Cutting Social Security is a very bad idea, and it’s the last thing one would expect an African-American president to consider, let alone actually propose! Yet where no other white, Democrat president has ever dared to go, is exactly where President Obama now chooses to be in his open advocacy for Social Security cuts.
Kudos to Obama for being America’s first (half) black president. However the hollow symbolism of that is no replacement for real substance, and the vanity of token triumphalism not only defies sanity, but also cuts through the veins of justice when minorities in power willfully harm people of color, the poor and others dispossessed.
Sure there are racists who criticize Obama just for the sake of it, however – as civil liberties attorney and columnist, Glenn Greenwald, often points out – there is a lot of criticism Obama rightfully deserves. It is immature and ignorant to forego that and instead hold on to some romantic, idealized version of what Obama is about, so as not to face what “Obama has wrought,” his becoming yet another minority celebrity in a growing list of African-American men and women who have betrayed the interests of minorities, a damned circle to which Harry Belafonte so rightly pointed out a decade ago Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell belong…
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/16194-liberal-america-wake-up
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