“[Obama is a] black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” —Professor Cornell WestIs the president ‘a Black Mascot’ and ‘a Black Puppet’ and is he a sell out to the killing machine because he killed Osama bin Laden? In addition, are those charges, in fact, racist charges?
These are the charges leveled at the president by Cornel West, a Princeton University professor and leading black intellectual. Dr. West is harshly criticizing President Obama, a candidate he once supported but now calls “a black mascot” and “a black puppet” in a recent interview with truthdig.com (see source)
With the Obama, media turning over every rock and looking beneath every shrub for Racism 1 would think they would race to pick the low hanging fruit that professor West offers. And they will eventually. (see story)
Had a White person remotely hinted that the president was simply the black face for Wall Street, Corporate America and the Western Industrialized Military Complex, a 24-hour news barrage equaling the combined forces of hurricanes Rita, Katrina and the tsunami that recently destroyed part of Japan would hound him or her.
That White person would have been swept away on a tidal wave of oblivion. A tidal wave which career and reputation would be spewed out over vast fouled beaches of unemployment.
Alas, Professor West is a Black man. So as Black on Black crime has historically been overlooked in America, the media will not report on a Black man calling another Black man the N-word or calling him a Sell-out or calling him an Uncle Tom or any of the pejoratives that are usually reserved for inter-racial confrontations. Professor West’s complaints will go largely unnoticed by the Brian Williams Katie Couric News media that made the Affirmative Action first Black president possible.
Professor West’s grievance is largely that Barry Hussein Soetoro is a sell-out and Uncle Tom to the people who voted for him. Professor West says that he will neither vote for Soetoro in 2012 nor will he recommend that anyone vote for Soetoro. Dr. West believes Soetoro has become a trader to his self-avowed race.
“And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.”—Professor Cornell West
According to professor West president, Soetoro has betrayed his race and his progressive liberal ideology for the power of the White man.
“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’”—Professor Cornell West
“What it said to me on a personal level was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”—Professor Cornell West
Dr. West also believes that president Soetoro is perpetrating on his claim that he is a Black man. According to Dr. West president Soetoro is afraid of real Black men similar to his grandmother who the president once said was afraid of Black men.
“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.—Professor Cornell West
Professor West is so distraught by the president’s fake Black populism that he does the unimaginable and praises the Tea Party for pointing out that the government under Soetoro is corrupt. Conversely one senses that professor West blames the government for corrupting the president as he comes to gasp with Soetoro own corruption.
The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.—Professor Cornell West
Finally, Dr. West sees Barry Hussein Soetoro as he is not as he projects himself to be. For seeing, this and attempting to warn others Professor Cornell West will pay an exacting toll. Just as any Republican would when the Obama Media sets out to destroy them Dr. West will be set upon by the Obama media and then relegated to the enemies list that heretofore was reserved for Obama political foes.
“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama.—Professor Cornell West
The truth is president Barry Hussein Soetoro’s self-styled form of democracy is counter to the Constitutional Republic that is America. That is what Professor West has learned and that is what the professor is attempting to warn America about.
God save professor West. He’s going to need God’s protection from what lies ahead at the hands of Democrats.
