Obama slandered America as racist using dishonest claims about the response to Hurricane Katrina

by Paul Mirengoff in Barack Obama, Obama administration, Race and racial bias

The Daily Caller has obtained and posted video (video below) of a 2007 speech by Barack Obama in Hampton, Virginia. Speaking to an audience of black ministers, and using a black dialect only marginally more authentic than Joe Biden’s, Obama claims that the U.S. government shortchanged Hurricane Katrina victims because of racism. As the Daily Caller says, “the effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event.”

Obama’s factual claims about alleged shortchanging of Hurricane Katrina are false. Obama states:

Down in New Orleans, where they still have not rebuilt twenty months later, there’s a law, federal law — when you get reconstruction money from the federal government — called the Stafford Act. And basically it says, when you get federal money, you gotta give a ten percent match. The local government’s gotta come up with ten percent. Every ten dollars the federal government comes up with, local government’s gotta give a dollar.
Now here’s the thing, when 9-11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act — said, ‘This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you gotta put in. Well, here’s ten dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ‘Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not gonna wait for you to scratch it together — because you’re part of the American family.’

What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money? Makes no sense! Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much!

But as the Daily Caller points out, by January 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. This was more than five times the money that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after 9/11.

Moreover, says the DC, the federal government did at times waive the Stafford Act during its New Orleans reconstruction efforts. On May 25, 2007, just weeks before Obama’s speech, the Bush administration sent an additional $6.9 billion to Katrina-affected areas with no strings attached.

So here’s what Barack “No Red America, No Blue America” Obama, the great racial unifier, did at Hampton. He charged the U.S. government with racism based on false claims about the response to Hurricane Katrina.

And Obama did not limit his accusation of racism to the federal government. For Obama, white racism is pervasive; it is, to use the central metaphor of the Hampton speech, a bullet that blacks carry in their body from the time of birth. This “bullet” of racism, says Obama, explains the 1992 riots in Los Angeles.

 

Having thus slandered the U.S. government and white America, Obama demanded the transfer of money to the inner cities:

We need additional federal public transportation dollars flowing to the highest need communities. We don’t need to build more highways out in the suburbs. We should be investing in minority-owned businesses, in our neighborhoods, so people don’t have to travel from miles away.

In addition, Obama insisted, we need a series of new federal programs, including one to teach punctuality to the poor:

We can’t expect them to have all the skills they need to work. They may need help with basic skills, how to shop, how to show up for work on time, how to wear the right clothes, how to act appropriately in an office. We have to help them get there.

Here at last, we find some evidence of the racism Obama claims pervades America — his own claim that blacks can’t be expected to show up for work on time without a special program from the federal government.

 

Barack Obama was already a candidate for president when he delivered the Hampton speech, so this isn’t ancient history. Rather, the speech is a sincere (though factually dishonest) statement of how he really sees America and what he believes must be done in response. In essence, America needs to redistribute wealth from whites to blacks in order to offset, as best it can, the nation’s basic racism.

 

As Stanley Kurtz has shown in his book Spreading The Wealth: How Obama is robbing the suburbs to pay for the cities, the redistribution of wealth from middle class suburbs to the inner city constitutes the core of Obama’s domestic agenda for his second term. The sincere outrage Obama expressed in Hampton should leave little doubt that Obama will aggressively pursue that agenda through executive orders, regulations, and coercion if America makes the grave mistake of re-electing him.

 

Here in full was last night’s Fox News coverage of the film:

(video at link) http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/10/obama-slandered-american-as-racist-using-dishonest-claims-about-the-response-to-hurricane-katrina.php