The Mask Slips

by Melanie Phillips - July 27th, 2009 - The Spectator (London)

Obama’s major speech on race in March 2008 in which he finally ‘renounced’ his former pastor, the anti-white bigot Rev Jeremiah Wright, which was hailed as the greatest piece of oratory since the Gettysburg address and which supposedly transcended racial animosities to create the colour-blind Brotherhood of Man, was anything but. In this speech Obama actually said Wright should not be renounced, and that Wright’s racism was actually all the fault of white people. The fact that so many people failed to hear or read what Obama actually said and instead heard or read only what they wanted to hear was truly frightening.

Now, thanks to the histrionics of Henry Louis Gates, we can see how Obama’s dysfunctional attitude to race plays out in real time. Gates’s arrest was an honest and understandable mistake by the Cambridge police who were investigating what appeared to be a break-in. It clearly had nothing to do with Gates being black – not least because other officers backing up the arresting officer were non-white. Gates’s protests were preposterous, and vividly demonstrated the pathological resentment and injustice – not to mention the strutting arrogance and narcissism -- of anti-racist ‘victim culture’.

Barack Obama is a racist. He blames America, especially white America, for all the problems of the world. It is the reason he keeps going around the world grovelling on behalf of America and apologizing for our nation. What is wrong with a country that is so wrapped up in guilt that it would elect a ruler who hates the nation he is to rule? What is wrong with a party, the Democrat Party, that so adores a man who only tolerates you if you bow down to him?