As the election rolls into the final stretch, and President Obama's lead solidifies, the GOP's need for a "Game Changer" becomes more and more desperate. And now, enter Obama: The Hidden Tape (Part II).
It was billed as a bombshell on the eve of the first presidential debate: A video showing then-Sen. Barack Obama making controversial comments about class and race. It wasn't until Fox News and the Daily Caller unveiled the video that it became clear that it was an event that had already seen by the public: Mr. Obama's speech to Hampton University in 2007.So this is supposed to be the alleged "smoking gun" that proves Obama is hellbent on repaying Whitey for 400 years, even though he was actually raised by Whitey?
What it succeeded in doing was reminding people about Mr. Obama's warm welcome at the event to his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright - the pastor whose incendiary remarks created such a controversy that Mr. Obama was forced to deliver his famous "race speech" in 2008 in response.
"I've got to give a special shout-out to my pastor, the guy who puts up with me, counsels me, listens to my wife complain about me," Mr. Obama said at the Hampton event on June 5, 2007. "He's a friend and a great leader. Not just in Chicago, but all across the country."
His remarks came less than a year before Wright's infamous "God damn America" speech grabbed the spotlight in 2008.
Fox News' Sean Hannity seized on what the Daily Caller deemed as "racially charged and at times angry" parts of the speech that hadn't been on YouTube since 2007, where Mr. Obama criticized the federal response to Hurricane Katrina and suggested something about a "racist, zero-sum society."
"What's happening down in New Orleans? Where's your dollars?" he asked the audience. "Makes no sense. Tells me the bullet hasn't been taken out. Tells me that somehow the people down in New Orleans, they don't care about it as much."
Another part of the speech that was flagged by Hannity and the Daily Caller also hadn't been seen since it was delivered in 2007 and focused on helping inner city residents find work.
"[We] need additional federal public transportation dollars loaned to the highest need in the community. We don't need to build more highways in the suburbs if we have people in the city who want to work and have no way to get into those jobs," Mr. Obama said. "We have to help connect them to the jobs that exist. We should be investing into minority owned businesses so people don't have to travel so far away."
The release of the video is a clear contrast to Mother Jones' release of a video showing Mitt Romney speaking to campaign donors and suggesting that he doesn't care about "47 percent" of the country that is dependent on the government.
The problems here are many. Obama isn't saying anything other than giving a stock "the government should have done better after Katrina" stump speech that most Democrats did in 07-08'. The shout out to Rebb'n Wright makes sense, given that they were still collegial at the time. Tying the LA riots to post-Katrina New Orleans in an attempt to explain why black people sometimes are slightly angry isn't "race baiting". And of course, there's the small matter that this speech was well covered in 2007, so it's not exactly new. It's been on YouTube for years. Fox News, Sean Hannity, and even Tucker Carlson all covered this themselves back then.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Much like other Obama is a closet racist urban legends (Michelle-O's "Whitey Tape!", Dr. Derrick Bell, Black Liberation Theology) this is simple race baiting from the Right to somehow convince Real Americans that this guy is gonna put them in chains. Cause what other agenda would a black President have, other than, you know, fixing the economy and keeping the country safe, and all that other innocuous Presidential sh*t.
If nothing else, I wish the rest of the "media" would finally tar and feather Hannity, Drudge, and that smarmy punk Tucker Carlson as the racist bastards they are.
And of course, that won't happen.
Question: Is Obama: The Lost Tape (Part II) a true bombshell or just more race baiting from the right wing?!?
