Obama/Biden and McSame/Palin - Reversal

If things were reversed.  Tell me, oh, tell me...Have we really outgrown racism>

 

! Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin,
what if things were switched around? .....think about it.

 Would the country's collective point of view be different? 
 
Ponder the following:
 
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including 
a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
 
What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
 
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
 
What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
 
What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe 
disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
 
What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair 
while he was still married?
 
What if Michelle Obama was the ! wife who not only became addicted to 
pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable 
organization?
 
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
 
What if Obama had beena member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five 
were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting 
a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis 
of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
 
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
 
What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?
 
What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included 
discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?
 
What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many 
occasions, a serious anger management problem?
 
What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?
 
What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
 
You could easily add to! this list. If these questions reflected 
reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as 
they are?
  This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes 
positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in 
another when there is a color difference.
 
Educational Background:
 
Barack Obama:
 Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
 International Relations.
 Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude
 
Joseph Biden:
 University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
 Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)
 
vs.
 
John McCain:
 United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899
 
Sarah Palin:
 Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester
 North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study
 University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism
 Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester
 University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in JournalismBR> 
Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in 
the land as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

The World Looks At Barack Obama

This particular article is from the Times of India. Americans tend to be very provincial and forget that there's a whole, big world out there. Here is at least one view from the world's second most populous nation. (I won't say the World's Largest Democracy; my indictment of Indian government must be in another post!)

Obama and the world

Vir Sanghvi, Hindustan Times

October 25, 2008

First Published: 21:37 IST(25/10/2008)

Last Updated: 01:08 IST(26/10/2008)

All of us, or so the saying goes, should have a vote in the American Presidential election because the results affect the rest of the world almost as much as they affect America itself. If we did, in fact, have such a vote, it's quite clear who we would vote for. Poll after poll tells us that the world prefers Barack Obama to John McCain.

And now, it looks as though America may agree. There are the skeptics: people say that Americans are too shy of admitting that they would never vote for a black man to opinion poll agencies, but that when it comes to the crunch, they will chose the white guy. And there's my theory, advanced on this page, some months ago, that Americans are uneasy with an ethnic President.

But there are too many polls for us to deny the obvious. Unless something goes drastically wrong in the next couple of weeks, Barack Obama will be the next President of the United States.

Obviously, this will be an epochal moment for America. As late as the mid-sixties, black people were forced to use segregated toilets in the American South and refused seats on buses. Now, only 40 years later, an African-American will sit in the Oval office.

But if Obama does win, this could also be the moment when the world stops hating America. Surveys tell us that global anti-Americanism has now grown to an all-time high. At a time when their country's global authority has been eroded by eight years of capricious governance by George W Bush, easily the stupidest man to occupy the White House in many decades (even Gerald Ford was brighter), and their economy has gone to the toilet, Americans need the goodwill of the world more than
ever.

By electing Obama they have the chance to earn that goodwill, to transform their country's image, and to finally stem the rising tide of global anti-Americanism.

In the long run, that might do them more good than anything Obama can achieve in the domestic policy sphere.

Some positive global consequences of an Obama victory are:

The Black factor: For centuries, America has fed the world a lie about its essential character. It has told us it is the land of free where it is 'self-evident' that "that all men are created equal" etc. etc. For much of this time, it has restricted these freedoms to white males. The framers of the Constitution kept slaves. Blacks had to fight to be regarded as fully human. And the country itself was founded on land-grab and genocide: the early settlers massacred the Indians and stole their lands before condemning the surviving native Americans to second-class citizenship.

Unfortunately for America, its huge propaganda machine has never succeeded in fully obscuring this lie. And that's one reason why even though much of the world loves American popular culture, an air of suspicion has always haunted the global view of America. When things go wrong — as they have over the last few years — this suspicion turns into downright hostility.

By electing a black man, Americans finally have a chance to the tell the world that their country has changed: it is now truly, an equal society.

International outlook: When Bill Clinton was President, we had a sense that he was a global citizen, engaged with the world. George Bush, on the other hand, strikes most non-Americans as being parochial, small-minded and unmindful of the concerns of the rest of the world.

John McCain, to his credit, is more international but his campaign is hamstrung by the appalling Sarah Palin, a woman who only got her first passport a few years ago so she could go on an official trip and whose idea of a global perspective is looking at Russia 'on a clear day' from Alaska.

Obama comes across as truly international. He is an African-American in the full sense of the term: his father was African (Kenyan) and his mother was American (white.) He grew up in Indonesia, has travelled the world, cares about global affairs (he was quick to issue a statement about India's moon mission a few days ago) and conveys the impression that his concerns extend beyond the American heartland.

All that is certain to work to America's benefit. The world will feel engaged by an Obama Presidency.

Muslims and Iraq: Sending himself up at a roast two weeks ago, Obama joked that whoever gave him his middle name clearly had no idea that he would run for President one day. It's a good joke but it also reminds us that the next President of the United States could well be a man called Hussein.

What's more encouraging is that even though some of his opponents have tried to cash in on his Muslim middle name, referring to him as 'Barack Hussein Obama' (rather as Narendra Modi used to refer to 'James Michael Lyngdoh"), America seems largely unmoved.

This is certain to have an effect on the psyche of the world's Muslims many of whom now loathe America with intensity. It's easy to demonize Bush's America if you are a Muslim; less easy if America is led by a black man with Muslim middle name who grew up in the world's largest Muslim country.

On Iraq, Obama's record has been better than nearly everybody else's. Unlike say, Hillary Clinton, he voted against the war arguing, sensibly, that America should devote its energy to rooting out Al Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan (and Pakistan), not in a pointless engagement in Iraq which has destroyed that hapless country, encouraged fanatics to turn to terrorism and now, devastated the US economy as well.

His views are pretty much the views of the rest of the world as well and so, are bound to find resonance.

The economic crisis: It hasn't happened yet but I think it's only a matter of time. As the global economic crisis begins to bite, as factories close, as people are rendered unemployed and as the world's middle classes see their savings wiped out, there will be a tendency to blame America for the world's financial misfortunes. After all, who can deny that this crisis was caused by Wall Street's greed and the failure of the US government to regulate its mammoth private financial institutions?

The best hope for America's image in this situation is the election of a President who slams Wall Street and the big multi-nationals; who promises regulation and who disowns the excesses of the last decade.
Bush can't do that: his administration allowed the crisis to happen, even helped make it possible. Nor can McCain, whose traditional Republican ties to big business restrict his room for maneuver and who clearly doesn't understand what's going on anyway.

Only Obama has the ability and credibility to tell the world that America made mistakes and that, he will fix them.
Education: Even those who support Obama will concede that he has a tendency to come off as too clever and loves to lecture.

In America, this is seen as a disadvantage. In the rest of the world, it is a huge advantage.

Most of us are so fed up of the folksy simplicity of American politicians that we long for an American President who has an IQ higher than Mickey Mouse's or Goofy's.

McCain's probably a bright guy but his slow, soft, ingratiating (every sentence is addressed to "my friends") delivery does not suggest mental agility. Sarah Palin actually makes a virtue out of her ignorance, passing this off as an All-American value. Asked by interviewer Katie Couric which papers she read, she couldn't name one. Asked to name a single Supreme Court decision apart from the famous Roe v. Wade, she had no idea.

The world is terrified by the prospect of having the most powerful country on the planet led by a moron. We've already seen the havoc eight years of Bush have wrought. So, on balance, we don't mind if the next US President is an intellectual show off. Hell, we may even like it!

The big change: If Obama does win, as seems likely, then it will serve notice to the world that America is finally ready to turn its back on the past: on centuries of discrimination; on pointless wars; on parochialism and small-mindedness; on the economics of greed; and on years of refusing to understand the planet.

Is it any surprise that the rest of the world hopes that he will win?

--
WHY TRY TO FIT IN? YOU WERE BORN TO STAND OUT!

Barack's Impossible(?) Dream

This post is totally partisan. I like Barack Obama, both as a politician and as a human being. I have, in the course of this campaign, come to dislike John McCain more and more, both as a politician and a human being.

This article made me laugh. I hope in two weeks and one day, at this time, I am still laughing.

OK, OK, I admit this picture is over-the-top and crudely, inexpertly done, but why not? I'm over-the-top and crudely, inexpertly done (My Bad! Don't blame God!) By the way, "The Impossible Dream" is one of four songs I sing every morning after my morning prayers, to prepare me for how I want to live that day. (I'll tell you the others, if anyone asks.) And I've put the words of "The Impossible Dream," as well as some more of my ramblings at the end of this post.

Obama Belongs to All of Us
By Melvin Durai

I have a message for my African-American friends: Stop claiming Barack Obama as one of yours. He's not one of yours. He's one of OURS. In case you haven't checked, Obama isn't just black. He's half-black, half-white and half-Asian. Okay, perhaps he isn't half-Asian, but his step-father was Indonesian, he was raised partly in Indonesia, and most of his clothes are from Asia. So don't you dare laugh when you're driving through Chinatown and see a bumper sticker that says "I'm Voting For Obama. He's Almost Asian!"

If you're Hispanic, you can take pride in him too. Did you know that Obama loves tortilla chips and salsa, and he once sat through an entire Jennifer Lopez movie? Yes, the man has gone to great pains to discover his Hispanic side.

When they make a movie about Obama, you'll see him flying to the White House in a cape, with people gazing up and gasping, "It's a black man! It's a white man! It's everyman!"

Obama identified himself with the African-American community as a young man, partly because he felt a need to belong, and that suits everyone just fine, because we love to put people into neat categories. But his background is quite different from most African-Americans. After all, there aren't many African- Americans who could organize a family reunion and harbor a slight fear that Dick Cheney might show up.

And there aren't many African-Americans who could fly to Africa, host a dinner party for their extended family and have hundreds of people showing up, most of whom are actually related to them.

Obama's late father was Kenyan and his late mother was Kansan. If he's elected to the White House, it will be a momentous, historic occasion, because, as everyone knows, America has never had a Kenyan-Kansan president. Yes, he'll be America's very first K-K president, much to the dismay of the KKK.

Obama has given credit to his white mother for raising him after his father left, writing in his memoir that "what is best in me I owe to her." But despite all that, it's his father's race that seems to define him. "If you have one drop of black blood, you're black," society seems to say. But what if every drop of your blood is red?

Shouldn't we celebrate Obama's mixed heritage, instead of glossing over it, instead of cutting off his mother's side?

The same can be asked about Tiger Woods. Journalists often refer to Tiger as an African-American golfer, except in Thailand, where journalists describe him as "the golfer whose mother is Thai."

According to Wikipedia, Tiger's late father, Earl, was half African-American, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Native American, while his mother, Kultida, is half Thai, one-quarter Chinese and one-quarter Dutch. That makes Tiger one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter African-American, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth Dutch. And that makes me glad I studied fractions in high school.

Thanks to those lessons, I've figured out that Tiger is -- drum roll please! -- twice as much Asian as African-American. But not many people know that. If they made a movie about him, it would be called "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Asian."

Tiger, quite smartly, considers himself "Cablinasian" (a combination of Caucasian, Black, American-Indian and Asian.) He's not just a great golfer, but also a great role model, making so many people proud, especially those in the Cablinasian community. You may not know this, but for 10 consecutive years, they've selected him as "Cablinasian of the Year."

Tiger has a unique genetic makeup -- and so does each of us, no matter our racial background. Obama owes his not just to his father, but also his mother. That's why it puzzles me that 92 percent of blacks supported him in the Mississippi primary, but only 26 percent of whites did.

Why such a racial divide over a candidate who's half-this and half-that?



March 24, 2008

Melvin Durai is a Toronto-based writer and humorist. Born in India, he grew up in Zambia and has lived in North America since the early 1980s.His humor has appeared in dozens of newspapers and magazines in several countries, including America, India and Zambia. Read more of Melvin Durai's humor at http://melvindurai.com

The Impossible Dream
from MAN OF LA MANCHA (1972)
music by Mitch Leigh and lyrics by Joe Darion

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go

To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star

This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far

To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause

And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest

And the world will be better for this
That one man fat, little gramma, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

I admit, Don Quixote de la Mancha (Please do check out this site. The webmaster and I have religious differences, but share a common spirit).

is one of my heroes. I flat refuse to give in or give up. Am I a romantic dreamer? Sure. Why not? "And I'm not the only one." A few more of us and who knows what wonderful things could happen? I ask myself, "What will it take to break me?" Honestly, I don't know. I don't think I want to find out. Loss couldn't do it. Death couldn't do it.

Although Nietzsche isn't one of my favourite people, he did say something true. "What does not destroy me makes me stronger." It is dangerous to almost destroy a human being, because that person is likely to "come back even stronger, not a novice any longer."

Now my next step is to deflate this gigantic ego-thing. I read somewhere that the biggest ego trip is believing that you have no ego; the second biggest is believing you have your ego under control.

SAY SOMETHING NICE ABOUT THE PALE ONE.

I promised myself that after the debate, I would say something nice and positive about Sarah Palin.  Here goes.

 

She has really pretty hair, complete with a fancy do and professional highlights!

 

My hair?  Ah, no!  Mine is 100% natural, no cutting, no coloring, no curling, no chemicals and, as yet, no grey!  Just wash and condition and comb and tie.  Repeat as needed.

 

Look!  A nice picture of her hairstyle.  And an even nicer one of her lovely children a few years ago.