The president received some bad news and some very good news on Tuesday. The inventor of the single, technological innovation that made Obama what he is today, Herbert J. “Hub” Schlafly, died and Tavis Smiley predicted the 2012 election would be “the most racist” ever.
Schlafly invented the teleprompter over 50 years ago to help soap actors remember their lines but politicians have utilized the device to even greater advantage, to give the illusion they are presenting memorized speeches whereas every word is spelled out for them on their teleprompters.
ABCNews.com is quick to point out that, “In truth, every President since Dwight D. Eisenhower, excepting Nixon, has used one for major speeches in Congress.” (http://abcn.ws/eTy1pn) However, ABC omits another, more relevant, truth that no president in history has used his trusty teleprompters as extensively for major and minor speeches, to Congress and to virtually anyone else who was listening.
One has to maintain the façade of oratorical eloquence when such a façade is created for one. Barack Hussein Obama owes a deep debt to gratitude to “Hub” Schlafly.
Obama also owes a debt of gratitude to Tavis Smiley, the ethnocentric African-American PBS host who alone gives reason to de-fund PBS. Smiley was all exercised last year over Obama’s failure to exclusively focus on the needs of blacks in America. As Smiley dramatically resolved, “I was compelled to [call for 'a black agenda'] because of this debate” and called together a blue ribbon panel to discuss the matter.
He invited such black luminaries as the racial agitator Reverend Jesse Jackson, the racist Nation of Islam leader, Louis Farrakhan, and radical black professor, Cornel West, among others to join the discussion: http://bit.ly/gr0xMf
Well, Smiley is back in the news, this time for his prediction, where else but on MSNBC, that we’re headed for a racist election. Smiley reiterated, “I said over a year ago that this was going to be, this presidential race was going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic,” then added, “I did not know that race to the bottom would begin so quickly.”
See Smiley’s comments to the equally-caustic Larry O’Donnell here: http://bit.ly/gBIOwH
Smiley and O’Donnell must have missed the 2008 election when their boy, Obama, used an ugly, nasty, divisive, veiled appeal to America’s white electorate to vote for him because it was time for an African-American to be president, because he was “articulate and bright and clean,” according to his future VP, and because this way they could expiate their collective white guilt.
Smiley didn’t mention any of that on MSNBC and instead attributed all that ugly, nasty divisiveness to the tea party and Donald Trump who was appealing to the worst in tea partiers which, he hastened to add, he wasn’t demonizing since he shared their angst about government.
Smiley was almost credible–almost–until he launched into citations of threats of violence emanating from tea party rallies, references showing he’s never been even in earshot of their rallies, and until he invoked the Tucson mantra of civility and civil discourse.
Obama mouthed those platitudes but his acolytes never got the message. If anything, the Left has gotten even more vicious and divisive since Tucson.
Smiley is in that same camp and took special exception to The Donald’s estimation of Obama as the worst president in America’s history. That may be an overstatement in view of Jimmy Carter but Obama has only been in office 27 months. Give him time.
If, in fact, the election of 2012 devolves into the issue of ugly racism instead of being based on the issue of Obama’s miserable tenure in the White House, that devolution will not be attributable to the tea party, to the Republican Party, or to Donald Trump. Barack Obama cashed in on white guilt in 2008 and must be delighted in Tavis Smiley’s prognostication for next year.
Obama thrives and wins on racism and may do it again in 2012. Consider yourself warned.
