The "Bombshell" Obama Video

The process of constructing Barack Obama as fundamentally un-American has now come almost full circle, into the naked and explicit realm of race baiting. But first, some backstory:

Barack Obama ran for president in 2008. On the campaign trail, his opponent had to actively defend Obama from questioners in the audience who openly wondered about whether Barack Obama was a Muslim. John McCain had the decency to say that he was a good man, with whom he had disagreements, and was a Christian. And yet, rumors of Obama Islamic faith (preying effectively on a populace sensitized to the supposed Otherness of Islam to America in a post 9/11 world) continued to circulate.

Then Obama was a Communist. He told Joe the Plumber he wanted to share the wealth. He favored "redistribution." Taking from the workers, giving to the parasites. While this argument proved to be unpersuasive during the 2008 campaign cycle (radically so) it did not stop this theme from insisting upon itself, as the Randian tenor of the Tea Party and the "53% Tumblr" cried out, that the makers would not be befuddled by the takers. Now there are 47% of the American people who do not contribute to America. Real Americans earn. Real Americans produce. Obama wants to take from those who produce. The Cold War might be over politically, but the Cold War of our mental colonization is dogged and determined, indeed.

Obama might not even be a citizen! Some people held out that Obama was born in Kenya, not America. At least one article argued that the birtherism was a "screen for partisanship." This dismissal is of course terrifying: what sort of mere "screen" make thinkable the possibility that the president was not born in America, even with prior official documentation available? Even after Obama revealed his birth certificate, fizzling out the "controversy," Dinesh D'Szoua's Obama 2016 continues to advance a separate theory of Obama's "citizenship" based not on his formal membership in the polity but on his civic committment to strains of anti-colonialism. He may be formally of this nation, but not politically of it.

And now we have this "bombshell" video from Sean Hannity. On his show tonight, Sean Hannity brought up three major attacks against the speech:

1) It was raced on the basis of content, as Obama accused the federal government of racial discrimination against New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

2) It was raced in a purely basic manner, that it was not colorblind, and spoke of the existence of black communities.

3) It was tonally raced, as Obama capitalized on a particular black dialectic. In Tucker Carlson's worlds "This is not how he talks...its a put on, a phony."

A curious tension is at work. On one hand, Obama is not truly black: he is putting on a dialectical show for his particular audience, showing "them" that he knows how to walk the walk and talk the talk. On the other hand, we are to take seriously Obama's statements about the government's treatment of Katrina victims in the storm's aftermath. Happily, Hannity has on a guest (a black gentleman named David Webb) willing to say "this is the REAL Obama." Obama's true persona is the "Derrick Bell" influenced and racially charged one.

Hannity and Carlson go way out of their way to make clear: real Americans are not race conscious. Real Americans do not see race. There are two America's, the colorblind America of Fox News and the color conscious America of Barack Obama and his black audience. The real Obama is angry about Katrina. The real Obama expresses his fury. The real Obama knows that racial injustice exists. The real Obama knows that America still has many bullets to remove.

He speaks tonally like an angry black man. He wants to take away our wealth. He wants Kenya to rise up against colonial capture. He secretly worships Allah. He does not know what it means to be an American citizen. Even though in the speech several times Obama goes well out of his way to mention that the aftermath of Katrina "is not about race" this does not go far enough for Hannity and Co. Everything must be raced. Real America does not tolerate or acknowledge difference. Real America is the abolition of difference. Real America is the absence of dissent. Real America is red America packaged and understood as THE America. Debates over what America means are beyond the pale.

Antagonism without agonism? Just ask the crypto-Marxist Muslim Kenyan Anti-Colonialist who'll turn on whitey whenever possible.