US President Barack Obama’s upcoming visit to South Africa was condemned on Sunday by some trade unions, political parties, and civil society bodies.
“We categorically make it known that the visit of the US president to South Africa is an unwelcome visit that will be protested, picketed and resisted by all justice and peace-loving peoples of this country,” the organisations said in a joint statement on Sunday.
“Friendship with South Africa must be based on values of justice, freedom and equality, and these the US has offended, undermined and ridiculed through its actions in the global front,” they said.
The statement was issued by the National Unions of Metalworkers of SA, the SA Communist Party, the Young Communist League of SA, the SA Students’ Congress, the Muslim Students’ Association, the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union, the Congress of SA Trade Unions, the Friends of Cuba Society, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel in SA, and the World Federation of Trade Unions.
“Our rejection is based the US’s arrogant, selfish and oppressive foreign policies, treatment of workers and international trade relations that are rooted in war-mongering, neo-liberal super-exploitation, colonial racism and the disregard and destruction of the environment, thus making the realisation of a just and peaceful world impossible,” they said.
Obama’s visit later this month would be his first to South Africa since he was elected head of state.
“The US, under his leadership, has escalated its assault on human rights, militarisation of international relations and continuing galloping of world resources at the absolute expense of the environment and oppressed peoples of the world,” the organisations said.
Issues such as the US’s use of world resources, its role maintaining the underdevelopment of the African continent, and its contribution to global warming would be highlighted in the protests.
The public was invited to participate in a national day of action on June 28, where there would be a protest march from the Union Buildings in Pretoria to the US embassy from 10am.
There would also be a demonstration on June 29 against the University of Johannesburg’s decision to award Obama an honorary doctorate. It would be held at the university’s Soweto campus at 11am. – Sapa
Today is 16 June, a public holiday (vacation to our American friends) commemorating the race riots of 1976 in Soweto. Every year I dread the arrival of 16 June, incongruously called “Youth Day”, because it represents the acme of the anti-white propaganda calendar in South Africa.
Even the country’s biggest beer company, SAB Miller, participates in the onslaught, with an “artistic” rendition of the dead Hector Pieterson’s famous photo which you can see lower down here. I will save you the real photo, either because you have seen it many times already, or because we are all aware of how images are debased through constant repetition. You needn’t have read any of the theories of Walter Benjamin or Jean Baudrillard about the loss of authenticity or receding reality to understand that.
US First Lady Michelle Obama visits Hector Pieterson Memorial, 22 June 2011
To South African leftists, black nationalists, radical theologians and persons of that ilk, Hector Pieterson or his image represents common currency. There is even now a Hector Pieterson Memorial which is touted to tourists. It has already been visited by Michelle Obama and will soon be inspected by her husband, Barack, whose first visit to South Africa is imminent. It seems that Chinese tourists go to the Voortrekker Monument while American tourists prefer the Hector Pieterson Memorial. Probably, it speaks to them of their own race riots, as well as the interminable arguments around them and how whites are always, in the final analysis, to blame for black violence and mayhem.
Now get this: Hector Pieterson was shot by a black policeman., not a white one. To the crazed, left-wing propagandists on their crusade against the last vestiges of white or Western civilization, the race of the policeman is immaterial. It suffices that the previous white South African government “made him pull the trigger”, like whites always “make blacks do things” or by some intricate racial dialectic cause them to commit crime, not to do well at school or undermine their value system so they end up taking bribes in positions of authority. According to eyewitness reports, Hector Pieterson, who was supposed to be at school that day but sauntered along to see some of the protest action, simply “wandered into the line of fire” between a large crowd of stone-throwing youths and a small group of policemen defending themselves after the mob had not responded to earlier warning shots fired over their heads.
South African Breweries (SAB Miller) has just published this version of the Hector Pieterson image, as a “positive” message to the multiracial youth of South Africa (Click to enlarge)
The photograph in question was taken by one Sam Nzima who worked for a black newspaper called The World at the time. It shows Hector Pieterson being carried by Mbuyisa Makhubo after being hit by a stray bullet not intended for him. The shooter being black, you could call it “friendly fire” or black-on-black violence. Hector’s sister, Antoinette Sithole, runs beside them and is obviously distressed. Here is the beer commercial version of the photograph which puts an entirely new “spin” on it, as being a message addressed to the multiracial youth of South Africa. Note also that Hector Pieterson has suddenly become white in SAB Miller’s “reworking” of Sam Nzima’s image.
SAB Miller became the second biggest beer company in the world as a result of two things:
The thirst of black South Africans for its products.
The fact that apartheid or white rule in the country placed enough buying power in the hands of blacks to afford so-called “clear beer”, as opposed to the African or “Bantu beer” traditionally consumed by blacks.
Not so long ago, I read someone’s Ph.D. thesis on the role of advertising in post-1994 South Africa and SAB, having the biggest “ad spend” in the country, also did the most “to shape our new identity”.
Until I saw SA Breweries’ appropriation of the Sam Nzima photograph, I had not been aware of how intimately the beer company had been involved in the whole Hector Pieterson cult! Apparently there exists a “shebeen route”, the Soweto equivalent of the Cape wine route, whereby one may visit “The world of beer”, showing a traditional (and in those days, illegal) black tavern or “shebeen”, and then move onto the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Winnie Mandela’s garage museum. After reading Rian Malan’s article in the latest Noseweek, one could safely say that Winnie Mandela has so many skeletons in her cupboard that she needs a garage to put them in. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, but perhaps someone needs to scan and OCR it to make a bootleg or “shebeen copy” available to enlighten the public on the real Winnie Mandela. Nelson Mandela’s wife (they have since been divorced) had 14-year old Stompie Moeketsi murdered but was protected by both the ANC and the dying National Party government from prosecution. Why? Because she was famous. And black, no doubt.
But let’s not digress and keep to our main topic, which is the 1976 race riot, flatteringly referred to by journalists and academics as an “uprising”. An article in the New Age newspaper, written by Zwelinzima L Sizani, an ANC official, is subtitled: “How we lost our fear of the regime in the days leading to June 16 1976 and the events that changed history.” Like SA Breweries, Sizani is also busy appropriating the riot for his party which played a very marginal, if any, role at the time.
Within the mythology of the New South Africa – why our country’s name has not been changed during all the other name changes I do not know – the Soweto riots were the “turning point”. On 16 June blacks “rose up against the white regime” which was “forcing Afrikaans down the throats of black schoolchildren”. In response – or so we are told – the rioters went on the rampage, killed a Jewish doctor caring for their sick, looted some beer halls and burned down government buildings, including some of their own schools.
‘The recent slogan of “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” represents a prolongation of the Jew-killing, school-burning mentality of 37 years ago.’
I know that in South Africa there exists a certain inversion of values, at least among our ubiquitous leftist commentators and historians. They consider terrorism, which is decried elsewhere in the world, as the apotheosis of virtue. Every time Afrikaans street names are changed, they ransack the lists of past terrorists and killers of civilians for “heroes” to name streets in Pretoria after, such as Solomon Mahlangu. Within this mindset it is perhaps understandable that killing a philanthropic Jew, Dr. Melville Edelstein, and burning schools are considered exemplary acts which we should celebrate every year on a national holiday. With SAB Miller and other big companies tossing in some ad spend to keep the propaganda going.
The recent slogan of “Kill a Boer, kill a farmer” represents a prolongation of the Jew-killing, school-burning mentality of 37 years ago. If the Gauteng education department under Mrs. Barbara Creecy could burn down a few schools, especially Afrikaans schools, they would consider it a great contribution to this country’s intellectual development. No functional school must be left alone, is the revamped version of the slogan of yore: “Liberation before education.”
The Soweto riots of 1976 are used retroactively to justify the extremist racism and chauvinism meted out to Afrikaners today. In 1976, only a small minority of blacks and white English leftists were anti-Afrikaans. Thanks to the constant stream of ethnic hatred and propaganda, a real hatred against Afrikaans exists at present, fuelling farm murders and ethnic attacks.
The notion that anybody in the history of South Africa – or Azania as the Left calls it – has ever been forced to learn Afrikaans or learn in Afrikaans is so preposterous, it is almost laughable. Yet it suits a lot of people to repeat this fallacy mindlessly every year, including the adherents to the creed that Azania is really a British colony that should speak English only. The multiculturalist, anti-Western British Council probably loves it. For 200 years Afrikaans has survived against all odds, being suppressed under the British Empire and now under its successor, the Bantu Empire.
The denial of language rights to Afrikaners is even more pervasive in the twenty-first century than in the nineteenth in the Cape Colony. English has always been “rammed down our throats”, together with the sickening propaganda that our children are forced to learn for exams at school. It includes history, which means ANC history and the biography of Nelson Mendala, and an idiotic subject called “Life Orientation”. Given the preponderance of English in business and in the media, Afrikaans has never been the dominant language in South Africa. Yet in the Life Orientation handbook at school it is stated: “Under apartheid Afrikaans was the dominant language in South Africa.” I suppose we wrote more books than anybody else in this country, which must have been a crime.
One of those prolific Afrikaans writers is Jaap Steyn, a retired professor of linguistics and one of the greatest minds to come out of South Africa. He wrote a 500–page tome on Afrikaans entitled Tuiste in eie taal (At home in one’s own language). The section on the Soweto riots contains some interesting facts:
In only one of the seven Soweto schools protesting against Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in 1976 was the language used as such, and then only in one subject, History;
the English Academy of South Africa was waging a major campaign in black schools to get them to use English, whereas there was no such campaign by any Afrikaans organisation;
unlike a small coterie of white English leftists in Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban, blacks did not hate Afrikaans. During a competition for school choirs in Soweto, twelve of the sixteen choirs in the senior division sang in Afrikaans and only four in English.
According to Steyn, the economic damage of the riots included the following:
More than 100 buildings of the West Rand Bantu Administration Council were damaged or destroyed;
250 liquor stores and beer halls were looted or destroyed;
170 shops were looted or destroyed;
25 health clinics were burnt down;
8 banks were destroyed;
a number of libraries, post offices, hotels, churches, community halls, magistrate’s courts and gas stations were burnt down;
several 100 vehicles were burnt and up to a third of the 926 buses belonging to the Public Utility Transport Corporation (Putco) were attacked.
While liberals and leftists consider such acts of arson and wanton destruction as “heroic”, the question has to be asked: Why? After all, the ANC government announced only recently that from next year all children in the country will have to learn an African language at school, including white children. No predominantly white and Afrikaans school is preparing to riot and their teachers are not encouraging them to do so.
On 27 June 1976 the editor of the Zulu newspaper, Ilanga, Obed Kunene, wrote in the Sunday Tribune: “Blacks do not destroy facilities… They destroy symbols of the entire system devised by Whites for them… When riots come… all the institutions and services that bear the stamp of White authority become prime targets…”
By the same token, Afrikaners should now be burning every government building in sight, as the reverse holds true: Thanks to their demographic superiority, blacks enjoy political power over us at all levels and decide what is good for us, including what our children should learn at school and in what language they may study at university.
But seeing the Soweto riots as a merely black-white affair, as did the editor of Ilanga in 1976, is simplistic. For long periods white and black have been able to coexist more or less peacefully, but separately, in South Africa. Whenever there was outside interference or incitement of blacks, mayhem broke loose. A deeper analysis of the Soweto riots would reveal the role played by the British Churches such as the Anglican Church and by the so-called Christian Institute, funded by the German churches. They organised and encouraged the Soweto pupils, many of whom were in their twenties as blacks in those days started school at a higher age than whites, to protest and oppose even the study of Afrikaans literature.
‘Affirmative shopping’ as theft is euphemistically called in South Africa, takes place openly in a supermarket in Sasolburg
The problem with the riot-as-revolt theory is that since the advent of black rule in South Africa, we have had as many, if not more, riots than ever before! When someone had stolen cables along the railroad tracks, making trains late, the historic Pretoria statioin was set alight by blacks. Other trains were burnt out too. Not a day goes by when one does not read about “service delivery protests”. Tyres are burnt and vehicles stoned, similarly to the riots of 1976. Blacks seem to be revolting against their own government and municipalities, which they themselves had voted in. They also burn the same “symbols of oppression” as before: councillors’ homes, community centres, municipal offices, libraries, cars and still loot shops and liquor stores. In January this year, black South Africans exercised their right to loot in Sasolburg, south of Johannesburg and pictures again show burnt-out vechicles and a liquor store being ransacked.
In the United States too, race riots have been a feature of that country’s political life. When the four policemen who had assaulted Rodney King were acquitted in 1992, the Los Angeles riots ensued. During those riots, 53 people were killed and more than 2000 injured. In Britain, France, Sweden and elsewhere, burning and looting have become a way for their immigrant communities to express themselvesA recent modish term in South Africa has been the “grammar of blackness” on which I commented a few days ago in White guilt, Coloured faith. Perhaps riots are the grammar of blackness, as they often seem incomprehensible to the white mind. Winnie Mandela famously said: “With our boxes of matches and our necklaces we shall liberate this country”, the “necklace” being placing a petrol-filled tyre around the victim’s neck and igniting it.
The point to understand is that the burning has never stopped and “liberation” continues to this day.
In the Johannesburg Sunday Times I discovered the following amazing pronouncement this week, on the subject of a name change for Pretoria, our capital: “What we should accept is that victors always rewrite history and ensure their dominance is not only felt but seen.”
I may be alone in this, but I refuse to accept that because we have been conquered by propaganda, we should perpetuate the disinformation ourselves. None of the leftist fairy tale of South African history, including the Soweto riots, will stand up to closer scrutiny. There is no continuous “march to freedom” performed by South African blacks. Between the Rivonia trial where Mandela and his comrades were jailed and the Soweto riots, we discern a discontinuity or “epistemological break”. The Soweto riots must be seen as a more or less isolated event.
Neither is there continuity between the riots and the National Party’s ultimate capitulation and absorption by the ANC. FW de Klerk and Roelf Meyer betrayed their own electorate and supporters in all but surrendering to the ANC. Perhaps they were bribed or influenced by foreign powers, but they took that decision by themselves and for peculiarly idiosyncratic and personal reasons.
Like schoolchildren are fond of saying: “It’s random!” There is nothing in South Africa’s past that made the present nightmare a necessity. The Soweto riots could have been triggered by some other event that may have had nothing to do with Afrikaans at all. Like a Rodney King or soccer violence or the presence of foreign Africans in Soweto. Currently, we are seeing a lot of looting and killing around so-called xenophobia. The shops of Somali traders in black areas are regularly attacked, looted and their proprietors assaulted or murdered. So “liberation” continues.
Michelle Obama has already reaffirmed the myth of Soweto by visiting the Hector Pieterson memorial and no doubt her husband Barack will do the same during his coming visit to South Africa. He has already booked a visit to Mandela’s prison cell on Robben island, off Cape Town.
As in the dystopian novels of George Orwell, we are living through a powerful artificial consciousness, a pseudo-reality fabricated by the mass media, academia and the advertising industry. In this story the rioters are the heroes and Dr. Melville Edelstein or the Afrikaner education officials of Soweto are the villains
It constitutes rule by propaganda, domination by (dis)information. We have seen how Tony Blair lied to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Irak. The truth is what you can get away with. Or as it is bluntly put by the Sunday Times:
“What we should accept is that victors always rewrite history and ensure their dominance is not only felt but seen.”
I wonder what Orwell would have thought about that axiom.
The Muslim Lawyers Association in Johannesburg wants US President Barack Obama arrested and tried for war crimes when he arrives in South Africa on June 29.
It submitted a 600-plus page document to the Office of the National Director of Public Prosecutions on Friday asking for an investigation into Obama’s involvement in the Middle East.
Group spokesman Yousha Tayob said Obama ordered drone strikes that killed innocent civilians.
In terms of the Rome Statute, South Africa has the right to prosecute a war criminal on its territory, said Tayob.
Researchers from New York University School of Law and Stanford University Law School recently released a report entitled “Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan”.
They found that in four years Obama commissioned five times more drone attacks than former president George W Bush did in his two terms in the White House .
The report estimates drones have killed between 474 and 881 civilians, including 176 children.
The US Embassy in South Africa’s spokesman Jack Hillmeyer said it had “no comment”.
National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Bulelwa Makeke said the office had received the docket and was studying it. – timeslive.co.za
Trust Republicans to give battle over the wrong broad and for the wrong reasons.
Political posturing aside, Susan Rice, whom Barack Obama has appointed to be his national security adviser – despite or perhaps because of her role in developing the administration’s Benghazi fable – is likely less dangerous than Samantha Power, who will be sent to the United Nations in Rice’s place.
Rice, you’ll recall, was shoved out onto the Sunday shows – five days following the Sept. 11 attack on the mission in Libya last year – to tell tall tales about the genesis of that attack, and to saddle the blame for U.S. fatalities there on an anti-Islam filmmaker. (The man still languishes in jail.)
Formerly at the National Security Council, and acting as senior White House security adviser at the time, Power knows a thing or two about the Benghazi pickle. More to the point: In cahoots with Rice and Hillary Clinton – the woman who cracked the whip at Foggy Bottom – Power was responsible for Obama’s war on Libya, having “developed” a doctrine every bit as intellectually and morally bankrupt as the Bush Doctrine (which advocated waging war to ostensibly prevent it).
Writing in The Nation, a magazine of the ultra-left, Tom Hayden has illustrated just how dangerous is Power’s “Responsibility to Protect” doctrine. A former California state senator, Hayden is also a ’60s flower-power peacenik, whose progressive pedigree can be traced back to Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Jane Fonda.
According to Hayden, Power is an “Irish internationalist”; a “humanitarian hawk” who “see[s] war as an instrument for achieving her liberal, even radical, values.” She “advocates American and NATO military intervention in humanitarian crises.” As she sees it, “The United States must … be prepared to risk the lives of its soldiers to stop the threat of genocide.”
Hip to Power’s hypocrisy, Hayden points out that “like U2′s Bono, another Irish human rights activist,” she “has been less preoccupied by the human rights abuses inflicted by the British during the 30-year war in the northern part of her own country.” Indeed, like her neoconservative philosophical clones, Power considers herself a redeemer of mankind – but not, mind you, of her own kind.
Power has still to scale the Senate Foreign Relations committee for confirmation. My guess is that the leggy fanatic will clear the hurdle by offering as confirmation quid pro quo a softer stance on, say, Israel. And voila, onward to Syria.
By far the more dangerous of the two Obama Amazons is Samantha Power. Susan Rice, in a sense, has been neutralized by scandal; she’s under scrutiny. And if you’re wondering what a U.S. ambassador at the U.N. could possibly do by way of taking the country to war, think of John Negroponte. He pushed for the Security Council resolution “that President Bush eventually cited in going to war in Iraq.”
If they play rough, Republicans will lap up the ladies’ foreign-policy antics, starting with the senior Republican senator from Arizona. John McCain recently crossed enemy lines to cavort with Syrian rebels, the type of chaps who lunch on enemy lungs. He, Lindsey Graham (another senior Republican senator) and their colleagues can’t wait to supply the noble savages of the world with rations.
The only time Republicans will shake fists and point fingers is over a war delayed, one that isn’t led by the U.S., or a war waged without the necessary conviction (read collateral damage).
In all, white progressives like Power derive an erotic rush from swooping down to save The Unknown Other, whether he likes it or not. The coolest place from which to keep this hot thrill going is the global geopolitical scene.
To expect someone like Power to care about her homies first is a lot like expecting Angelina Jolie to adopt a poor white baby (an Afrikaner living in a shantytown , for example). How unglamorous! There’s no chic value in that. In Jolie’s defense, it’s her money. It’s hers to do with as she pleases. In a public servant, however, Power’s proclivities amount to treason.
Edmund Burke certainly thought so. These sellouts of American interests would do well to ponder Burke’s wisdom:
“To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle (the germ as it were) of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love to our country and to mankind. The interest of that portion of social arrangement is a trust in the hands of all those who compose it; and as none but bad men would justify it in abuse, none but traitors would barter it away for their own personal advantage.”
Big media have been willing, even eager, to pass the buck for Barack for the past five years. But the Fourth Estate rose as one on its proverbial hind legs when the president made the mistake of going after their own: members of the media.
For doing their jobs, Associated Press journalists were spied on and had their telephone records and other personal information seized by the head of Barack Obama’s Justice Department, Attorney General Eric Holder. For doing his job, Fox News Channel’s James Rosen was framed by the same department for the crime of conspiracy to leak classified materials.
IRS bloodhounds Douglas Shulman and Steven Miller, likely in charge of hounding conservative organizations unsympathetic to Obama, had practically taken up residence at the Big Dog’s House. Yet, curiously, conservatives have largely avoided linking Barack Hussein Obama to this and to the other scandals reverberating throughout his administration.
Republicans have eddied around the issue, merely describing the president’s stance with respect to the Rosen, AP, Benghazi and the Internal Revenue Service affairs as “disconnected,” “lacking focus.” An “absentee presidency,” surmised the conservative bloggers at Powrline. “The Spectator President,” pronounced Patrick Buchanan. Judge Andrew Napolitano’s brief was equally narrow. He avoided so much as hinting that Holder had likely been carrying out the wishes of his bosom buddy.
Although it’s hard to know what to make of it here, Republican rigor mortis is par for the course. Fortunately, for every mealymouthed Eric Cantor—the House majority leader is responsible for the “disconnected” description—there are progressives like Salon’s Joan Walsh, who, spittle flying, are tying the president to the infractions liberals consider unforgivable. “If you want to know how Obama feels about the AP and Rosen controversies,” reasoned Walsh, “compare his reactions to the three different ‘scandals’ the GOP has been working overtime to conflate … .”
“On Benghazi, Obama has been uncharacteristically defiant,” noted Walsh. He defended the women involved and accused the GOP of staging a “sideshow.” “By contrast, he quickly called the IRS targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny ‘outrageous’ and ‘unacceptable.'” “On the AP and Rosen controversies” the president equivocated. He tried “to have it both ways,” observed Walsh.
To the news that the president’s former senior legal advisor (Eric Holder), as The Huffington Post reported, “personally signed off on the warrant that allowed the Justice Department to search Rosen’s personal email,” Obama has responded by holding Holder still closer to him—he praised the AG and charged him with probing his own malfeasance.
Concludes Ms. Walsh: “the DOJ’s media probes reflect administration policy.”
Obama’s feeble response to “the outcry over the AP and Fox scandals” Jonathan Turley has also taken as evidence “that these are Obama’s sins.” Writing in USA Today, professor Turley, a civil libertarian who is “neither a Republican nor conservative,” smarted over what he termed “the greatest attack on the free press in decades.” Turley goes well beyond other liberals in fingering Holder for supervising a “comprehensive erosion” of civil liberties, privacy rights, and press freedoms. Deftly drawn deductions have enabled this cool brain to elegantly connect the philosophical dots between The Boss and his underling’s pervasive and persistent assaults on due process.
“Holder is what we call a ‘sin eater’ inside the Beltway — high-ranking associates who shield presidents from responsibility for their actions,” posits the professor.
“Richard Nixon had H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman. Ronald Reagan had Oliver North and Robert ‘Bud’ McFarlane. George W. Bush had the ultimate sin eater: Dick Cheney, who seemed to have an insatiable appetite for sins to eat.”
Alas, having reasoned that, “feigned ignorance” notwithstanding, Obama is the original sinner, and Holder his “sin eater,” Prof. Turley stopped short of calling for the impeachment of the president for his many “mortal sins.”
From the expansion of surveillance-state USA, to the leveling of Libya, to forcing individual Americans to purchase healthcare and religious organizations to fund birth control; to the crafting of a Kill List featuring his chosen targets for extrajudicial elimination, to running guns to Mexico’s goons, while gunning for America’s guns—Barack Hussein Obama’s philosophical fingerprints are all over his administration.
While pitting a favored voting bloc against the rest of us, Obama told militant Latinos: “We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.”
The link between President Obama and the policies his minions have pursued seems patent enough. Obama is the philosophical felon, the fulcrum on which everything pivots.
In the aftermath of President Obama’s victory, the Wall Street Journal described the GOP as the WOP, the White Old Party. Indeed, the Republican Party finds itself in a demographic death spiral as youth, single women, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians overwhelmingly vote Democrat.
In fact, the Democratic Party could become the American version of South Africa’s ANC as immigration and high non-white birth rates ensure a steady stream of Democratic voters eager for “change” or even South African-style “transformation:” the ANC’s term for racial revolution and ever tighter anti-white measures.
The latest proposal is for all charities, such as orphanages or soup kitchens to lose their non-profit status if they serve any whites at all. It would mean that charitable organizations could serve only blacks and that whites would not be allowed to help each other in any organized way, even to alleviate poverty or care for orphaned white children.
In the United States, such extreme anti-white measures are probably unthinkable today, but as recently as the early 1980s the idea of a black president in South Africa was deemed equally unthinkable. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s spokesman Bernard Ingham said at the time: “Anyone who thinks the ANC will form the government of South Africa is living in cloud cuckoo-land.”
In the 1960s, so-called apartheid South Africa was still considered such a desirable place to live that 500,000 Britons emigrated there, fleeing socialist Britain.
The question therefore arises: how could South Africa, once seen as a leading Western power more or less on par with Canada or Australia, collapse so quickly to become “just another African country?” And what lessons can white Americans draw from our tragic demise, as they ponder the outcome of a Presidential election in which the evidence of a demographic turn for the worse is clear for all to see?
Ilana Mercer’s book, Into The Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa went some way towards portraying the horrors and mayhem of whites living under a hostile black government, but the underlying causes of South Africa’s spectacular collapse still need explanation.
A century ago, South African whites still enjoyed demographic parity with blacks and were a majority in most towns and cities. In 1950, demographers sympathetic to the National Party shocked everyone at a Stellenbosch University conference by stating that the black population could grow from 8 million to 20 million by 2000. This prediction seemed so outlandish no one believed it. The recent census confirmed that blacks now represent 40 million, far overshooting the “nightmare scenario” of 1950.
South African whites feared communism more than anything else, but American racial ideologies such as affirmative action and so-called BEE (“black economic empowerment—our version of minority procurement) are doing vastly more damage to them. At least under communism the Bolshoi ballet still functioned and the Soviet Union still had a space program. The pursuit of diversity and multiculturalism in South Africa has, however, led to across the board decline; some small towns regularly suffer water and electricity shortages.
In my opinion, America’s future will not resemble its past, but will look more like today’s South Africa. As the number of whites declines, loss of power will follow, leading to aggressive legislation pushing whites out of jobs and most positions of power.
Many whites will emigrate or move to the remaining red states, just as South Africa’s whites have emigrated since 1994. But ultimately there will be no place to go as the global demographic decline of whites means that even European countries suffer the same fate of dispossession.
Demography is destiny, as Auguste Comte said. There is a mysterious process whereby whites react to racial domination not by rioting or claiming special privileges as other races do, but by working harder, having even fewer children, and quarrelling among themselves. We see this happening in South Africa, in Western Europe and, of course, in America where white Republicans and Democrats are like two dogs fighting over a bone, while a third is about to run away with it and leave them with nothing.
The Republican Party is poised to adopt the attitude of South Africa’s liberal opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, which has forsaken its core white support and practices affirmative action in its own ranks. There are three women on its election posters: one white, one colored or mixed-race, and one black, at once expressing the party’s diversity and its disdain for the white male.
Jared Taylor asks that the Republican Party be loyal to its electorate and become the unabashed champion of white interests. Again, the history of South Africa is instructive. British Prime Minister Harold McMillan made a famous speech in the South African parliament on February 3, 1960 in which he warned us that “the wind of change is blowing through the African continent” and that ultimately we would have to surrender power to the nonwhite majority. Our brilliant leader, Hendrik Verwoerd, promptly replied in an unprepared speech that “the tendency in Africa for nations to become independent, and at the same time to do justice to all, does not only mean being just to the black man of Africa, but also being just to the white man of Africa.”
Verwoerd’s slogan of “justice for the white man too” was rejected by most of the Western world. Lest we forget, the rank and file of the Republican Party rebelled against Ronald Reagan’s veto and passed sanctions against South Africa on Sept. 29, 1986.
Since that time, the U.S. has consistently pursued an anti-white foreign policy. In Southern Africa it supported black Marxist movements such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the South West African Peoples Organization (SWAPO). In Europe, it has called for a large Muslim state, Turkey, to be included in the European Union. Would the American elite ever adopt a pro-white policy domestically while pursuing the opposite of such a policy externally?
There are three forces that are likely to determine the Republican Party’s position on white interests. The first is the wishes of its own electorate; the second is the corporate sector that funds the party, and the third is the mainstream media. America’s large corporations support affirmative action and diversity, while the media support multiculturalism. The GOP will follow their bidding and betray its voters.
Like the whites of the former Rhodesia, South West Africa, and South Africa, Republicans will embark on a forlorn search for conservative allies “of color” whom non-white voters will reject as “traitors.” Even if a black woman such as Condoleezza Rice could be fielded as the next Republican presidential candidate, it is doubtful whether many blacks or Hispanics would vote for her.
Pat Buchanan and others have already chronicled “the death of the West,” but we need to understand the laws of this process, because it follows a pattern of false hopes, interspersed with successive betrayals by white leaders. The final days of the Roman Empire followed the same fatal chain of events.
The crisis is far deeper than most Americans realize. South Africa went from being a powerful, Western country to capitulation in just ten years: from 1980 to 1990. President Barack Obama has already started to fire some of his best generals, just like F.W. de Klerk purged his army of all pro-white generals prior to surrendering to the ANC.
I fear that white Americans take false comfort in “still being the majority.” They do not realize how quickly they will lose that status as global demographics change, and immigration to the US accelerates. South Africa is now being overrun by immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa. But America too will become a haven for African immigrants as the population of our continent doubles from the current one billion to two billion within the next 30 or 40 years.
It could even be that Africa’s burgeoning population poses a far greater demographic risk to Americans than Mexicans. Unprecedented technological change, especially in communications, has put immigration information at the disposal of Africans in even the remotest villages.
American whites could become a minority much sooner than they think. That has been our experience in South Africa; people appreciate the enormity of the changes only after it is too late.
Some white Americans may clamor for self-determination, and the South may want to secede again. However, any breakaway group will find itself in the political wilderness, without media support and fighting the forces of demography and history.
We need to form a global network to keep America from falling into the hands of anti-white zealots. We should constantly compare notes on successes and failures, taking heart from every advance. The United States is such a military and economic power that the battle now taking shape within its borders could well determine the fate of the West. If the United States goes the way of South Africa, whites everywhere will be in danger.
In our democracy – for we are no longer a republic that upholds individual rights and limits central power – you vote not for the representative who will defend your inalienable, individual rights. Rather, if you are The Rich – whom the left treats as a reified, rigid state-of-being – you vote defensively. If you are The Poor, you vote extractively – you empower your guy to steal The Other Guy’s stuff and hand it over.
Elections are when the politically dominant majority gets to thump the politically weak minority.
The Moron Media, left and right, are sticking to their story. Barack Obama had “out-hustled” Mitt Romney. Obama ran a better “ground game.” He triumphed “in the trenches,” “neutralized” his rival. He had not stopped campaigning since 2008. The president’s mega-machine was unbeatable, even though his vision was lacking. (As I like to say, a visionary bureaucrat is a voracious one. The best leader is one who leads in limiting his leadership.)
Had Romney, say some of the analysts, been a better tactician, scrappier, less of a patrician – he’d have won.
The media so arguing have advocated for immigration policies that have helped, over the decades, to replace the American people with a new, vastly different people. Although whites broke for Romney in a big way – as a proportion of the voting public, the founding majority is teetering on minority status. It has shrunk to the point where it is becoming powerless against a coalition in opposition.
As an extension of their life’s work, the “news” people aforementioned have anointed a string of progressive commentators who are distinguished from the Democrats with whom they cavort in studios in one way only: They call themselves Republicans.
This lot’s line on the Republicans’ Nov. 6 defeat went as follows: Be nicer to the axis of Asians, blacks, browns (and brown-nosing bimbos) who handed the Democrats a handy victory.
For years, those of us who’ve warned about demographics have been dubbed racists. But the D- Bomb has dropped. Its debris is scattered across “the field” upon which Mitt Romney said he “left everything.”
Asians, blacks and Latinos united for Obama.
As always, women voted with their wombs, although married sisters were less wild for big daddy O. (Oh, how we suffer for the female suffrage! I once vowed to “give up my vote if that would guarantee that all women were denied the vote.”)
To the pox of the 19th Amendment – it granted women the vote – add the 26th Amendment. Smuggled into the Constitution by statute, it artificially swelled the ranks of Democratic voters by millions of 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds. While they don’t work for a living, the vote grants youngsters a claim on the livelihood of those who do.
Overlapping voter categories notwithstanding, Obama thus curried favor with females – single ladies, in particular – the faithless, kids and minorities.
Put differently, those earning less than $50,000 trended Barack Obama; those earning more than $50,000, and certainly individuals in the upper-income tax bracket, preferred Mitt Romney.
People with higher incomes constitute a minority, an economically dominant minority (to paraphrase Amy Chua). People with low incomes are in the majority, a politically dominant majority.
The rich are politically impoverished; the poor politically rich. The rich dominate the economy; the poor dominate the polity.
When elections roll around, the politically powerful exact their revenge against the economically powerful.
What kind of a right gives one man control over another man’s life? In a democracy, the right to vote does just that.
As for demographics, they have become destiny. They were not necessarily so. Demographics have been the excuse central planners have advanced to persevere with immigration policies that destroy civil society and shore up the welfare state.
The now-waning West became great not because it outbred the rest of the world. The West was once great because of its human capital – innovation, exploration, science, philosophy; because of superior ideas and the willingness to defend such a civilization, not because it was more populated than the rest of the world.
America doesn’t need more people; it needs better people.
Making nice with constituencies that vote repeatedly and habitually for the candidate who promises them more stuff is tantamount to sleeping with the enemy. The only voters who could be swayed by the promise of the free market are the Democratic Party’s Asian supporters, since they enjoy higher incomes and stabler families than the party’s Hispanic and black devotees.
Ultimately, elections are about perception – the way in which the people perceive the political planks of the two parties.
The American people perceive the Democratic Party as the party of entitlements. They think of the Republican Party as the party of austerity.
History and reality tell us that both parties have grown government into the gigantic, intractable, wealth-gobbling Thing that it is. But in the age of reality TV, reason and reality are meaningless.
Perception is everything.
The idea of an American People is yet another misconception. The extravaganza that had one adorable, carrot-topped kid bawling “no more ‘Bronco Bamma’ and Mitt Romney, please” has ended. But if this advance auction of stolen goods – H. L. Mencken’s definition of an election – proved anything, it is that America is a mass of competing factions.
Some vie to keep more of their rightful property; others fight to get their paws on that very property.
And the tipping point has arrived. This, Nov. 6, 2012, has proven.
A protest at the University of Mississippi against the re-election of President Barack Obama grew into crowd of about 400 people with shouted racial slurs as rumors of a riot spread on social media. Two people were arrested on minor charges.
The university said in a statement Wednesday that the gathering at the student union began late Tuesday night with about 30 to 40 students, but grew within 20 minutes as word spread. Some students chanted political slogans while others used derogatory racial statements and profanity, the statement said.
The incident comes just after the 50th anniversary of violent rioting that greeted the forced integration of Ole Miss with the enrollment of its first black student, James Meredith.
Ole Miss Chancellor Dan Jones promised an investigation and said “all of us are ashamed of the few students who have negatively affected the reputations of each of us and of our university.”
On Wednesday night, about 700 people held up candles and called for racial harmony outside the administrative building at the university in Oxford, countering Tuesday’s protest over Obama’s re-election.
Police were initially alerted to Tuesday’s uproar by people who saw Twitter posts about it. The students were told to leave, but about 100 came back later. One person was charged with public intoxication and another with failure to comply with police orders. There were no reports of injuries or property damage.
Rumors about the situation were fueled on Twitter after the university’s student journalists posted a video referring to the gathering as “riots.” The student newspaper posted a video of the crowd, but much of what the students said in it is unintelligible other than the “Hotty Toddy” cheer, which is common at football games and other school gatherings.
One picture that spread rapidly on social media shows people burning an Obama campaign sign, but the university hasn’t confirmed that the picture was taken on campus. The chancellor said some photos shared on social media showed things that were not seen by police on campus, but the reports of uncivil language and racial slurs appeared to be accurate.
Some students and teachers used social media to condemn the conflict.
Ellen Meacham, an Ole Miss journalism instructor, posted on Facebook that “anyone who calls that a riot has never read or heard anything about 1962.”
She was referring to when Meredith became the first black student to enroll at the university on Oct. 1, 1962. Federal authorities deployed more than 3,000 soldiers and more than 500 law enforcement officers to Oxford during the integration. An angry mob started an uprising that killed two white men. More than 200 people were injured. Ole Miss sponsored lectures and other events this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary.
“Now, 50 years later, about 2 percent of the overall student body goes out to protest when their guy doesn’t win the presidency and a portion of that small percentage displays the ugly strain that still infects too many in our student body,” Meacham wrote.
In a state with a 37 percent African-American population, Ole Miss now has a black enrollment of about 16.6 percent. The current student body president, Kim Dandridge, is the fourth black person elected to the post.
Jones said the campus was back to normal Wednesday.
The university was planning an event for Wednesday evening called the “We are One Mississippi Candlelight Walk” to condemn the protest, according to Thomas J. “Sparky” Reardon, vice chancellor for student affairs. – AP
Four years ago Africa greeted Barack Obama’s election with rapture, predicting America’s first black president would smother the continent with attention. But instead of warm hand-holding, Africa got hard-headed, security-first policies.
Africa’s response to Obama’s election in November 2008 was nothing short of ecstatic. A Nigerian foreign minister wept, Nelson Mandela hailed it as proof that people should “dare to dream,” and Kenya declared a national holiday.
The fawning was quickly reciprocated, with Obama visiting Ghana just five months after his inauguration.
“I have the blood of Africa within me,” he emotively told the Ghanaian parliament and rapt television viewers across the continent. Africa, the new president declared, was now “a fundamental part of our interconnected world.”
But as America’s Great Recession deepened, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan trundled on and the Arab Spring exploded, sub-Saharan Africa found itself in a familiar spot; on the back-burner.
“There was an expectation that he was going to be the US President for Africa,” said long-time South African diplomat Thomas Wheeler, now of the South African Institute of International Affairs. “It was just an unrealistic expectation.”
“The fact that he had an African father did not mean that he was going to devote a lot more time to Africa.”
Symbolically, Obama’s visit to Ghana was to be his only trip to the region. Equally symbolically, it took until June this year for his White House to come up with a nine-page “US strategy toward sub-Saharan Africa”.
Yet the continent was far from ignored.
Air Force One has been conspicuous in its absence, but the US Air Force and other branches of the US security services have not.
Quietly, US policy toward Africa has started to look a lot more hard-headed and a lot more like policy toward the rest of the world.
“Obama to my mind is more engaged in Africa, but the nature of how the United States is engaging has changed. It is mostly security related,” said Jason Warner, a Harvard-based expert on African security.
According to Warner, Obama has helped “normalise” Africa policy. “There is no other region in the world that the US engages on simply humanitarian grounds.”
Since Obama took office it has been widely reported that the administration has expanded a network of air bases across Africa, training its might on al Qaeda affiliated militants and other groups.
Clandestine bases in Burkina Faso, Mauritania and Uganda are said to have been used variously to spy on al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and track elements of the Lord’s Resistance Army, led by Joseph Kony.
Unconfirmed US drone strikes are reported with some frequency in Somalia.
According to the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, between 58 and 170 people have been killed in 10 to 23 strikes on Somalia, although some took place during George W. Bush’s administration.
“The nature of what he is doing is definitely more covert. But you do get these glimpses every few months that the US is really deeply embedded in Africa,” said Warner.
A year ago Obama deployed 100 US special forces to help Ugandan troops scour thick African jungles of the Central African Republic for Kony – an indicted war criminal – backed up by surveillance planes.
The linchpin for this newly securitised policy toward Africa is the United States Africa Command, or Africom, which operates as a nerve centre for US military operations and military-to-military contacts in the region.
The command became operational barely one month before Obama was elected and now boasts 2,000 designated staff. By one count that is more Africa staff than the foreign aid department USAID.
But much like Obama’s security policy in Africa, Africom has remained largely low-key. It is based in Stuttgart, Germany, rather than in the region, in part to allay accusations of neo-colonial ambitions.
Officials are keen to talk up military training programmes and not so willing to discuss covert operations.
That lack of bombast has been welcomed by many on the continent.
According to Chidi Odinkalu, head of Nigeria’s National Human Rights Commission and a respected activist, Obama’s policy toward one crisis – Nigeria’s Boko Haram Islamist insurgency – has struck a balance.
“It would’ve been easy to overreach… and take Nigeria into the realm of the global war on terror. But I think the US has recognised the particularities of the situation.”
Still, there is little doubt that Obama has missed an opportunity to create goodwill through more high-profile appearances in African capitals, but according to John Campbell, a former US ambassador to Nigeria, the impact of the loss is limited.
“I don’t doubt that for many people on the street it is somehow or other disappointing,” he said. “But you keep looking for concrete examples of where it has damaged relations, and I don’t really see any.”
Regardless of the perceived neglect, Obama’s power to grasp the African imagination remains undimmed, according to Nigerian rights activist Odinkalu.
“I think the success of the Obama presidency goes beyond whatever he’s done for Africa.” – Sapa/AFP
It was hard not to feel sorry for President Barack Obama during what was the first of three presidential debates. The dejected demeanor and the perpetually lowered gaze conjured an unprepared student peppered by a pedantic teacher with questions he could not possibly answer.
The president’s pose spoke to the beating he was receiving at the hands of his opponent, Gov. Mitt Romney.
Obama campaigner Chris Matthews – a proxy for this president, who cloaks himself in the raiment of a newsman – demanded to know: Why was Obama staring down at his “notes” and scribbling? What was he waiting for?
To describe what Gov. Romney had done in the course of the 90-minute debate, Matthews, who possesses a nimble intelligence his candidate is without, reached for wild man Charlie Sheen’s zinger: “What was Romney doing? Winning!”
Moderator Jim Lehrer is an old-school newsman who has never in the course of a long and distinguished career revealed his own political bias. Now the pack men of the media were piling on the PBS anchor for not controlling the debate’s outcome, and for allowing a free to-and-fro between the men.
And since Mitt won hands down, the moderator must have been bad. Or so goes the loser’s lackluster logic. Never mind that reasoning backward is an error in logic. So how does post hoc ergo propter hoc work? Had Obama won the debate under the same emcee’s minimal intervention, Lehrer would have been lauded.
“Passive and unprepared,” chimed another MSNBC regular.
“I was stunned,” confessed thug extraordinaire Ed Schultz of “The Ed Show.” The vulgar and venomous Schultz has openly and repeatedly referred to Republicans as “the enemy,” on his MSNBC extravaganza. If what we saw was indicative of what was to come, Schultz lamented, Obama was in serious trouble.
Arrogant to the end, press pack animal Chuck Todd conceded that Romney’s debate on Oct. 3 qualified him for the first time as a “credible candidate.”
In the left’s peanut gallery, comedian Bill Maher is a philosopher-prophet. Tweeted Maher: “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but Obama looks like he DOES need a teleprompter.”
Also at MSNBC, Rachel Maddow provided the ultimate rationalization, which her co-hosts on the network and elsewhere quickly embraced. “The presidency spoils your ability to be a good debater.”
“In psychology and logic, rationalization (also known as making excuses) is an unconscious defense mechanism,” writes Wikipedia. It is intended to shield the fragile ego from reality.
Like Maddow, presidential hagiographer Douglas Brinkley took cover from real life on Fox News’ “Cavuto.” The yang to Lincoln idolator Doris Kearns Goodwin’s yin, Brinkley diminished Romney’s intellectual victory by applying that most stringent historical test to the governor’s performance: It was without a Reaganesque zinger. Obama, however, had not damaged his brand, claimed Brinkley. He was still a gifted “retail politician.” (Read community organizer.)
Indeed, CNN’s ecstasy meter – a monitor of women’s response to the candidates – crescendoed whenever Obama noodled on aimlessly.
To their credit, the groupies at MSNBC were far more cognizant of the failures of their man than their colleagues at, say, the Huffington Post. “Obama played offense and defense admirably well,” diarized one diarrhetic blogger during the Wednesday night “wipeout.” Or the New York Times, which framed the president’s intellectual flubs as no more than a tactical or stylistic tic. “Cool Hand Barry” they continue to call him.
Once an enthusiastic supporter of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, crunchy con Andrew Sullivan has for some time struggled to stay relevant. (I won’t bore you with the hackneyed hoaxes Sullivan once spewed for Bush, only to say here that there was not an occurrence he didn’t trace back to Iraq: anthrax, September 11 and too few gays in the military – you name it; Iraq was behind it.) Sullivan’s latest (always forgiven) faux pas was splayed on the cover of Newsweek, just the other day, and was provocatively titled, “President Obama: The Democrats’ Ronald Reagan.”
The ever-wrong Sullivan is no longer salivating for the guy “I love.” “… this was a disaster for Obama,” he tweeted. (Never mind, Andy. America loves you, whether you urge her sons to go to war needlessly, or make literary love to her dictators. And love means never having to say you’re sorry.)
For one reason only was Obama on the ropes, while Romney floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee: Romney’s superior intelligence, his ability to store immense amounts of information and apply it to bolster his arguments – abilities his rival, Barack Obama, manifestly lacks.
The belated scoop is this: The Child was not born in a barn and was never a brainiac.
Four years after his election–and a week since CNN’s Jessica Yellin revealed nothing but her own adoration in “Obama Revealed,” an agonizing hour with the president – a Washington Examiner investigation divulged the following facts, belatedly:
Obama was a child of privilege, not of hardship. He lived in Jakarta’s most exclusive suburb. His white grandmother (whom he once tarred with the taint of racism and with whom he lived in Hawaii) was a bank vice president. She sent him to an exclusive private school. Later on he was a shoo-in at Columbia and Harvard Law School. During his 12 years as a lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Law School, his student-approval ratings were low. In fact, he was one of the lowest-ranked professors in his last five years at the university. There, did he teach tort law or bankruptcy law or civil liberties or civil procedures or criminal appeals, or, perhaps navigate the shoals of intellectual property law? No. Obama taught “racism” related law. He left no record of legal, scholarly writings.
Make no mistake; should he succeed in vanquishing Obama come Nov. 6, Romney’s brand of “repeal-and-replace statism” – not to mention maniacal militarism and Sinophobia – will be no victory for liberty.
If not for liberty, last night was, however, a small victory for reality.
DENVER (AP) — In a showdown at close quarters, an aggressive Mitt Romney sparred with President Barack Obama in their first campaign debate Wednesday night over taxes, deficits and strong steps needed to create jobs in a sputtering national economy. “The status quo is not going to cut it,” declared the Republican challenger.
Democrat Obama in turn accused his rival of seeking to “double down” on economic policies that actually led to the devastating national downturn four years ago — and of evasiveness when it came to prescriptions for tax changes, health care, Wall Street regulation and more.
With early voting already under way in dozens of states, Romney was particularly assertive in the 90-minute event that drew a television audience likely to be counted in the tens of millions — like a man intent on shaking up the campaign with a little less than five weeks to run.
He seemed at ease in debate with the man who has been in the White House for four years. “It’s fun, isn’t it?” Romney said. In a rare post-debate concession, some Democratic strategists not involved in the campaign conceded the president was not at his best and missed opportunities to challenge his rival.
The former Massachusetts governor virtually lectured Obama at one point after the president accused him of seeking to cut education funds. “Mr. President, you’re entitled to your own airplane and your own house, but not your own facts,” he said.
The economy dominated the evening, as it has the race for the White House all year. Pre-debate opinion polls showed Obama with a slight advantage in key battleground states and nationally.
Romney said he had plans to fix the economy, overhaul the tax code, repeal Obama’s health care plan and replace with a better alternative, remake Medicare, pass a substitute for the legislation designed to prevent another financial crash and reduce deficits — but he provided no new specifics despite Obama’s prodding.
Said Obama: “At some point the American people have to ask themselves: Is the reason Governor Romney is keeping all these plans secret, is it because they’re going to be too good? Because middle class families benefit too much? No.”
The two men debate twice more this month, but they were first going their separate ways on Thursday. Obama had campaign stops in Colorado and then Madison, Wis., while Romney was booked into Virginia. All three states are among the nine battlegrounds likely to settle the race.
At times the debate turned into rapid-fire charges and retorts that drew on dense facts and figures that were difficult to follow. The men argued over oil industry subsidies, federal spending as a percentage of the GDP, Medicare cuts, taxes and small businesses and the size of the federal deficit and how it grew.
Obama sometimes seemed somewhat professorial. Romney was more assertive and didn’t hesitate to interrupt the president or moderator Jim Lehrer, who seemed to struggle to maintain control.
The wonky tone of the debate was a stark contrast to the harsh, broad-brush and sometimes personal attacks the two men make in person and in multimillion-dollar television advertising.
At the same time, Romney managed to make some points by personalizing his comments with recollections of people he said he had met on the campaign trail. In another folksy reference, Romney told Lehrer, a veteran of the Public Broadcasting Service, that he would stop the federal subsidy to PBS even though “I love Big Bird.”
Generally polite but pointed, the two men agreed about little if anything.
Obama said his opponent’s plan to reduce all tax rates by 20 percent would cost $5 trillion and benefit the wealthy at the expense of middle income taxpayers.
Shot back Romney: “Virtually everything he just said about my tax plan is inaccurate.”
The former Massachusetts governor and businessman added that Obama’s proposal to allow the expiration of tax cuts on upper-level income would mean tax increases on small businesses that create jobs by the hundreds of thousands.
The two campaign rivals clasped hands and smiled as they strode onto the debate stage at the University of Denver, then waved to the audience before taking their places behind identical lecterns.
There was a quick moment of laughter, when Obama referred to first lady Michelle Obama as “sweetie” and noted it was their 20th anniversary.
Romney added best wishes, and said to the first couple, “I’m sure this is the most romantic place you could imagine, here with me.”
Both candidates’ wives were in the audience.
Without saying so, the two rivals quickly got to the crux of their race — Romney’s eagerness to turn the contest into a referendum on the past four years while the incumbent desires for voters to choose between his plan for the next four years and the one his rival backs.
Romney ticked off the dreary economic facts of life — a sharp spike in food stamps, economic growth “lower this year than last” and “23 million people out of work or stropped looking for work.”
But Obama criticized Romney’s prescriptions and his refusal to raise taxes and said, “if you take such an unbalanced approach then that means you are going to be gutting our investment in schools and education … health care for seniors in nursing homes (and) for kids with disabilities.”
Not surprisingly, the two men disagreed over Medicare, a flash point since Romney placed Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan on his ticket.
The president repeatedly described Romney’s plan as a “voucher program” that would raise out-of-pocket costs on seniors.
He continued, directly addressing the voters at home: “If you’re 54 or 55 you might want to listen because this will affect you.”
Romney said he doesn’t support any changes for current retirees or those close to retirement.
“If you’re 60 or 60 and older you don’t need to listen further,” he said, but he contended that fundamental changes are needed to prevent the system from becoming insolvent as millions of baby boom generation Americans become eligible.
Romney also made a detailed case for repealing Obamacare, the name attached to the health care plan that Obama pushed through Congress in 2010. “It has killed jobs,” he said, and argued that the best approach is to “do what we did in my state.”
Though he didn’t say so, when he was governor Massachusetts passed legislation that required residents to purchase coverage — the so-called individual mandate that conservatives and he oppose on a national level.
Romney also said that Obamacare would cut $716 billion from Medicare over the next decade.
The president said the changes were part of a plan to lengthen the program’s life, and he added that AARP, the seniors lobby, supports it.
With a two-minute closing statement, Obama said he had spent his first four years in office fighting for those in the middle class and those seeking to make it there. “If you’ll vote for me, I’ll fight just as hard in my second term,” he said.
Romney was as critical of Obama’s tenure as he was the moment the two men walked onto the stage.
If the president is re-elected, he predicted continued economic trouble for the middle class, chronic unemployment, higher costs for health insurance and “dramatic cuts to the military.”
Obama took office in the shadow of an economic crisis but promised a turnaround that hasn’t materialized. Economic growth has been sluggish throughout his term, with unemployment above 8 percent since before he took office.
The two presidential rivals also are scheduled to debate on Oct. 16 in Hempstead, N.Y., and Oct. 22 in Boca Raton, Fla.
Vice President Joe Biden and Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin have one debate, Oct. 11 in Danville, Ky. Both men have already begun holding practice sessions.
Hampton University, a historically black institution
WASHINGTON (AP) — Conservatives on Tuesday used a speech President Barack Obama delivered as a candidate in 2007 to accuse him of using racially charged rhetoric.
“There’s no way you can listen to this speech and not hear it as a deliberately divisive speech that pits Americans against each other and does so largely with racial innuendoes that are very, very clear when you hear the speech,” former Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich said on Fox News, which aired segments of the videotaped speech.
At issue Tuesday, one day before the first presidential debate and as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney trails in polls, was a speech then-candidate Obama made to black clergy at Hampton University, a historically black institution in Virginia. Media outlets including The Associated Press and Fox News covered the remarks at the time.
Obama – now the nation’s first black president – said in the speech that the Bush administration did nothing to defuse a “quiet riot” among blacks that threatened to erupt in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Then a U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama also said the Bush administration “was colorblind in its incompetence.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity said the speech “contains some of the most divisive class warfare and racially charged rhetoric ever used by Barack Obama.”
Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson of The Daily Caller, which posted video of the speech online, argued that the speech features “racial rhetoric designed to make people fearful.” And The Drudge Report, a regular Obama critic, predicted the video would “ignite accusations of racism – in both directions!”
Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt quickly dismissed the criticism, accusing “Mitt Romney’s allies” of recirculating video of a widely covered speech in “a transparent attempt to change the subject” from Romney’s comments about 47 percent of Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes.
Romney’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment. The Republican previously distanced himself from a conservative group considering an advertising campaign featuring Obama’s former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons stirred controversy in Obama’s first campaign.
Five weeks to Election Day, President Barack Obama is within reach of the 270 electoral votes needed to win a second term. Republican Mitt Romney’s path to victory is narrowing.
To overtake Obama, Romney would need to quickly gain the upper hand in nearly all of the nine states where he and Obama are competing the hardest.
Polls show the president with a steady lead in many of them as Romney looks to shift the dynamics of the race, starting with their first debate Wednesday night in Denver.
Obama headed to Las Vegas for an evening rally and planned to stay in Nevada as he prepared for the debate. Romney remained in Boston on Sunday, going through preparations of his own for Wednesday’s event.
Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan says there’s time for the Republican ticket to win. “In these kinds of races people focus near the end, and that’s what’s happening now,” he told “Fox News Sunday.”
A prominent Romney supporter, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said he expected Romney’s debate performance in Denver to shake up the campaign after a “tough couple of weeks.” Christie predicted Romney would do “extraordinarily well,” and that come Thursday morning, “this whole race is going to be turned upside down.”
But a top Obama adviser, David Plouffe, cast doubt on how much the debate would turn around the race.
“They expect to come out of this with the race fundamentally changed. Now, what does that mean?” asked Plouffe. “If it’s going to fundamentally change, that means in seven or 10 days from now you’ll see states like Ohio tied, the state of Iowa tied because that’s what really matters here. So they have set the bar quite high.”
If the election were held today, an Associated Press analysis shows Obama would win at least 271 electoral votes, with likely victories in crucial Ohio and Iowa along with 19 other states and the District of Columbia. Romney would win 23 states for a total of 206.
To oust the Democratic incumbent, Romney would need to take up-for-grabs Florida, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Virginia, which would put him at 267 votes, and upend Obama in either Ohio or Iowa.
U.S. presidents are elected not by national popular vote but in state-by-state contests. Each state gets one electoral vote for each of its representatives in the House and Senate. There are 538 votes in the Electoral College, and a candidate must have at least 270 to win. Except for Maine and Nebraska, states award all their electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state.
The AP analysis isn’t meant to be predictive. Rather, it is intended to provide a snapshot of a race that until recently has been stubbornly close in the small number of the most contested states.
It is based on a review of public and private polls, television advertising and numerous interviews with campaign and party officials as well as Republican and Democratic strategists in the competitive states and in Washington.
In the final weeks before the Nov. 6 vote, Obama is enjoying a burst of momentum and has benefited from growing optimism about the economy as well as a series of Romney stumbles. Most notably, a secret video surfaced recently showing the Republican nominee telling a group of wealthy donors that 47 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes and consider themselves victims dependent on the government.
To be sure, much could change in the coming weeks, which will feature three presidential and one vice presidential debate. A host of unknowns, both foreign and domestic, could rock the campaign, knocking Obama off course and giving Romney a boost in the homestretch.
Barring that, Romney’s challenge is formidable.
Obama started the campaign with a slew of electoral vote-rich coastal states like New York and California already in his win column. From the outset, Romney faced fewer paths to cobbling together the state-by-state victories needed to reach the magic number.
It’s grown even narrower in recent weeks, as Romney has seen his standing slip in polls in Ohio, with 18 electoral votes, and Iowa, with six. That forced him to abandon plans to try to challenge Obama on traditionally Democratic turf so he could redouble his efforts in Ohio and Iowa, as well as Colorado, Florida, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Nevada and Virginia.
Romney is hoping that come Election Day, on-the-fence voters tip his way. But there are hurdles there, too.
Early voting is under way in dozens of states, and national and key state surveys show undecided voters feel more favorably toward Obama than Romney.
Ohio’s shifting landscape illustrates Romney’s troubles over the past few weeks. No Republican has won the presidency without taking Ohio.
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Republicans and Democrats agree that Obama’s solid lead in public and private polling in the state is for real. Over the past month, the president has benefited from an improving economic situation in the state; its 7.2 percent unemployment rate is below the 8.1 percent national average. Obama’s team also attributes his Ohio edge to the auto industry bailout and General Motors plant expansions in eastern Ohio.
Obama and his campaign have hammered Romney on his tax policies, arguing that the former Massachusetts governor favors the rich while the president is a defender of everyone else.
Underscoring his challenges, Romney also has been forced to spend millions of dollars a week defending himself in North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state that’s more conservative than most of the states that will decide the election.
Polls now show a competitive race there. Democrats boast of having registered 250,000 new voters in the state since April 2011. It’s an eye-popping total in a state that Obama won by just 14,000 votes four years ago. A flood of new voters, presumably a chunk of them Democrats, could help keep that state within Obama’s reach this year.
Romney now faces an extraordinarily tight path and few options but to bear down in the states where he is competing aggressively. Time, though, is running out.
Plouffe appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” and ABC’s “This Week.” Christie spoke on NBC, ABC and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” – AP
Mitt Romney accused President Barack Obama on Tuesday of trying to “paper over” deadly unrest and crises in the Middle East and failing to stand up to Iran in its quest for a nuclear bomb.
Shortly after the president laid out an unapologetic defense of his under-fire Arab Spring policy in a speech to the UN General Assembly in New York, the Republican nominee insisted the White House was shrinking from its responsibility to lead through strength in the volatile region.
He particularly took issue with Obama’s weekend characterization of Middle East troubles as “bumps in the road” while countries like Egypt and Tunisia undergo sensitive transitions to democracy.
“Those developments include 20,000 people being killed in Syria, a Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, Iran on the cusp of becoming a nuclear power, and of course the assassination of our ambassador in Libya,” Romney told CNN while campaigning in the critical battleground state of Ohio.
“I’m not sure whether any of those qualifies as a bump in the road. They certainly don’t in my view.”
“The White House’s failure to acknowledge that the assassination of our ambassador was a terrorist attack, a terrorist event, suggests that they’re trying to paper over the seriousness of what’s happening in the Middle East.”
His comment came despite the White House last week describing the assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, which killed four Americans including ambassador Chris Stevens, as a “terrorist attack” that could have links to Al-Qaeda.
Romney also said Obama has pledged time after time to prevent Iran and its President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from acquiring a nuclear weapon, but that “it’s very clear that his policies with regards to Iran have not dissuaded them from becoming nuclear by one iota.”
The Republican also reiterated his charge that the Obama administration should be “indicting Ahmadinejad under the Genocide Convention for incitation to genocide, (and) treating the diplomats of Iran like the pariah they are, the way we treated the diplomats under South Africa under apartheid.”
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