According to their tax-returns, Barack and Michelle Obama are millionaires who give less than 7% of their income to charity. However, in a fit of self-righteous indignation, Barack had the following words of wisdom today:
“The point is, though, that — and it’s not just charity, it’s not just that I want to help the middle class and working people who are trying to get in the middle class — it’s that when we actually make sure that everybody’s got a shot – when young people can all go to college, when everybody’s got decent health care, when everybody’s got a little more money at the end of the month – then guess what? Everybody starts spending that money, they decide maybe I can afford a new car, maybe I can afford a computer for my child. They can buy the products and services that businesses are selling and everybody is better off. All boats rise. That’s what happened in the 1990s, that’s what we need to restore. And that’s what I’m gonna do as president of the United States of America.
“John McCain and Sarah Palin they call this socialistic,” Obama continued. “You know I don’t know when, when they decided they wanted to make a virtue out of selfishness.”
I guess Obama has the right to say that, he is afterall one of the most selfless people out there, isn’t he?
See for yourself: Exhibit 1
[The] bucolic scene in his father’s village of Kogelo near the Equator in western Kenya conceals a troubling reality that, until now, has never been spoken about. Barack Obama, the Evening Standard can reveal, after we went to the village earlier this month, has failed to honour the pledges of assistance that he made to a school named in his honour when he visited here amid great fanfare two years ago.
At that historic homecoming in August 2006 Obama was greeted as a hero with thousands lining the dirt streets of Kogelo. He visited the Senator Obama Kogelo Secondary School built on land donated by his paternal grandfather. After addressing the pupils, a third of whom are orphans, and dancing with them as they sang songs in his honour, he was shown a school with four dilapidated classrooms that lacked even basic resources such as water, sanitation and electricity.
Obiero says that although Obama did not explicitly use the word “financial” to qualify the nature of the assistance he was offering, “there was no doubt among us [teachers] that is what he meant. We interpreted his words as meaning he would help fund the school, either personally or by raising sponsors or both, in order to give our school desperately-needed modern facilities and a facelift”. She added that 10 of the school’s 144 pupils are Obama’s relatives. Obiero was not the only one to think that the US Senator from Illinois, who had recently acquired a $1.65 million house in Chicago, would cough up. Obama’s own grandmother Sarah confidently told reporters before his visit: “When he comes down here, he will change the face of the school and, believe me, our poverty in Kogelo will be a thing of the past.”
During Obama’s visit to the school, he opened their half-finished science laboratory (built with £4,900 raised by the community) and wrote in the visitor’s book: “Congratulations on the new laboratory!” Today, the lab has been mothballed because they ran out of funds to equip it and because, critically, there is no running water. “We must pay the man with the donkey to fetch us water from the river four kilometres away,” says Obiero. The situation in the school mirrors that of Kogelo village where the people live without water, electricity or access to proper healthcare and on average incomes of less than $1 a day. Yet they remain diehard fans of the man who has put their rural community on the map and have even renamed the beer, called Senator, in his honour: locals now order “an Obama”.
Obama’s “lapse” is all the more difficult to understand given that he wrote in his 1995 autobiography, Dreams from My Father, that Kogelo occupies a special place in his heart as being where he reconciled the diverse parts of himself – American and African, white mother and black father. Obama wrote how he fell to his knees, sobbing, between the graves of his father and grandfather at the family compound.
Now let’s move on to Exhibit 2:
No wonder we’ve never seen Obama’s extended family members during the campaign. They all live in circumstances which are less than stellar. His aunt lives in a Boston Housing Project:
A Boston Housing Authority director says Barack Obama’s aunt, a Kenyan woman who has lived in public housing for five years, is an “exemplary resident” and only recently did anyone know of her connection to the presidential contender.
Obama’s campaign spokesman Reid Cherlin confirmed to the Herald yesterday that Zeituni Onyango, 56, who lives on Flaherty Way in South Boston, is Obama’s aunt on his father’s side.
Onyango, a Kenyan native, is believed to be the “Aunti Zeituni” in Obama’s memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”
And can we possibly forget Barack Obama’s brother, George Hussein Obama who lives in a shack in Kenya on less than a dollar a month.
So here is Exhibit 3:
“I live like a recluse, no-one knows I exist.”
Embarrassed by his penury, he said that he does not does not mention his famous half-brother in conversation.
“If anyone says something about my surname, I say we are not related. I am ashamed,” he said.
It would be one thing if all these are nameless , faceless people, places and things that Obama knows nothing about, but quite to the contrary, they are all an integral part of his life, based on his own admissions.
So who has really made a virtue out of selfishness? Barack Obama or the people he addressed his diatribe to?
Posted by PUMA Pundit
