Osama Bin Laden Gone-President Obama Political Promise Kept

Today is the one year anniversary of the SEAL Team Six mission in Pakistan that resulted in the death of al Qaeda leader and 9-11 attack mastermind Osama bin Laden.

The Republicans are trying to obfuscate and ignore the irrefutable fact that it was the African-American commander in chief who gave the order for that ultimately successful mission while the previous White House occupant failed to do so and much less was disinclined to go after him.

And yeah, may I remind y'all (snicker, snicker) during the 2008 campaign about that October 7, 2008 debate in Nashville, TN with Sen John McCain (R-AZ) in which then Sen. Obama spelled out what would happen in his administration if he got the chance to get Osama Bin Laden.

A certain Willard M. Romney called him 'naive' for doing so
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MR. BROKAW: Senator McCain, thank you very much.

Next question for Senator Obama. It comes from the F Section, and it's from Katie Hamm. Katie?

Q Should the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and not pursue al-Qaida terrorists who maintain bases there, or should we ignore their borders and pursue our enemies, like we did in Cambodia during the Vietnam War?

SEN. OBAMA: Well, Katie, it's a terrific question.

And we have a difficult situation in Pakistan. I believe that part of the reason we have a difficult situation is because we made a bad judgment going into Iraq in the first place when we hadn't finished the job of hunting down bin Laden and crushing al-Qaida. 

So what happened was we got distracted, we diverted resources, and ultimately bin Laden escaped, set up base camps in the mountains of Pakistan in the northwest provinces there.

They are now raiding our troops in Afghanistan, destabilizing the situation. They're stronger now than at any time since 2001. And that's why I think it's so important for us to reverse course because that's the central front on terrorism. They are plotting to kill Americans right now. As Secretary Gates, the Defense secretary, said, the war against terrorism began in that region, and that's where it will end.

So part of the reason I think it's so important for us to end the war in Iraq is to be able to get more troops into Afghanistan, put more pressure on the Afghan government to do what it needs to do, eliminate some of the drug trafficking that's funding terrorism.

But I do believe that we have to change our policies with Pakistan. We can't coddle, as we did, a dictator, give him billions of dollars, and then he's making peace treaties with the Taliban and militants. What I have said is we're going encourage democracy in Pakistan, expand our non-military aid to Pakistan so that they have more of a stake in working with us, but insisting that they go after these militants.

And if we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable or unwilling to take them out, then I think that we have to act, and we will take them out.

We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al-Qaida. That has to be our biggest national security priority.

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Read it and weep conservafools.  This mission was REALLY accomplished and y'all hate the fact that Osama bin Laden is resting at an undisclosed location near the bottom of the Arabian Sea.

You think this White House isn't going to point out this major success in this so called by you vanillacentric fools 'failed presidency' on the campaign trail?    You damned skippy he needs to pop his collar on this one.  It's deliciously ironic that the Black Democratic POTUS succeeded in his first term mind you where you conservafool chicken hawks miserably failed over seven years.




If this is a 'failed presidency' I want four more years of this kind of 'failure'.

As Vice President Biden recently stated, Osama is dead and the American auto industry is alive.

Is November 6 here yet?   

The 20th Anniversary Of The LA Riots

Today is the 20th Anniversary of the LA Riots that broke out for several days across the city in reaction to the acquittal of four LA police officers accused of beating Rodney King during a March 1991 videotaped traffic stop

The epicenter was the then predominately Black South Central LA neighborhood (now called South LA) where the anger and frustration at the LA po-po's policing tactics was at the highest along with anger over the acquittal.

The riots that lasted until May 4 resulted in 53 deaths, with 10 of those deaths being people shot and killed by the LAPD.and caused and estimated billion dollars in property damage.

Once order was restored, it led to major changes and reforms in the Los Angeles Police Department..

But the 'a riot is the language of the unheard' Dr. King quote from his March 1968 The Other America speech  is echoing through my mind as I think about what happened in LA twenty years ago.   

Twenty years later the structural inequalities and negativity aimed at African-Americans still hasn't been addressed, is continuing to be ignored, and we still have to deal with a 'just-us' system that negatively impacts us.   Combine that with a Republican Party so bankrupt of ideas their only play is to exacerbate racial tensions to win an election against an African-American president, increasing tension over the Trayvon Martin case and sadly, we may see another manifestation of the 'language of the unheard'  breaking out in some American city in the near future. . 

Titanic Sinking 100th Anniversary

Today is the 100th anniversary of a tragic event that still captures the world's imagination and interest 100 years after it happened.  

It was the impetus for several movies about it including the blockbuster 1997 James Cameron produced film and diving expeditions to find the sunken liner that was eventually discovered in 1985.

The sinking of the British passenger liner RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage on April 15, 1912 several hours after colliding with an iceberg caused the deaths of 1,514 people and was the worst peacetime maritime disaster in world history.   The passenger list on that maiden voyage included some of the world's wealthiest people at the time and immigrants to the United States and Canada from Great Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and other parts of the world.

One of the facts that has come out about the Titanic sinking in recent years is there was one family of African descent traveling on the ill-fated liner, the Laroches

25 year old Haitian native Joseph Laroche, his pregnant French wife Juliette, and daughters Simonne and Louise, were onboard and in the process of moving from their former home in Paris to Haiti to escape the racial discrimination he'd encountered in France while trying to find a job as an engineer.  Laroche's uncle Cincinnatus Leconte was president of Haiti at the time and arranged a job for him as a math teacher.

Laroche's mother had booked first class passage on the liner LaFrance for them but after the Laroche's heard about the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique line's policy of children not being allowed to dine with their parents, they exchanged the tickets for second class passage aboard the Titanic.  

Juliette, Simonne and Louise managed to be placed on a lifeboat by Joseph and were picked up later by the RMS Carpathia  Joseph did not survive and his body was never recovered   Juliette Laroche returned to France with her daughters and later gave birth to a son.   Louise died in 1998 as one of the last eight survivors of the disaster. 
 

The disaster involving the 'unsinkable' ship which was the largest built in the world at the time led to improvements in maritime safety.   The Titanic remains on the seabed of the North Atlantic gradually disintegrating in 12,415 feet (3794 m) of water. 

Since the discovery of the wreck site, thousands of artifacts from arguably the most famous ship in the world have been recovered, have been displayed in museums around the world and the ship still holds the world's collective attention a century later.

The Oreo Cookie's 100th Anniversary

Back on March 6 the Oreo cookie celebrated its 100th anniversary.   The cookie was first produced by Nabisco in 1912 in its New York City factory as a response to the Hydrox cookie.   IIt has become the most popular cookie sold in the United States over the last century and into the 21st century.

The Oreo cookie has also become an iconic slice of our childhoods and our pop culture.

The Oreo has become part of African-American culture as a derogatory word you call a black person who to their fellow African-Americans has acquiesced sold out to whiteness and white supremacy and backstabbed the Black community for their own personal gain.

In other words, when you call someone an 'Oreo' in the black community you are asserting, like the cookie, they are black on the outside and white on the inside and it's on like Donkey Kong when you do so.

That's a post for another time, but as someone who has happily demolished more than her fair share of Oreo cookies during my lifetime, I definitely needed to take some time to recognize the centennial birthday of one of my favorite cookies.

Houston Astros Inaugural Game Anniversary

This is a bittersweet season for Houston Astros fans since this is the last one in the National League no thanks to Bud Selig before we get forcibly moved to the American League, but fifty years ago today the Houston Colt 45's played their inaugural National League game in town at Colt Stadium against the Chicago Cubs.  

It was a successful debut as the Colt 45's routed the Cubs 11-2.

The Colt 45's eventually finished that maiden season 64-98 and in eighth place in the National League ahead of the Cubs and the New York Mets, but it would be three more years before the Astrodome would open, the nickname of the team changed to the Astros and 1972 before the team would experience its first pennant race.   

But it was the first season of 50 years of major league baseball in H-town, and it started on a winning note today.

MLK Jr Assassination Anniversary 2012

Once again the calendar flips to April 4 and we have to mark the sad occasion of the now 44th anniversary of the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.in Memphis,TN.

2012 America, just like it was in 1968 is a cauldron of raging racial tensions.  We're once again fighting a foreign war that increasing numbers of people in the US want us to bring our troops home from.   African Americans are asking themselves in the wake of another senseless shooting if this country will ever get over its all too easy propensity to hate us, and a contentious course changing presidential election that promises to be just as close and potentially ugly because the Democratic president occupying the White House is African American.

The best way to close this post is to leave you with the words of the Good Doctor, his April 3, 1968 'I've Been to the Mountaintop' speech.




 
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