By Selwyn Duke

Many millions of people have been murdered throughout
history due to ethnic and racial hatred. It’s a deadly flaw that man, being
tribalistic by nature, tends toward. This is why there are few things more
destructive and evil than using lies to stoke the fires of racial animosity. This
brings me to the recently discussed video of Barack Obama’s 2007 Hampton
University speech.

As some already know, the video shows Obama feigning an
Ebonics accent (not always very well) while addressing the university’s mostly
black audience. This is eyebrow-raising not just because the president doesn’t
normally speak that way, but because he surely never did. Remember that Obama
never actually lived in a black neighborhood, having grown up in Indonesia and
Hawaii. In fact, even when he became a community agitator later in life, he
didn’t live among the project dwellers he was agitating but in racially mixed
Hyde Park a 90-minute commute away.

Most damning, however, is what 2007 Obama said about the
government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. As Thomas Sowell presented
it:

Departing from his prepared
remarks, he [Obama] mentioned the Stafford Act, which requires communities
receiving federal disaster relief to contribute 10 percent as much as the
federal government does.

Senator Obama, as he was then,
pointed out that this requirement was waived in the case of New York [after
9/11] and Florida [after Hurricane Andrew] because the people there were
considered to be "part of the American family." But the people in New
Orleans — predominantly black — "they don't care about as much," according
to Barack Obama.

Such race-baiting is always bad, but there’s something that
makes this far, far worse: two weeks before Obama’s speech, the Senate had in fact voted to waive the Stafford Act
for New Orleans. Moreover, that city ultimately received more federal tax
money for reconstruction than New York and Florida combined.

But it gets worse still. As Sowell writes:

Unlike Jeremiah Wright's church,
the U.S. Senate keeps a record of who was there on a given day. The Congressional
Record for May 24, 2007 shows Senator Barack Obama present that day and
voting on the bill that waived the Stafford Act requirement. Moreover, he was
one of just 14 Senators who voted against — repeat, AGAINST — the legislation
which included the waiver.

So let’s put what happened in plain terms:

Obama votes against funding for the disaster-stricken black
people about whom he purports to care.

The measure, however, passes despite his resistance.

He then appears in front of other black people a mere two
weeks later and claims that no such funding was forthcoming.

Furthermore, he sends a clear message that this is due to
white “racism,” vile racial demagoguery sure to evoke hateful feelings.    

The only thing left to settle is what circle of Hell this
behavior warrants. That is to say, since the Stafford Act waiver was embedded
in a larger bill, there’s an outside chance that Obama didn’t realize it was
part of the legislation and that it had been waived for New Orleans. After all,
given his admitted laziness, perhaps he was as out-to-lunch during the Senate
vote as he was in last week’s debate. But how likely is this given that he
mentioned the act in his Hampton U. act? And even if it was the case, it only
means that his contemptible demagoguery was facilitated by terminal malpractice
and incompetence—as opposed to an outright lie.

Yet the media tells us that this story, which more than most
anything else reveals Obama’s character, is old news. Well, to use a variation
on one of Thomas Sowell’s examples, the Pythagorean Theorem is 2000 years old,
but it is assuredly “news” to the schoolchild who learns it today, and it is knowledge
that could be valuable in a career he may have tomorrow.  

Then, remember that there is a kind of very old news called
history, and it’s actually more significant than new news because it’s endured long
enough to grow old. And we know that if we fail to learn from it, we’ll repeat
its mistakes. If we don’t want to repeat the mistake of 2008, we’d better learn
from 2007.

       © 2012 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved