More Obama Fairy Tales

Obama and Sharpton are trying to boost Obama’s blackness quotient. Evidently they feel his mac-daddy, hip-hop strut isn’t quite enough, so they paraded Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Shaun Donovan, out to shore things up among the black folks. In an attempt to convince the boys/girls in the hood that Obama is down with the struggle, Donovan told those gathered at Sharpton‘s National Action Network (NAN) that all of Obama’s hard work as president has been because he identifies with the black folks.

Donovan told the group that Obama knew what it was like to walk the halls of public housing because he had worked in public housing. He said: “[Obama] knows what it’s like to walk the streets of our cities’ poorest neighborhoods because he’s lived there.” And then he spun the grandest lie of the day when he said Obama had had to take a subway or a bus just to find a fresh piece of fruit in a grocery store.

But he didn’t stop there: Obama had to be concerned whether he could afford college or decent healthcare. And he worried about being judged fairly. According to Donovan’s White House-approved speech, Obama knew what it was like to not be judged on one’s merits or talent, but rather to be judged by where he came from, his name, and his appearance. Yupper, Donovan got it all in–Barry was down with the bro’s in the hood. The only problem is that everything he said after hello was a lie.

Obama did not grow up in poverty, and he certainly didn’t grow up in an impoverished neighborhood, and he doggone sure never had to worry about health insurance. And the only reason he would have been roaming the halls of public housing would have been to get the cocaine and marijuana he craved. It’s a fact that even if he lived in a mud hut in the jungle there would have been no need to take a bus to find a fresh fruit. Donovan’s tales of “he shared your pain” were damnable lies designed to underscore Michelle Obama‘s claims that the inner cities are vast “food deserts” where 23.5 million Americans (read blacks) including 6.5 million children (read black children) live. She claimed that these are the areas where people live without supermarkets and end up buying their groceries at gas stations and convenience stores.

The problems with her claims and the White House-endorsed Donovan speech are manifold. Surprisingly, none other than the New York Times debunked Michelle’s “food desert” claims, and the NY Times is hardly a bastion of conservative truth. For the Times to debunk her statements as false, they had to have been utterly baseless prevarications wholly unsupportable by the facts.

The New York Times wrote it this way: “It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables. But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents. Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “’you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said. Not only are the First Lady’s assumptions about “food deserts” wrong, but the idea that increasing the amounts of “healthy” foods in a neighborhood will result in slimmer waistlines is just absurd. “It is always easy to advocate for more grocery stores,” says Kelly D. Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. “But if you are looking for what you hope will change obesity, healthy food access is probably just wishful thinking.” (NY Time Debunks Michelle Obama‘s Food Deserts; theblaze.com; 4/19/12; Meredith Jessup)

I could write a novella on why the Obama’s are pushing the “there are no grocery stores in the ghetto” and “fat and black in the hood.” But let me quickly point out a couple things. The first is if they claim a shortage of grocery stores in the hoods, they can use money to open grocery stores as backdoor payola for those who hustled votes for them (think Sharpton and Jackson). The other reason is the worthless ignorance of classroom theorization.


If either Obama or his wife had actually spent time in the inner city they’d know that the last thing there is a shortage of are grocery stores and restaurants. Of course, they could know perfectly well they are lying and not care, but I digress. As I’ve written before, my friends and I go to the inner city for various ethnic foods that we either cannot get in our neighborhoods and/or because the restaurants in the inner city make the ethnic dishes better. But Mr. and Mrs. Harvard Obama, like most socialists, sat in classrooms, and, based on the those discussions, concluded fat people were offensive to them, especially fat black people. Victims and perpetrators were their two missing elements, but they easily solved that by making blacks the victims and fast foods the perpetrator.

And of course, in order to push that agenda, they’ve got to up the ante of hardship. I’m reasonably certain that there are fewer grocery stores and restaurants within walking distance in the suburbs than in the inner city. But Obama needs blacks to turn out in historic numbers if he is to get reelected. So we see him pandering to them–which is just one more example of the bigotry and prejudice that motivates these two people.