Thursday, March 27, 2008
Obama answers questions, raises other inquiries
LOOKING AHEAD by Wally Dobelis
The donkey’s ears are growing longer, and The Democratic National Committee has to take the blame. Or should it be the Michigan State Democratic Committee, or the one in Florida, that wanted to rob Iowa and New Hampshire of their birthrights? Or are those inherited rights to early primaries really justified?
In any event, MI and FL Democrats were deprived of their primaries’ votes, for lack of DNC’s exit strategy (where have I heard that expression before?). Now the Michigan DC wants to revote, which is not to Sen. Obama’s liking, since he was not on the ballot (was that strategy or what?), and many of his supporters cannot participate, having voted in the Republican column, the only game in town for them on that day. Florida DC has just folded its arms and wants to let the vote stand, since both candidates were on the ballot. Quo vadis, DNC?
Sen. Obama keeps coming back to the center of the stage. In that masterful emotionally rousing speech, he completely disavowed the palpably racist ideas of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s and affirmed his responsibilities to both the white and non-white races that constitute his genetic makeup. Yet, his review of the injustices suffered by black Americans to this date does not explain the minister’s irresponsible charges against the rest of us. Rev. Wright is an educated man, with eight honorary DDs and an earned one, in sacred music, besides two masters’ degrees and a medical technicianship of three years learned in the US Navy (redirected from the Marine Corps), and should know better than to accuse the US, for instance, of spreading the AIDS epidemic. He knows that he and his defenders are not doing any good for the Obama campaign and has taken a low profile, retiring from the ministry of the Trinity Church earlier this year and avoiding interviews. He has refused to answer questions by the right-wing interviewer Sean Hannity, because the ex-seminarian had not read the books by Black Liberation’s religious leaders James Cone and Dwight Hopkins.
Looking further, one finds that Cone and Hopkins are both distinguished university professors, with many references on the internet that enlighten us about this branch of Christianity. Historically, it came to light in 1966, with an advertisement in the NYTimes by 51 black theologians. We find that in liberation theology the black experience is the starting point for ascertaining theological truth, and Jesus is seen as a political leader, freeing black Israel from bondage and into salvation. Harking back to the acceptance of slavery by the early American church of the South, the Christianity accepted by the black liberationists is the one that fights for the rights of the oppressed. This political theology evidently relates also to Rev. Wright’s support for Libya’s Col. Ghadaffi and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Sen. Obama’s cause might have been served better if Rev. Wright had retired earlier, short-cutting the political connections that Obama’s Republican opponents are now freely conjecturing.
New Mexico’s Gov. Richardson’s endorsement came as a timely counterpoint to the doubts and attacks raised by Obama’s associations with Rev. Wright. The former Clinton appointee – Cabinet Secretary and Ambassador to the United Nations – sees Obama as a unifier and the best kind of American emissary to the world, countering the image created by the churlishness of the early Bush policymakers, no matter how hard Secretary Rice tries to shake it.
There is one more point that Obama can offer, as confirmation to his birth-given facility to unite people of several continents and ethnicities – his wide –spread family of half-siblings. To begin, there’s his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, child of his mother Ann Dunham (d. 1995) and Lalo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil company and government functionary (d.1987). She is a teacher of history at a girl’s school and a professor at the University of Hawaii, a mother of a two-year old, who is married to Konrad Ng, a Chinese -Canadian UH professor. Then, Obama has seven living ethnically diverse African siblings, six brothers and a sister, from his father’s three other marriages, to one American and two African women. Several of the siblings have left Kenya and live in Britain and the US.
To explain the elder Barack Obama’s life and family relations, he was married in Africa, before coming to the US and meeting Ann Dunham at the University of Hawaii. They divorced when young Barack Obama was two, and the father received a scholarship to Harvard, where he earned an MA. Returning to Africa, he taught at a university in Uganda, and then worked for an US oil company until accepting an offer to join the Kenyan Treasury as a senior economist. A tribal disagreement with President Yomo Kenyatta ended that career, and, disappointed, he returned to his family village of Nyongoma-Kobelo. He died in a car accident in 1982.
The donkey’s ears are growing longer, and The Democratic National Committee has to take the blame. Or should it be the Michigan State Democratic Committee, or the one in Florida, that wanted to rob Iowa and New Hampshire of their birthrights? Or are those inherited rights to early primaries really justified?
In any event, MI and FL Democrats were deprived of their primaries’ votes, for lack of DNC’s exit strategy (where have I heard that expression before?). Now the Michigan DC wants to revote, which is not to Sen. Obama’s liking, since he was not on the ballot (was that strategy or what?), and many of his supporters cannot participate, having voted in the Republican column, the only game in town for them on that day. Florida DC has just folded its arms and wants to let the vote stand, since both candidates were on the ballot. Quo vadis, DNC?
Sen. Obama keeps coming back to the center of the stage. In that masterful emotionally rousing speech, he completely disavowed the palpably racist ideas of Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s and affirmed his responsibilities to both the white and non-white races that constitute his genetic makeup. Yet, his review of the injustices suffered by black Americans to this date does not explain the minister’s irresponsible charges against the rest of us. Rev. Wright is an educated man, with eight honorary DDs and an earned one, in sacred music, besides two masters’ degrees and a medical technicianship of three years learned in the US Navy (redirected from the Marine Corps), and should know better than to accuse the US, for instance, of spreading the AIDS epidemic. He knows that he and his defenders are not doing any good for the Obama campaign and has taken a low profile, retiring from the ministry of the Trinity Church earlier this year and avoiding interviews. He has refused to answer questions by the right-wing interviewer Sean Hannity, because the ex-seminarian had not read the books by Black Liberation’s religious leaders James Cone and Dwight Hopkins.
Looking further, one finds that Cone and Hopkins are both distinguished university professors, with many references on the internet that enlighten us about this branch of Christianity. Historically, it came to light in 1966, with an advertisement in the NYTimes by 51 black theologians. We find that in liberation theology the black experience is the starting point for ascertaining theological truth, and Jesus is seen as a political leader, freeing black Israel from bondage and into salvation. Harking back to the acceptance of slavery by the early American church of the South, the Christianity accepted by the black liberationists is the one that fights for the rights of the oppressed. This political theology evidently relates also to Rev. Wright’s support for Libya’s Col. Ghadaffi and Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Sen. Obama’s cause might have been served better if Rev. Wright had retired earlier, short-cutting the political connections that Obama’s Republican opponents are now freely conjecturing.
New Mexico’s Gov. Richardson’s endorsement came as a timely counterpoint to the doubts and attacks raised by Obama’s associations with Rev. Wright. The former Clinton appointee – Cabinet Secretary and Ambassador to the United Nations – sees Obama as a unifier and the best kind of American emissary to the world, countering the image created by the churlishness of the early Bush policymakers, no matter how hard Secretary Rice tries to shake it.
There is one more point that Obama can offer, as confirmation to his birth-given facility to unite people of several continents and ethnicities – his wide –spread family of half-siblings. To begin, there’s his half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, child of his mother Ann Dunham (d. 1995) and Lalo Soetoro, an Indonesian oil company and government functionary (d.1987). She is a teacher of history at a girl’s school and a professor at the University of Hawaii, a mother of a two-year old, who is married to Konrad Ng, a Chinese -Canadian UH professor. Then, Obama has seven living ethnically diverse African siblings, six brothers and a sister, from his father’s three other marriages, to one American and two African women. Several of the siblings have left Kenya and live in Britain and the US.
To explain the elder Barack Obama’s life and family relations, he was married in Africa, before coming to the US and meeting Ann Dunham at the University of Hawaii. They divorced when young Barack Obama was two, and the father received a scholarship to Harvard, where he earned an MA. Returning to Africa, he taught at a university in Uganda, and then worked for an US oil company until accepting an offer to join the Kenyan Treasury as a senior economist. A tribal disagreement with President Yomo Kenyatta ended that career, and, disappointed, he returned to his family village of Nyongoma-Kobelo. He died in a car accident in 1982.
# posted by Wally Dobelis @ 8:45 AM 
