Obama disses own grannie

Barack Obama's underwhelming major address on race, and more particularly, to deflect the criticism of his pastor's racist, anti-American comments in his sermons, rather amazingly dissed his own grandmother.

After refusing to throw Rev. Jeremiah Wright under the bus, which some interpreted as a sign of character, Obama said his white grandmother, still alive in Hawaii, made racist comments that made him cringe. Obama did express his total disagreement with what Wright said (although somehow he sat in Trinity Church of Christ for 20 years without leaving) in his many sermons that are readily available on audio and video across the web.

Obama also fanned the racial fires in his speech, over-dramatizing the hatred and divisions whites and blacks in America have. You'd have sworn we had Iraq-style armed warfare in the streets, if the tensions between blacks and whites were as vicious as he characterized them. Somehow, miracle of miracles, we have avoided that fate in the U.S.

What was most disturbing, however, was calling out his grandmother, who raised him most of his life. His black father abandoned the family when Barack was 2 years old, and his mother was in and out of his life continuously. His white grandparents were the constant that raised him through to adulthood.

In a brilliant piece in today's Wall Street Journal, Shelby Steele, a black intellectual at a think tank, says there are two ways for blacks to function in America: one is the confrontational pusher like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, the other is to be the bargainer, like Obama, who works overtime to put whites at ease.

Steele quite correctly concludes that "nothing could be more dangerous to his aspirations than the revelation that he sat Sunday after Sunday in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church."

Thus Obama's Philadelphia speech today, to hide that fact.