Sen. Obama has scheduled a major address on race for Tuesday in Philadelphia:

“This is why I’m giving a speech about this tomorrow, that will be a lot more wholesome than a press conference. Does that make sense?” Obama asked.

Yeah, it makes sense — you don’t want to have to answer tough questions.

It ought to be a good speech. Obama has had years to prepare for this moment that inevitably had to arrive.

It might even be a great speech, if Obama can summon up the courage to overcome his fear that he’s not “black enough.” If he explains to blacks that he used to subscribe to what Wright says, but he’s learned over the years that blaming everything on the white man is just self-defeating for blacks, that it’s been a generation-and-a-half since the Civil Rights years, that blacks have to grow up.

But, I expect it will instead just be more of the Will.i.am-quality soft soap he’s been ladling out for years.

Keep in mind that the Wright-Obama connection has two interrelated but distinguishable aspects: the black racial angle and leftist ideological angle. My guess is that Obama will play up the black angle of his past (as being both more understandable — seeing as how Obama, kind of like Jesus, was a poor black child raised by a single mother in the ghetto of Honolulu — and more untouchable by the press) and totally ignore the leftist angle.

It would be more fun if Obama reversed the polarity and snarled, “Yeah, yeah, for the last 12 years, I forced myself to nod in seeming agreement when all those smug Friedmanite economists at my University of Chicago would ramble on about the magic of the market. But, in my heart, I knew this glorious day would come when the capitalist system crumbles in ruins! Nyah-hah-hah-hah!”

The famous Youtube clip of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright includes this:

“ Folks are hatin’ on Barack Obama. He doesn’t fit the mold, he ain’t white, he ain’t privileged. Hillary fits the mold. Europeans fits the mold. Giuliani fits the mold. Rich, white men fit the mold. Hillary never had a cab whiz past her and not pick her up because her skin is the wrong color.”[Transcript at Chicago's 560 AM WIND]

Obama actually is privileged, having attended Punahou Prep School in Hawaii, and being the second generation of his family to go to Harvard. Hillary and Rudy both attended public schools, and while Rudy’s parents never split up, they were separated briefly while Rudy’s father was in Sing Sing.

But the Reverend is right that a taxicab would probably consider it safe to pick up Hillary Clinton, since middle-aged white women commit very few crimes of violence, whereas black criminals have killed more cab drivers than left turns.[See Myth Of The Racist Cabbie , an excerpt from Dinesh D'Souza's book, The End Of Racism]

The last time this came up was when Barack Obama claimed he couldn’t get a taxi in New York because of prejudice, and that this made him “authentically black.” Ann Coulter did a column called Obama Hails A Unicorn in which she pointed out the danger of death to drivers who pick up the wrong passengers, and also said that sometimes she can’t get picked up on Fifth Avenue:

…. the driver displayed a scar across his neck, a souvenir from a black customer who had robbed him. “I have to choose which is worse,” the driver said, “a fine or death.”

Thanks to Rudy Giuliani, cab drivers in New York no longer have to make that choice. Under his mayoralty, New York City became a lot safer for cab drivers – and everyone else. The murder rate went from about 2,000 murders a year under Mayor David Dinkins to about 700 by the end of Giuliani’s term. The last time a cab driver was killed in New York was in 1997.

In addition to making it safer for (mostly African-American and Muslim) cabbies to pick up African-Americans, Giuliani made it costly for them not to. He started “Operation Refusal” in 1999, sending out teams of black undercover cops and taxi commissioners to hail cabs and give fines to those who refused to pick up blacks.

Even back in 1999, in the first 12 hours of “Operation Refusal,” out of more than 800 cabs hailed, only five cab drivers refused to pick up a customer – one of whom was a white woman with children. And by the way, I’ve had dozens of cabs refuse to stop for me on Fifth Avenue. Sometimes they forget to turn on the “off duty” light, or they’re daydreaming or maybe they’ve read my columns on Muslims.

So if a cute blonde in a miniskirt can’t get a cab on Fifth Avenue, maybe Hillary has seen cabs whiz off without picking her up.

The other reason cabdrivers aren’t enthusiastic about picking up African-American passengers is a widespread belief that African-Americans are lousy tippers. This has been verified  by social scientists with way too much time on their hands. Going just by stereotypes, I’d say that an ambitious young politician would be an excellent tipper. Going by similar stereotypes, I suspect a radical clergyman would be a lousy tipper, and both of these last two are cross-racial stereotypes.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day to all our Irish-American and Irish readers. Mark Steyn has a post today on how the “No Irish Need Apply” signs “remembered” by anti-Nativist immigration enthusiasts are an urban myth, a subject covered previously on VDARE.com.

Of course, as I pointed out a while later, modern “affirmative action “ recruiting might as well say “No Irish Need Apply.” since the Irish are the wrong color for minority recruiters.

So in honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I have a few examples of our coverage of the Irish diaspora:

My March 17, 2001 column, The Camp Of St. Patrick, about Irish immigration in the nineteenth century, (not an unmixed blessing)

An Irish-American Reader Complains About Fulford’s “Ganging Up On America.”, a response to my take on Gangs of New York.

Ireland: Though All The World (Specifically, The Irish PM) Betray Thee. by Martin Kelly

When Everyone Is Irish,The Times (London, England), March 21, 1987 By Peter Brimelow, explaining St. Patrick’s Day to the English.

Barack O’Bama, Irishman

The Brogue Wears Off: Why The Catholic Church Is Addicted To Immigration By J.P. Zmirak

And more from my last year’s post on St. Patrick’s Day here.

By the way, some schools, out of their fear of anything connected with the Christian religion, have started referring to this as “Green Day”–one blogger writes [March 17, 2008]

Happy Green Day

Or, as it’s NOT know at my son’s school, St Patrick’s Day. Are we so afraid of anything remotely religious now that St Patrick has been demoted to just being Green?

Saul Alinsky, famed radical community organizer in mid-20th-Century Chicago, figures prominently in Steve Sailer’s current article on Barack Obama at VDARE.com’s main page.

My impression, as a Chicago native and a grad student at the University of Chicago (also Alinsky’s alma mater) in the 1970s, was that Alinsky, though a committed leftist, was a man without illusions about humanity. Pertinent to the immigration-sanity movement, there’s a well-known Alinsky quote that strikes me as a great antidote to the bleatings of the ethnic-grievance brigades within the Treason Lobby:

The fact that people are poor or discriminated against doesn’t necessarily endow them with any special qualities of justice, nobility, charity or compassion.

You can find that quote all over the Web, here for example. I haven’t stumbled upon a source that actually gives the time and place where Alinsky said it. But I’ve been aware of the quote for at least 30 years, and I’ve no doubt that he did say it. It’s also consistent with other things I heard attributed to him back when I was in Hyde Park (the University of Chicago’s neighborhood).

My own formulation of Alinsky’s idea in the quote above is this: The people you’re trying to help aren’t any better than the people you’re working against, and if you interchanged them, you’d wind up with the same struggle on your hands.

The Alinsky quote also brings to my mind a theme enunciated a number of times by David Horowitz, once a man of the left who is now a stalwart of the right:

There is a sense, of course, in which the left has always been defined by its destructive agendas. Its utopian vision was just that – utopian, a vision of nowhere. In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy. In the vast library of socialist theory (and in all of Marx’s compendious works), there is hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth – to what will cause human beings to work and to innovate, and to what will make their efforts efficient. Socialism is a plan of morally sanctioned theft. It is about dividing up what others have created. Consequently, socialist economies don’t work; they create poverty instead of wealth. This is unarguable historical fact now, but that has not prompted the left to have second thoughts.

In a long article on the young Barack Obama in the Chicago Reader, December 8, 1995, as he was launching his political career, I found something I had not known before:

“Obama took time off from attending campaign coffees to attend October’s Million Man March in Washington, D.C.”

But that doesn’t mean Obama agreed with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who organized the Million Man March and gave the climactic numerology-laced two hour oration. As Obama pointed out in Dreams from my Father (p. 200), Farrakhan’s black separatist capitalism just isn’t practical:

“If [black] nationalism could create a strong and effective insularity, deliver on its promise of self-respect, then the hurt it might cause well-meaning whites, or the inner turmoil it caused people like me, would be of little consequence.”

What Obama wants instead is multicultural collective action. He told the Reader in 1995:

“In America,” Obama says, “we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations.” …

“But what was lacking among march organizers was a positive agenda, a coherent agenda for change. Without this agenda a lot of this energy is going to dissipate. Just as holding hands and singing ‘We shall overcome’ is not going to do it, exhorting youth to have pride in their race, give up drugs and crime, is not going to do it if we can’t find jobs and futures for the 50 percent of black youth who are unemployed, underemployed, and full of bitterness and rage. …

“Exhortations are not enough, nor are the notions that we can create a black economy within America that is hermetically sealed from the rest of the economy and seriously tackle the major issues confronting us,” Obama said.

“Any solution to our unemployment catastrophe must arise from us working creatively within a multicultural, interdependent, and international economy. Any African-Americans who are only talking about racism as a barrier to our success are seriously misled if they don’t also come to grips with the larger economic forces that are creating economic insecurity for all workers–whites, Latinos, and Asians.

And don’t forget, it takes a village to raise a child!

“The right wing, the Christian right, has done a good job of building these organizations of accountability, much better than the left or progressive forces have. But it’s always easier to organize around intolerance, narrow-mindedness, and false nostalgia. And they also have hijacked the higher moral ground with this language of family values and moral responsibility.

“Now we have to take this same language–these same values that are encouraged within our families–of looking out for one another, of sharing, of sacrificing for each other–and apply them to a larger society. Let’s talk about creating a society, not just individual families, based on these values. Right now we have a society that talks about the irresponsibility of teens getting pregnant, not the irresponsibility of a society that fails to educate them to aspire for more.”

Interestingly, while Obama is for the workers of the world uniting politically like in a Benetton ad, he’s not crazy about blacks deciding for themselves to live among whites:

“The right wing talks about this but they keep appealing to that old individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and get out. Instead of investing in our neighborhoods, that’s what has always happened. Our goal must be to help people get a sense of building something larger. …

Obama’s 1995 dismissal of getting a job, getting rich, and getting out of the ghetto was a reflection of his first conversation with Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. in the 1980s, as recounted in Dreams from My Father. One of Wright’s own secretaries at Trinity tells Obama she wants to move to an integrated suburb so her son will be safe. Obama then asks Wright (pp. 283-284):

“But wasn’t there a reality to the class divisions, I wondered? I mentioned the conversation I had with his assistant, the tendency of those with means to move out of the line of fire. …

“‘I’ve given Tracy my opinion about moving out of the city, [Rev. Dr. Wright] aid quietly. ‘That boy of hers is gonna get out there and won’t have a clue about where, or who, he is.”

“‘It’s tough to take chances with your child’s safety.’

“‘Life’s not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be.’”

The economic subtext is that the jobs of both Wright as a South Side black preacher and Obama as a South Side black community organizer and proto-politician are imperiled by the right of blacks who can afford it to move out of the black slums and find a less dangerous place to raise their children. It’s less fun being a “community leader” if your putative followers keep moving to Schaumburg. So, Wright and Obama implore their followers to stay put, even at the risk that their children will join gangs and go to prison or the grave.

So these two hyper-glib men’s guilty consciences over their policy of self-interestedly persuading black parents to continue to expose their children to the dangers of gang-infested neighborhoods helps explain some of the anti-white paranoia that runs through Wright’s and Michelle Obama’s statements. For example, on 60 Minutes, Michelle explained: “… as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station …” as if KKK snipers were cruising past the South Kenwood Amoco. (South Kenwood, where the Obama’s mansion is, is only 1/3rd black, but North Kenwood’s a dicey neighborhood).

Obviously, the main danger faced by black men is being shot by other black men, but that’s too unspeakable to mention, so free rein is given to paranoid fantasies about The Man being behind black-on-black violence, as in Wright’s Trinity church “Black Value System.” Keep in mind that this quote isn’t from Farrakhan, it’s from the church that the Obama family donated $22,500 to in 2006:

Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

Those so identified are separated from the rest of the people by:

1. Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.

In an asinine op-ed in the New York Times, “Obama’s Brother in China,” Roger Cohen reveals the location of Barack Obama’s half-brother Mark, bragging:

So there I was, a couple of weeks back, sitting under a mango tree in western Kenya, when Senator Barack Obama’s half-sister Auma says to me:

“My daughter’s father is British. My mom’s brother is married to a Russian. I have a brother in China engaged to a Chinese woman.”

My understanding is that this half brother living in China is Mark. He’s the son of Obama’s father and an American woman named Ruth, whom Obama Sr. met while at Harvard in the 1960s and brought back to Kenya.

As you’ll recall, I announced here on January 8, 2008 “I’ve discovered Obama’s estranged half-brother Mark,” but I refused to say where Mark lived, mentioning only: “He lives and works abroad, neither in America nor in Africa.” My reason for not violating Mark’s privacy was simple:

“There’s no evidence on the Internet that Mark has ever attempted to boost his career by calling attention to the fact that he’s the half-brother of a potential President of the United States. This is in sharp contrast to Billy Carter (Billy Beer and a dubious loan from Col. Gadaffi) and Donald Nixon (Nixonburger and a dubious loan from Howard Hughes). So, I’m not going to drag him into the madness of the campaign.”

I guess Cohen would claim that he hasn’t violated the man’s privacy because China is practically full of half-black guys named Mark with Stanford physics degrees, so he can just blend in with the crowd…

Cohen burbles on:

If nominated, Obama’s family baggage will get pored over. Four years ago, Bush’s people cast Kerry as un-American for speaking French. A Republican camp campaigning at the sorry nadir of Bush’s handiwork will try to portray the war hero John McCain as more American and patriotic than his opponent.

But things are different. Less fearful, Americans are less willing to be manipulated. They’ve backed Obama this far in part because they’re sick of the narrow American exceptionalism of Bush’s divisive rule.

Never before have U.S. fortunes been so tied to the world’s. … Isolationism is not merely wrong, it’s impossible.

If elected, Obama would be the first genuinely 21st-century leader. The China-Indonesia-Kenya-Britain-Hawaii web mirrors a world in flux. In Kenya, his uncle Sayid, a Muslim, told me: “My Islam is a hybrid, a mix of elements, including my Christian schooling and even some African ways. Many values have dissolved in me.”

Obama’s bridge-building instincts come from somewhere. They are rooted and proven. For an expectant and often alienated world, they are of central significance.

Swell, but Cohen completely misses the point of Obama’s poignant passage about his 1988 meeting with Mark, who is also half-Luo and half-white. I apologize to longtime readers, but since almost nobody in the press seems to have paid serious attention to the Democratic frontrunner’s 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I’ll have to quote from it at length again.

Unlike Obama, who long dreamed of Kenya but knew little about it, Mark spent his summers off from his American studies in Kenya at his mother and step-father’s pleasant Nairobi home, where Obama met him on his first trip to Africa in 1988, when Obama was 27. Here’s what Obama wrote about him (pp. 341-345):

“‘So, Mark,’ I said, turning to my brother, ‘I hear you’re at Berkeley.’

“‘Stanford,’ he corrected. His voice was deep, his accent perfectly American. ‘I’m in my last year of the physics program there.’”

They meet once more, for lunch:

“I asked him how it felt being back for the summer.

“‘Fine,’ he said. ‘It’s nice to see my mom and dad, of course. … As for the rest of Kenya, I don’t feel much of an attachment. Just another poor African country.’

“‘You don’t ever think about settling here?’

“Mark took a sip from his Coke. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s not much work for a physicist, is there, in a country where the average person doesn’t have a telephone.’

“I should have stopped then, but something — the certainty in this brother’s voice, maybe, or our rough resemblance, like looking into a foggy mirror — made me want to push harder. I asked, “Don’t you ever feel like you might be losing something?’

“Mark put down his knife and fork, and for the first time that afternoon his eyes looked straight into mine.

“‘I understand what you’re getting at,’ he said flatly. ‘You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots, that sort of thing.’ He wiped his mouth and dropped the napkin onto his plate. ‘Well, you’re right. At a certain point, I made a decision not think about who my real father was. He was dead to me even when he was still alive. I knew that he was a drunk and showed no concern for his wife or children. That was enough.’

“‘It made you mad.’

“‘Not mad. Just numb.’

“‘And that doesn’t bother you? Being numb, I mean?’

“‘Towards him, no. Other things move me. Beethoven’s symphonies. Shakespeare’s sonnets. I know — it’s not what an African is supposed to care about. But who’s to tell me what I should and shouldn’t care about? Understand, I’m not ashamed of being half Kenyan. I just don’t ask myself a lot of questions about what it all means. About who I really am.’ He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I should. I can acknowledge the possibility that if I looked more carefully at myself, I would …’

“For the briefest moment I sensed Mark hesitate, like a rock climber losing his footing. Then, almost immediately, he regained his composure and waved for the check.

“‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘What’s certain is that I don’t need the stress. Life’s hard enough without all that excess baggage.’

“… Outside we exchanged addresses and promised to write, with a dishonesty that made my heart ache.”

 

Notice that it’s Obama’s own dishonesty that is (supposedly) making his heart ache–he can’t know what’s in Mark’s heart as they exchange addresses, but Obama knows that he will not write to his own half-brother. The physics student is Obama’s intellectual equal, but his realism about Kenya, his lack of an identity crisis, lack of black ethnocentrism, and lack of illusions about their mutual father leave Obama so uncomfortable that he doesn’t want to hear from Mark anymore.

I hope the two half-brothers have patched up their relationship in the years since 1995, as the Presidential candidate has matured. (He has matured, hasn’t he?)

By the way, if Cohen has actually read Dreams with any care, he would have known that Obama’s half-sister Auma, Barack Sr.’s daughter by his first wife, Keiza, isn’t entitled to speak for Mark’s side of the family.

Obama Sr. and his third wife Ruth, a white American, had two sons, Mark and David, before their bitter divorce. Ruth then married an affluent and genial man who had moved to Kenya from a different African country. They had sons of their own, and all the boys were educated at a prestigious international school in Nairobi.

Mark absorbed his mother’s values, but the younger boy, David, rebelled as a teenager against his mother’s Western ways. Obama wrote: “He told her he was an African, and started calling himself Obama.” David, who was Mark’s full brother, ran away from home. Months later, the Senator’s hard-drinking half-brother Roy (Auma’s brother and Obama Sr.’s first son by Keiza–Roy later took up the name Abongo when he became an Afrocentric teetotaling Muslim) happened to see David begging on the streets. Roy took him in.

One night, not long before Obama’s 1987 visit to Kenya, Roy and young David went out drinking on Roy’s motorcycle. Roy got into a drunken brawl and was jailed, so he lent the boy the key to his motorcycle. David crashed it and died.

Roy/Abongo’s complicity in the death of Mark’s full brother David left relations between Keiza’s family and Ruth’s family even frostier than before. Upon his visit in 1987, Obama spent almost all his time with Keiza’s relations, such as his half-siblings Roy/Obongo and Auma.