inter-racial cooperation and civility in order to make political points or to receive ego-enhancing attention.

The abysmal failure of American racial leadership is such to make a seemingly small act of inter-racial compassion noteworthy.  The act, performed by Malik Stewart,120 pound black high school wrestler, occurred in early March, 2014 during a Class 3-A State High School Wrestling Championship.  In their final match, white Mitchell McKee pinned Malik to win the championship.  After the referee raised Mitchell's hand to indicate his win, Malik did not scowl or stomp.  He quietly walked over to Mitchell's father who was seated in the audience, embraced the man, and said, "You are loved."   The audience erupted in applause.  You see, Malik and they knew that Mitchell's father has terminal cancer and a remaining life expectancy of two months.

The article that recounted the incident suggested that Malik's own father had died from a heart attack when the boy was only 7 years-old.  In short, even after suffering what likely was a most disappointing loss, Malik chose to identify with Mitchell rather than to resent him.  Malik instinctively felt a connection that had nothing to do with race.  He saw Mitchell as like himself, not as different.

The most remarkable aspect of this story is not what Malik did; it is the fact that in order to do it he needed to resist all the divisive racial propaganda that has barraged him since his birth.  Among other things, Malik had to refrain from employing the readily accessible excuse that his white opponent won the wrestling match due to racial prejudice against blacks.  He had to forget that race mongers in America continually pressure him to call only black men, and not white men, "brothers."  He had to ignore the possibility that embracing whites could cause him to be called an "Uncle Tom." 

        

The story of black Malik Stewart and white Mitchell McKee is both an inspiring and saddening commentary about race in contemporary America.  It is inspiring in Malik's humanity and saddening in that inter-racial humanity is worth a blog post. 

I suggest that in January for Martin Luther King Day we boycott America's pontificating, hypocritical racial leaders.  Instead, let's have a succession of eveyday people, like Malik Stewart, flood the media, telling mundane, everyday stories that illustrate how we can interact with each other based on the content of character rather than on racial identity.

Barack Obama's United States Department of UnCivil Rights

The latest, but surely not last, race-based Obama fiasco is in progress right now.  You undoubtedly know that Barack nominated Debo Adegbile, former special counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, to be assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division and that the Senate blocked the nomination.  Even seven Democrat senators couldn’t stomach voting to affirm Adegbile who not only wrote a legal brief that helped get convicted cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal off death row but who also went to France to participate in several rallies in support of Mumia.

The National Fraternal Order of Police had accused Debo of taking a "cynical race-baiting approach to our legal system" and regarded his nomination as "a thumb in the eye of our nation's law enforcement.  It demonstrates a total lack of regard or empathy for those who strive to keep you and everyone else in our nation safe in your home and neighborhoods." 

Debo Adegbile’s choice, however, is totally consistent with Obama’s selective approach to civil rights.  He and his Office of Civil Rights carefully consider every racial angle of every racial incident involving blacks and whites.  When blacks are racially victimized Obama and his group strike like cobras, but when whites are victimized Obama and his group slink like sloths. 

Adegbile would have been a perfect racially-biased assistant to Attorney General Eric Holder who refused to prosecute the new Black Panthers after they threatened white voters in Philadelphia during Obama’s 2008 presidential election. Holder's disregard for white voters' rights apparently was shared by some members of "his" Justice Department. Speaking of the New Black Panther intimidation of white voters, Christopher Coates, a long-time Justice Department lawyer, testified On September 25, 2010, "I had people [in the Department] who told me point-blank that [they] didn't come to the voting rights section to sue African American people."

On March 1, 2011, when questioned about the New Black Panther case, Holder dismissed the significance of white voter intimidation on racial grounds—what else—saying “Think about that. When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia—which was inappropriate, certainly that…to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my [emphasis added] people." More than merely refusing to defend white voters, then, Holder was indignant, almost irate.  How dare you, he implied, expect me to defend YOUR particular white people in 2011 when in 1960 some of MY black people somewhere had their voting rights threatened.  Perhaps Eric also felt that today's whites should be refused service in restaurants because some blacks were so refused in the 1950s.

Like Eric Holder, Barack Obama has repeatedly demonstrated a racially jaundiced view of justice in which he confounds the present with the past.  Recall how quick Barack was to assert that white Sgt. James Crowley "acted stupidly" when he subdued the out-of-control Henry Louis Gates Jr, in July 2009 during the infamous Cambridge, Massachusetts incident.  Also remember that the President personally phoned Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie in 2010 to praise him for signing convicted dog killer Mick Vick to a six-year, $100 million contract at the quarterback position. Both the Gates and Vick situations warranted Obama's attention because the President viewed both in terms of race: Gates was a black man in a historically white neighborhood and Vick, a black man in a historically white dominated football position.   

            

So Barack Obama and Eric Holder choose to view justice through the rear-view mirror of the past rather than the window of the present.  Obama would rather slap the National Fraternal Order of Police in the face than find an appropriate attorney general candidate for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division.  Of course, I am white; perhaps white bias motivates me to accuse our beloved President of having a racist agenda.

I can provide two quick examples showing that opposition to Obama's "justice" policies is not a simple white vs. black issue.  First, appearing on Special Report with Bret Baier (March 7, 2014) black Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal said this about the President's choice of Debo Adegbile: "The administration already has enough race baiters, starting with the President himself, continuing to Eric Holder, his Attorney General.  The Senate knew not to add to their ranks."  And second, defending the choice of Debo, white Patrick Leahy, Democratic senator from Vermont, like Obama and Holder, gazed into the rear-view mirror of the past to suggest that Debo was being treated like black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had been in the 1960s.

Civil rights in 20014 America, then, is not confined to rational discussion of the present.  Taking their cue from Barack Obama, anyone, black or white, can obfuscate current racial reality by reminding discussants of past racial injustice.  By living in the past instead of the present, the race mongers delude themselves into believing that they are pro-black crusaders, fighting for truth and "justice."  They fail to realize that the more they manipulate race, allegedly in the service of blacks, the more they encourage white backlash and impede black progress.