Obama, Osama, O Mama!

By Antonio C. Abaya

Written on March 31, 2008

For the Standard Today,

April 01, 2008

If I were an American citizen, I would probably vote for Barack Obama. He is more genuinely articulate than the plastic and predictable Hillary Clinton. He has real fire in his belly; Hillary has only a bellyache caused by ambition unsatisfied by eight years in the White House as First Lady.

Obama is an authentic visionary, unseen in American presidential politics since John F. Kennedy in the 1960s. Hillary is just another politician mouthing platitudinous slogans.

Even her uniqueness as the first serious female contender for the American presidency is tarnished by her apparent resignation to and tolerance of her husband Bill’s open and scandalous womanizing, even within the White House itself while she was present in it.

In my book, a crusading woman politician, confronted with the peccadilloes of her husband, would have castrated him then and there, politically or otherwise. But, of course, Hillary did nothing of that sort because she needed to stay in the White House and present a false business-as-usual demeanor for the sake of her future run for the presidency.

At this point in the campaign, Obama has pulled comfortably ahead of Hillary and is no longer threatened by any last minute surge in the Clinton campaign. My forecast is not even fearless, that Obama will win the nomination of the Democratic Party in June.

Having said that, however, I do not think Obama will be the next president of the United States of America.

The British novelist Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature, predicted in an interview with a Swedish newspaper last February 9, that if Obama were to be elected president, he would be assassinated.

Two months before Ms. Lessing made her prediction, I had told members of my family, as well as two American friends of mine, that Obama might be assassinated even before he wins the election on November 4.

Despite the spread of social liberalism, the US retains much of its white supremacist fringe, and anti-black sentiments continue to boil beneath the surface, manifesting itself even in the course of the current presidential campaign.

The ready availability of guns and a modern history of high-profile political assassination unsurpassed anywhere except in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, mean that several would-be assassins in Idaho or Alabama or wherever are even now seriously plotting their dastardly deed. Ominously, this month marks the 40^th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

But even if Obama were to survive assassination, as I hope he does, events are being, or will soon be, manipulated to significantly reduce his chances of winning the elections in November. And the central point of this manipulation will be Iraq and the war against Radical Islam.

Already we are seeing subtle and not-so-subtle hints of this manipulation. Anti-Obama propaganda repeatedly refers to his middle name: Barack Hussein Obama, Barack Hussein Obama. The idea is to subliminally associate Barack with the certified despot and genocidal murderer Saddam Hussein, to defeat whom thousands of Americans have died and tens of thousands of others have been wounded.

This crude propaganda may not work with the liberals in the East and West Coasts, but for the unsophisticated local yokels and rednecks in Middle America, who make up the majority of the voting population, this would have resonance.

Especially if it were made part of a wider campaign along the same bigoted lines, as it undoubtedly will be. Such as the repetition ad infinitum of that YouTiube clip of his minister of choice for 20 years, Jeremiah Wright, screaming out his anti-White America diatribes that would make Fidel Castro sound like a Sunday school preacher moralizing about addiction to bingo. .

Wright’s “Not God bless America! But God damn America!” screamed out loud with bristling hatred and wild-eyed conviction……and not a word of protest or reproach from Barack during those 20 years, will be capitalized on and repeated ad nauseam by Barack’s many detractors of all stripes, including white supremacists and Christian Evangelicals, not just by the Republicans, as November 4 approaches.

Barack’s rationale that he could not disown Jeremiah Wright any more than he could disown his (white) maternal grandmother somehow rings hollow. Attention may be focused on his (white) mother as the central influence in his life, especially during those 20 years when Jeremiah Wright’s anti-White America diatribes may have seemed the acceptable conventional wisdom to an angry young (black) man and his angry young (white) mother.

That his (white) mother, Ann Dunham, from Kansas married first a black Muslim from Kenya (Barack’s father), then another Muslim from Indonesia, seems to suggest a deep-seated anger against White America for its enduring racism, which anger may have found reinforcement, for both mother and son, in the reverse racism of Jeremiah Wright.

Before he entered state, then national, politics and thus had to meld into the mainstream, Barack was not only an angry young man with an angry young mother, he also had an angry young wife in Michelle Robinson, who was a Law graduate from Princeton, as Barack was from Columbia.

Curiously, Michelle’e senior thesis – “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community” – has been “temporarily withdrawn” from the Princeton Library until November 5, the day after the elections. It must contain some sharp criticisms of White America that have been deemed, by Obama campaign managers, to be counter-productive to his presidential fortunes, for it to be embargoed until the day after.

In a recent interview, Michelle Obama said that “My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my ‘blackness’ than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus, as if I really don’t belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second…..”

My sense is that this resentful feeling of separateness from the white majority permeated the Obama household - (white) mother, son and daughter-in-law – from which they sought and found refuge in the reverse racism of Jeremiah Wright. In the present contest, Jeremiah Wright is an embarrassment, but he may have been an integral part of the Obama upbringing..

So the issue of race is a major component in the Obama candidacy to a far greater extent than has been admitted or is apparent. But even more potentially damaging to him would be Iraq and the war against Radical Islam.

Even my favorite American commentators have not taken notice of an announcement by the Defense Department last February 11 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and five other detainees in Guantanamo would soon be tried by a military commission.

For those who do not know, or may have forgotten, who KSM is, he was the al-Qaeda top gun who was the operational brains of several al-Qaeda initiatives including the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September11, 2001, one of the most devastating terrorist attacks ever anywhere, certainly the most humiliating setback suffered by the Americans on their own soil, at so little cost to the attackers..

This means that in the weeks and months leading to the November 4 elections, 9/11 will be relived with all the pain and anguish and anger and frustration that the Americans suffered seven years ago, and the calls for revenge and justice on the perpetrators, now on trial, will reach fever pitch as US media go on a feeding frenzy that may even overshadow, or be made to overshadow, the presidential campaign..

In such a hysterical environment, Barack’s (and Hillary’s) liberal calls for the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq in 16 months will likely be drowned out by orchestrated and real calls for a more vigorous prosecution of the war, even if it means opening a second front in Iran.

The recent resignation of Adm. William Fallon as C-in-C of Central Command, supposedly because he refused to endorse a war on Iran, means that war is in the cards as well.

So is a more relentless pursuit of Osama bin Laden and company in their mountain redoubts along the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the past four months, using unmanned Predator aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles, the CIA was able to kill the no. 4 man in al-Qaeda’s order of battle, plus another senior commander.

If Osama or his deputy, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zwahri, is killed or captured in the weeks leading to November 4, while KSM and his five confederates are being tried for 9/11, Obama’s 16-month withdrawal plan would lose much of its liberal appeal and many independent voters would swing towards John McCain’s unabashed embrace of George W’s war on Radical Islam, as long as it shows early signs of success, especially in Pakistan, where the cost in American lives would be minimal.

In the present calculus, a hard core 30-32 percent of American public opinion has solidly and consistently supported the Iraq war. These are mostly Christian Evangelicals who see war in the Middle East as fulfillment of biblical prophecies in the Book of Revelations, according to which most Jews in Israel would be killed, except for 144,000 males who will convert to Christianity, which will be the signal for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

With 30 to 32 percent of American voters already predisposed by religious beliefs to support the War on Radical Islam, the needed balance of 19 to 25 percent would not be difficult to harvest from among independent voters if my scenario outlined above were to simultaneously materialize in the weeks leading to November 4: er…black propaganda on Obama’s connection to Jeremiah Wright, the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his five 9/11 confederates, and the killing or capture of Osama and//or Ayman in Pakistan. Grating as it may be, George W may yet have the last triumphal laugh.

One recalls that in the last week of the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry and George W. Bush were tied in a dead heat in most surveys, with four percent of the voters still undecided.

It was during this stalemate that Osama bin Laden chose to make a sudden appearance on US television, ominously calling for more attacks on the Americans. One week later, George W went on to win the popular vote, by 3.7 percent. (See my article Osama Spooked the US, of Nov. 03, 2004)

In 2008, Osama could spook Obama just by getting killed or captured. And for those who think that he is too old at 71, McCain takes along his 95-year old mother in his campaign sorties, just to show voters that he has the longevity gene. O Mama!. *****

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