The Mask ..... and the man behind it

Any objective mind that reads “Dreams of my Father” cannot escape the inevitable. The author was, of course, Obama and the inevitable is that the book reveals just how racist he may be. For the most part, the racism remains hidden when it suits him, which is most of the time if you want to get elected, but its there nevertheless and, were he ever to overlook it, Michelle would be quick to remind him. Just as soon as she'd kicked off her Prado's in the Residence after she'd returned from her latest shopping spree and ordered that they be cleaned.

The very word “racism” carries negative connotations for some people even though it probably shouldn’t be so; how about “interracial awareness” instead?

Now I suspect that all of this may be uncomfortable for some of his supporters who sought to expiate their guilt for years of slavery and its aftermath and so they voted for him.

Let’s look at the press conference on Wednesday evening when the subject was supposed to be healthcare. After the rambling responses to the press corps’ initial round of questions, Obama came alive for the first time when some plant in the audience asked about the sad saga of Professor Gates from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Until now I’ve stayed away from this topic as I watched, with everyone else, Obama dig himself a hole. But as to the event itself, I’ll restrict myself to two points.

I live in a nice quiet area but even so we have a “Neighborhood Watch” program in place. This requires that all the participants be aware of their environment and to act should they detect anything or anybody untoward. The recommended action is to call the emergency services. In the case of Cambridge, this is exactly what Gates’ neighbor did. Now if I’d been in Mr. Gates’ shoes I would have been thanking both the police officer and the neighbor for their efforts to protect my property. Instead Mr. Gates chose to “mouth off”.

The other point is that Gates, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and countless other blowhards immediately started yelling about racial profiling. This is plainly preposterous in these circumstances. If the police officer had found both Mr. Gates, who is black of course, (just in case you hadn’t figured that out) and a white guy at the scene and then had decided that, based on that difference alone he was going to concentrate on the black, that would be racial profiling.

We know that is not what happened but what did happen is that Obama himself leapt into the fray and pronounced it an act of racial profiling and compounded it by declaring the individual police sergeant and his brother officers were “Stupid”. Needless to say, this did not sit well with police departments and unions across the country and faced with this growing firestorm, Obama was forced to try to defuse the very crisis that he had stoked.

Does anybody think that Obama would have intervened in the first place if Gates were white and the cop was black?

But, this whole mess does tell us something about Obama that he has sought to hide from the American electorate. Like an Al Sharpton he does not wait to get all the facts before playing the race card and he admitted as much.

For a brief moment the mask of urbane sophistication slipped and we saw the true Obama. Suddenly what we saw was not Presidential. What we saw was an ACORN leader. What we saw was a Community Agitator.