Yesterday, one of my sisters called and while listening to Barack Obama's speech, became particularly outraged at how he had "used" his grandmother. Scott Johnson at Powerline seems to have felt the same way and writes succinctly:
When seeking to extricate himself from the tight spot in which he has been placed by his long association with the spiritual leadership of Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama hauled in his (living) maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Obama has previously characterized Mrs. Dunham as a "trailblazer of sorts, the first woman vice-president of a local bank." She had a direct hand in his upbringing when Obama chose to live with his maternal grandparents rather than his mother, who was then in Indonesia. Today Obama brought Mrs. Dunham into his speech for a cameo appearance as a white counterpart to the fulsome Reverend Wright:
I can no more disown [Jeremiah Wright] than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
Even amid the false equivalencies and obvious evasions of his speech today, Obama's misuse of his grandmother seems to me a striking sign of poor character.
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2 comments:
I agree with Scott Johnson. To me it was just a way for Barack Obama to let all the black community know that every single white person in America is a racist, even his grandmother! Another point that no one has mentioned about Obama is that in his speech he blames racism and unequal job opportunities for the reason black men can't take care of their families. Well his father was not American so why didn't he take care of his own son?? Do they have the same values in Africa??
A quote from a Powerline reader. I could not say it better:
I still can’t get over the churlish treatment comment about his Grandmother. She sacrificed everything for him after he was abandoned by his drunken African polygamist father and his airhead, third-world bedhopping mother and this is how she gets thanked, getting used as a cheap political prop and compared to Rev. Wright, to justify his WRONG. Disgusting. For Obama to do that shows he has very strong disdain for white America. I think the guy’s whole life had been an attempt to restore amythically pure “blackness” in him that he lost when his worthless, wastrel father abandoned his wife and child. Marrying Witchelle was part of that as was joining the Church of Hate Whitie.
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