While Outside Protesters Face Police State
By Larry Jones
As the time arrived Monday evening for Michelle Obama to give the night’s
keynote address at the DNC in Denver, on the streets outside police
were making mass arrests. As protesters started marching near Civic
Center Park, police in riot gear cordoned off the street from two sides,
hemming in all the people in the area, including legal observers and
passers-by, and then fired pepper spray into this crowd. Ninety-nine
people went to jail.
Soon, inside the Pepsi Center, Michelle was talking about how “the
American dream endures.” She spoke about her commitment to her children,
who came before anything else. She honored her parents and praised the
U.S. military and said how she “loves this country.” Love of country
had to be in there strong because she raised so many hackles when some
weeks ago she said at a campaign rally: “For the first time in my
life I’m proud to be an American.” It wasn’t long before Cindy
McCain said, “I”ve always been proud to be an American.” So the
wife of the presumed Democratic candidate for president had to kneel
at the feet of nation’s power brokers and show how patriotic she is.
Make no mistake, however, Michelle is very winsome. Even with her Princeton
and Harvard degrees she comes off as a down to earth human being. She
moved back to the University of Chicago with the job of trying to remove
the school’s reputation as a “kind of imperialistic force on the
South Side,” as Salim Muwakkil, the senior editor of “In These Times”
put it on Democracy Now.
GOING ALONG WITH HER HUSBAND ON IRAQ
There has been some criticism and grumbling (but not enough rejection)
from Barack Obama supporters because he wants to enlarge the military
and increase forces in Afghanistan, where U.S. troops have already been
responsible for huge numbers of civilian deaths, including 90
of them, the majority children, just last week, according to the United
Nations. Further, Barack would be willing to use nukes to prevent Iran
from further developing their nuclear program, and his plan for withdrawal
from Iraq would leave troops there for years.
Thus it was necessary for Michelle to
speak about how her husband would “end the war in Iraq RESPONSIBLY.
Meaning, don’t expect it any time soon!
But taking individual responsibility was also part of her message. It’s
no wonder that Chris Matthews called her speech a “Bill Cosby Story.”
Cosby has made a second career from his blame-the-victim attitude ,in
telling Black people to get off their butts and solve their own problems,
thus directing the emphasis away from the ruling class oppressors of
African Americans, and the oppression that has been deeply woven into
every aspect of this society since the first Africans were brought across
the Atlantic in chains..
Michelle Obama ended her speech with what Franklin Roosevelt used to
call “the nod to God.” “God bless you, and God bless America,”
she said to thundering applause of the Democratic loyalists.
Yes, Michelle seems like a very nice woman and the delegates and mainstream
media loved her speech, but one can’t help but feel that some Obama
campaign insiders had a big hand in writing it. Salim Wuwakkil put it
this way, “[I]t really demonstrates how astute those speech writers
are, because they know exactly what the American people want to hear.
And she nailed it.”