by Julian Krasta
The veneer is peeling, the wax is melting … and hell may indeed be freezing over – and after what appeared to be a near-perfect pitch campaign that reminded me of the flawlessly timed cadences of Johnny Mathis when he sang ‘Chances Are.’
From where I sit, the wunderkind’s façade has slipped, and what we might be seeing now is the tried and true Barack Obama. Like water seeking its own level, his principles, too, have bubbled up through the glossy surface – and they are appearing not so wunderbar.
Up to now, Obama – using fast & loose rhetoric – has gotten farther up the political ladder than any other non-Caucasian in American history. The devotion and cheering on of the African-American communities and, by enormous measure, the white communities, have aided in propelling him straight toward the most coveted, most powerful executive position this country has to offer.
He has played his role skillfully as he delivered, and continues to deliver, mile-long stretches of imaginative, albeit immature, speculation, which his followers eat up like free ice cream on a hot day. According to those adoring fans, there seems to be nothing he could ever say that is wide of the mark. One liberal lady friend even said to me, “If Barack Obama could sprout wings we’d see him fly!”
His ability to soar above the skyline notwithstanding, Obama’s long-term, personal association with a certain racist pastor has grounded him, at least for the time being. This close association might possibly cancel out a significant share of all the good will, trust, and hope for progress – and I am not talking just in terms of the Presidency. I include the ongoing, exhaustive and frustrating wars against racial prejudice in America in general, which we were winning…we were winning.
Each inch-by-bloody-inch victory broke more and more barriers down and Americans were growing closer. When you add up all those inches that we here in America have gained, no one could deny that we had in fact come a very long way.
I dare compare the nature of our contentions to the centuries-long vicious turmoil in the Middle East where countries are crying out for freedom from mullahs and terrorists – for democracy, for equality. This is a universal refrain everyone can hum in unison regardless of the differences in languages.
Then, just at the moment when evolution occurs, another hothead – another racial ‘jihadist’ – comes scurrying out of his hole and starts hurling verbal IEDs in every direction causing widespread damage. This hothead – this pastor in Christ – refuses to let go of the past, because he is not happy unless he dredges up old ghosts and shoots every good intention in the head to impede advancement.
The stage was set for his ignominious emergence (like an irascible first-time homeowner who purposely blows his leaves into a neighbor’s yard, “…because now I can.”). He must have been thinking that his chummy friendship with Obama gave him the right to platform farcical and hateful statements such as “The government invented AIDS to kill black people,” and “The government is building concentration camps for black people,” and “The government provides drugs to blacks to hold them down,” etcetera, ad nauseum.
When I had read the pastor’s rants I thought for a moment they were Stokely Carmichael’s words rising from his grave (about the cancer that took his life). Carmichael had said, it was “…given to me by the forces of American imperialism and others who conspired with them.” He further claimed that the FBI had put the disease in his body to assassinate him.
Oceans of water have passed since Carmichael was on the scene and sparked the term Black Power. His attitude nonetheless remains inured in the pastor’s heart and mind. He has proven without a shadow of doubt that he, and persons like himself (and certainly not all of them black) who perpetually and unnecessarily let fly the words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ at our faces and into our collective consciousness, have no intention of changing one iota either their points of view or their off-color tune any time soon.
What I find disturbing is not so much what this pastor blurted but rather that Obama, who has been mentored by this person for over twenty years, claims he was not aware of his pastor’s intimate feelings (all unquestionably uber-radical), and has made clumsy excuses for the man and for what the man has said. Unlike Mitt Romney’s stirring speech concerning his Mormonism in which he emphasized his love and devotion for this country, Obama’s speech made no mention of patriotism or love for America. I welcome correction if I didn’t read it right.
Therefore, it is because of Obama’s obvious reluctance to put the pastor fully and equivocally in his place, and spending far too much time in his speech preaching about the good, bad, and ugly – and on and on and on and on – of race relations in America that I perceive a rapid withering of Obama’s perfect presentation of himself.
Strangely enough, I must thank the pastor for his horrid honesty. Until now, conservatives have decided to regard Obama’s spell over his followers as charming. No prima facie evidence we have presented to Democrats and liberals has been beefy enough to cause them to understand and accept the fact that he is not yet – I repeat: not yet – qualified or experienced to assume the mantle of Commander in Chief, particularly at this volatile time.
The pastor, however, quite possibly has single-handedly delivered the long-overdue hangover remedy the bloated masses of spellbound Obama followers have needed to sober up and face reality. That reality is, if their candidate cannot – or will not – take control over one person’s ravings, how can they expect him to control the White House?
Monday, March 24, 2008
The Damage Some Men's Dreams Can Do
by Julian Krasta
With proper upbringing, a boy can grow into a strong, self-reliant and sensible man. If that grown man is also well adjusted and has self-respect, he will neutralize deficiencies in his character (e.g., hubris, and that brother bugaboo “machismo”) to defray misgivings and ridicule by family, co-workers and friends – even his enemies. If a man behaves or speaks idiotically, someone eventually will call him on it.
Generally, men are dreamers … like our Founding Fathers were dreamers. It was upon their collective vision that the foundation of this great country was conceived and created where we live in blessed freedom, to achieve as much as we can in the short time given us – to be as great as we wish to be. I am always happy when trying to explain this to my liberal friends; and, if I am lucky, they will still not understand it and I will have to explain all over again.
But I digress.
I dream, too – of owning one of those ultimate driving machines, turning my baseball cap front to back and pushing the pedal to the metal. Realistically, I dream of owning a handsome house in a neighborhood where I can walk, shop, socialize, sleep and just breathe without feeling afraid – where the fellow next door is not secretly buying thousands of Uzis to ship to Iran.
There are dreamers like Mahmoud Admadinejad who, along with other rogue tyrants, refers to the United States as the Great Satan. If this were true, it would be fair of me to say he is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, only without the whimsy.
As millions of witless Americans parade in intoxicated revelry over the frenetic campaigning by the Democratic candidates (in my opinion, by the weakest field I can recall), Admadinejad skulks in shadow, waiting restlessly to dare the United States into a confrontation, possibly nuclear. He did it once, almost a year ago – to test our patience and gauge our potential firepower – when he ordered the abduction of British sailors. It was only after his advisors informed him that President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of the USS Nimitz strike group into the Persian Gulf, and with all possible speed, that Admadinijad backed down and released the prisoners to England. Our Commander in Chief had called his bluff, because his ace was, and is, the might of the United States military.
I do not need to know him personally to recognize that Admadinijad’s behavior is the product of a twisted twilight zone for the pathological and squirrelly, which pushed me to wonder: “What dreams does this man have?”
I began my research with the virgins in paradise myth. Its explanation is straightforward (according to Muslim legend):
"The smallest reward for the people of heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy two wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby … etc. …"
The wives referred to in this narrative are purported to be black-eyed, voluptuously beautiful virgins awaiting “the faithful” (i.e., martyrs). Who are the martyrs? They are the wretched dreamers who strap explosives to their bodies, pull the cord and destroy the lives of innocent human beings (men, women, children … babies) so that they can catapult to their heaven and luxuriate in the attention of obedient maidens.
This fantasy worries me a great deal, because I suspect Admadinejad’s dreams are loftier – that they exceed the 72-virgin limit. Why do I presume this? My wise dad once told me:
“To know your enemy you must learn to think like him – to imagine every possible angle and move that runs through his mind, like a chess game.”
Armed with this counsel, I deduced the following:
If a couple of sticks of dynamite earns a murder-suicide bomber 72 chaste females, Mahmoud Admadinejad might believe (or is being led to believe by mullahs, or his own demons, or both) that he would be rewarded with a thousand, maybe a million, times the legal limit if he sets off a nuclear device. The incentive is there if he accepts as true his craven ideology’s party-line propaganda of being forever fondled by nubile nymphs.
He and others like him could avoid such razzle-dazzle if they instead bought a membership at the Emperor’s Club in New York, where Governor Eliot Spitzer had found his paradise – several times, according to the reports. There a man does not have to be blown to bloody bits in order to attain nirvana.
I have a second, even greater worry. It is about the liberals and Democrats amongst us, whose foresight is, at best, fanciful. They dismiss the fact that it was daring and enlightened dreams that built America – that Admadinejad’s blasphemous trances could propel him and others to destroy it.
On the bright side, if Hillary Clinton becomes president her political party should split in about four months. On the down side, if Barack Obama succeeds to the Presidency this country could split in four weeks. We would then not need to concern ourselves over what aggressions Admadinejad might or might not attempt, because we (“we” includes every Barack-head who thinks he or she is exempt from being hit with taxes that will sustain Obama’s dream changes) will be drowning in the muck of his sausage factory, oxymoronic statements, such as:
“My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join me as we try to change it.”
That is the same as saying, “The Rolls Royce is the most beautifully appointed, masterfully built automobile in the world. Come on down and join in on its transformation. And bring your hammer, duct tape and can of spray paint.”
If the next President of the United States turns out to be either fantasist Democrat (both guaranteeing to fulfill a campaign pledge to leave the Middle East militarily unattended), we might as well draw a pentagram on the ground, face Mecca and join hands, and chant:
“The door is open. Do your worst.”
With proper upbringing, a boy can grow into a strong, self-reliant and sensible man. If that grown man is also well adjusted and has self-respect, he will neutralize deficiencies in his character (e.g., hubris, and that brother bugaboo “machismo”) to defray misgivings and ridicule by family, co-workers and friends – even his enemies. If a man behaves or speaks idiotically, someone eventually will call him on it.
Generally, men are dreamers … like our Founding Fathers were dreamers. It was upon their collective vision that the foundation of this great country was conceived and created where we live in blessed freedom, to achieve as much as we can in the short time given us – to be as great as we wish to be. I am always happy when trying to explain this to my liberal friends; and, if I am lucky, they will still not understand it and I will have to explain all over again.
But I digress.
I dream, too – of owning one of those ultimate driving machines, turning my baseball cap front to back and pushing the pedal to the metal. Realistically, I dream of owning a handsome house in a neighborhood where I can walk, shop, socialize, sleep and just breathe without feeling afraid – where the fellow next door is not secretly buying thousands of Uzis to ship to Iran.
There are dreamers like Mahmoud Admadinejad who, along with other rogue tyrants, refers to the United States as the Great Satan. If this were true, it would be fair of me to say he is the reincarnation of Josef Stalin, only without the whimsy.
As millions of witless Americans parade in intoxicated revelry over the frenetic campaigning by the Democratic candidates (in my opinion, by the weakest field I can recall), Admadinejad skulks in shadow, waiting restlessly to dare the United States into a confrontation, possibly nuclear. He did it once, almost a year ago – to test our patience and gauge our potential firepower – when he ordered the abduction of British sailors. It was only after his advisors informed him that President George W. Bush ordered the deployment of the USS Nimitz strike group into the Persian Gulf, and with all possible speed, that Admadinijad backed down and released the prisoners to England. Our Commander in Chief had called his bluff, because his ace was, and is, the might of the United States military.
I do not need to know him personally to recognize that Admadinijad’s behavior is the product of a twisted twilight zone for the pathological and squirrelly, which pushed me to wonder: “What dreams does this man have?”
I began my research with the virgins in paradise myth. Its explanation is straightforward (according to Muslim legend):
"The smallest reward for the people of heaven is an abode where there are eighty thousand servants and seventy two wives, over which stands a dome decorated with pearls, aquamarine and ruby … etc. …"
The wives referred to in this narrative are purported to be black-eyed, voluptuously beautiful virgins awaiting “the faithful” (i.e., martyrs). Who are the martyrs? They are the wretched dreamers who strap explosives to their bodies, pull the cord and destroy the lives of innocent human beings (men, women, children … babies) so that they can catapult to their heaven and luxuriate in the attention of obedient maidens.
This fantasy worries me a great deal, because I suspect Admadinejad’s dreams are loftier – that they exceed the 72-virgin limit. Why do I presume this? My wise dad once told me:
“To know your enemy you must learn to think like him – to imagine every possible angle and move that runs through his mind, like a chess game.”
Armed with this counsel, I deduced the following:
If a couple of sticks of dynamite earns a murder-suicide bomber 72 chaste females, Mahmoud Admadinejad might believe (or is being led to believe by mullahs, or his own demons, or both) that he would be rewarded with a thousand, maybe a million, times the legal limit if he sets off a nuclear device. The incentive is there if he accepts as true his craven ideology’s party-line propaganda of being forever fondled by nubile nymphs.
He and others like him could avoid such razzle-dazzle if they instead bought a membership at the Emperor’s Club in New York, where Governor Eliot Spitzer had found his paradise – several times, according to the reports. There a man does not have to be blown to bloody bits in order to attain nirvana.
I have a second, even greater worry. It is about the liberals and Democrats amongst us, whose foresight is, at best, fanciful. They dismiss the fact that it was daring and enlightened dreams that built America – that Admadinejad’s blasphemous trances could propel him and others to destroy it.
On the bright side, if Hillary Clinton becomes president her political party should split in about four months. On the down side, if Barack Obama succeeds to the Presidency this country could split in four weeks. We would then not need to concern ourselves over what aggressions Admadinejad might or might not attempt, because we (“we” includes every Barack-head who thinks he or she is exempt from being hit with taxes that will sustain Obama’s dream changes) will be drowning in the muck of his sausage factory, oxymoronic statements, such as:
“My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join me as we try to change it.”
That is the same as saying, “The Rolls Royce is the most beautifully appointed, masterfully built automobile in the world. Come on down and join in on its transformation. And bring your hammer, duct tape and can of spray paint.”
If the next President of the United States turns out to be either fantasist Democrat (both guaranteeing to fulfill a campaign pledge to leave the Middle East militarily unattended), we might as well draw a pentagram on the ground, face Mecca and join hands, and chant:
“The door is open. Do your worst.”
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