Posted by
RANT BRAZEN on Tuesday, November 17, 2009 7:26:34 PM
On the world scene, Barack Obama has an Asian/Arab complex. It’s the only way to explain it.
He bows to the King of Saudi Arabia. Excessive respect.
But he gives Prime Minister Gordon Brown a batch of DVD movies, and pointedly misses a joint press conference scheduled to take place when the British leader visited the U.S. in March of this year. Blatant disrespect.
He bows so deep to the Emperor of Japan that he seems to be looking for a lost contact lens. Excessive respect.
But he fails to even show up for the celebration of the fall of the onerous Berlin Wall – a major diplomatic blunder that causes a ripple of derision among America’s British and European allies. Clear and galling disrespect.
It would be easy to say that these disparate incidents have no relationship to one another. I disagree. I think they are disturbingly symbolic of the cultural contradictions that guide Mr. Obama’s erratic course through his presidency.
What could cause these curious clues to surface? Why would Obama have an Asian/Arab complex?
There may be some tantalizing clues in this excerpt from Biography.com:
Barack Hussein Obama was born Aug. 4, 1961, in Honolulu, Hawaii. His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was born of Luo ethnicity in Nyanza Province, Kenya. He grew up herding goats with his own father, who was a domestic servant to the British. Although reared among Muslims, Obama, Sr., became an atheist at some point.
Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, grew up in Wichita, Kansas. Her father worked on oil rigs during the Depression. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he signed up for service in World War II and marched across Europe in Patton's army. Dunham's mother went to work on a bomber assembly line. After the war, they studied on the G.I. Bill, bought a house through the Federal Housing Program, and moved to Hawaii.
Meantime, Barack's father had won a scholarship that allowed him to leave Kenya pursue his dreams in Hawaii. At the time of his birth, Obama's parents were students at the East–West Center of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
Obama's parents separated when he was two years old and later divorced. Obama's father went to Harvard to pursue Ph.D. studies and then returned to Kenya.
His mother married Lolo Soetoro, another East–West Center student from Indonesia. In 1967, the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama's half-sister Maya Soetoro Ng was born. Obama attended schools in Jakarta, where classes were taught in the Indonesian language.
Four years later when Barack (commonly known throughout his early years as "Barry") was ten, he returned to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Dunham, and later his mother (who died of ovarian cancer in 1995).
He was enrolled in the fifth grade at the esteemed Punahou Academy, graduating with honors in 1979. He was only one of three black students at the school. This is where Obama first became conscious of racism and what it meant to be an African-American.
In his memoir, Obama described how he struggled to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage. He saw his biological father (who died in a 1982 car accident) only once (in 1971) after his parents divorced.
http://www.biography.com/articles/Barack-Obama-12782369?part=0
Muslim influences. Asian influences. Black influences. Shades of victimhood. His grandfather a servant to the British in Kenya. Barack Jr. himself one of only three black students at the academy he attended in Hawaii. Admittedly hurt by racism during these formative years.
The problem with this president is he shows a distressing tendency to carry these early negative impressions, perceived insults and fancied slights into adulthood, into the presidency, and finally into the very crucible of international diplomacy, where he awkwardly acts out his resentments and favoritism, dragging the United States of America into the muck. He seems driven by his own demons.
Barack Obama is not stupid. Far from it. I think he’s very intelligent. But he doesn’t seem to have a clue how to be head of the most powerful and influential nation in the world. (And the greatest, by the way.) He’s still campaigning, looking now to 2012, while still in the infancy of his first term.
Along the way, he is leaving the impression of suffering from a political and cultural schizophrenia that keeps us all wondering when the real Barack Obama will stand up.
*** The claim that Barack Obama was born in the United States is disputed.