These posts regarding the racist views shared by Obama himself and his church are legitimate concerns and should be taken seriously by anyone considering to continue supporting this man and what he stands for in America.

Yep Pam and Bill, Obama’s surrounded by racists like;

Brigadier General Larry Gillespie. Gillespie has led a distinguished 33-year career with the U.S. Army. He served as the Assistant Deputy Commanding General, (ARNG) Army Material Command. He is a recognized authority in many of the technical challenges and solutions associated with Homeland Security and National Defense. As a civilian, General Gillespie has held a series of increasingly important positions with the Air Transport Association, Hughes Aircraft Company, Raytheon Systems Company, NCI, Hampton University, and Eagle Force Association.

Major General Scott Gration (USAF-Ret). General Gration is a retired two-star general and was the Director of Strategy, Policy, and Assessments of the United States European Command in Germany. General Gration was raised in Africa and entered the Air Force in 1974 through the Air Force ROTC program at Rutgers University. He served as a White House Fellow, operations group commander and two-time wing commander. The general served as Director of Regional Affairs in the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force for International Affairs. General Gration served as the Commander of Task Force West during Operation Iraqi F reedom. His aerial combat experience includes almost a thousand hours of combat time with 274 combat missions over Iraq.

Admiral Don Guter. Admiral Guter served in the U.S. Navy for 32 years, concluding his career as the Navy’s Judge Advocate General from 2000 to 2002. Admiral Guter currently serves as the Dean of Duquesne University Law School in Pittsburgh, PA. He also is executive director of the Navy Marine Coast Guard Residence Foundation.

Brigadier General David “Dave” McGinnis. General McGinnis was the Chief of Staff of the National Guard Association of the U.S. McGinnis served as director of strategic plans and analysis for the Honorable Deborah R. Lee, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. He served two tours in Vietnam before leaving the active Army in 1972 and joining the New York National Guard that same year. In 1990, he became branch chief of the force management division at National Guard Bureau (NGB) in Washington. Subsequent assignments included Deputy Chief from 1991-92 and Director from 1992-1993.

General Merrill “Tony” McPeak. General McPeak is a retired four star general and served as Chief of Staff of the United States Air Force during Operation Desert Storm. McPeak entered the Air Force in 1957 and was appointed Chief of Staff in 1990, holding that office until his retirement in1994. As a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Gulf War, McPeak served as a top wartime advisor to the President, the Secretary of Defense, and National Security Council. General McPeak is the recipient of the Silver Star, Distinguished Service Medal and Distinguished Flying Cross. He was a fighter pilot and flew over 300 combat missions in Vietnam.

Admiral John B. Nathman. During his thirty-seven year career with the U.S. Navy, Admiral Nathman held a variety of positions in naval air and sea-based operations, finishing his service as Commander, U.S. Fleet Forces Command. After graduating from the U.S. Naval Academy, Admiral Nathman became a naval aviator, ultimately serving as an instructor at the Navy Fighter Weapons School. In 1971, Admiral Nathman earned a Master of Science degree in Aerospace Systems Engineering from the University of West Florida. He attained Flag rank in 1994 and served in a number of command positions, including with the Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, Naval Air Forces, and U.S. Fleet Forces. Admiral Nathman also served as the Vice Chief of Naval Operations.

Major General Hugh Robinson. A West Point graduate, Robinson was promoted to brigadier general and became the Corps of Engineers’first African American general officer. He served as deputy director of Civil Works, and in 1980 assumed command of the Southwestern Division, a position he held until his retirement in 1983 as a major general. In 1965, he was appointed as military aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Robinson was the first African American to serve in that position and held the appointment throughout the remainder of Johnson’s presidency.

Brigadier General James Smith. Smith retired from the U.S. Air Force as a brigadier general and served as Commander, Joint Warfighting Center, U.S. Joint Forces Command, Joint Training Analysis and Simulation Center. He was responsible for managing the joint force exercise and training development program and the modeling, simulation and deploying of solutions that demonstrated high probability of operational success. His previous assignments included Commander, 18th Wing; Vice Director for Operations, Headquarters North American Aerospace Defense Command; Commander, 325th Operations Group; and CSAF Chair, National War College.

Admiral Robert “Willie” Williamson (USN-Ret Rear Admiral). Retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Williamson served as military Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition and Director, Office of Program Appraisal. He was the senior military advisor on the Secretary of the Navy staff. Williamson commanded the aircraft carrier, USS Nimitz, during Desert Storm, and his last operational assignment was Commander, Carrier Group Two, (John F. Kennedy Battle Group), Deploying to the Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas in support of allied operations in Bosnia.

Major General Ralph Wooten. Wooten is a former Commanding General of the Army’s Chemical Arsenal. His civilian corporate career includes Management of large material management and control of multi-million Department of Defense programs. He served 31 years in the U.S. Army and retired as a Commanding General. During his military career he crafted strategic vision, formulated operations plans, developed investment strategies, controlled facilities and equipment, executed multi-million dollar budgets, and provided leadership, direction and advocacy to human resources numbered in the thousands, and corporate management to major military installations. He is currently the Executive Vice President of Management Systems, Inc.

#31 what comments by Obama have you claiming him to be racist? Could you please post Obama’s racists comments for me?

Obama is too intelligent to verbally display his racism. His so-called Uncle holds these extreme racist views and am certain they have rubbed off on him to some extent. Any psychologist would explain that your friends envelop who you are and that is why you retain these friends in church and in everyday life. The people you surround yourself with are basically making you the person you are today.

That says volumes about Obama.

K I thought the same thing about being judged by the company you keep on 9-11 when I found out that 1st President Bush was having breakfast with Bin-Laden’s father. Then when the only non-military planes allowed in the air were being used to round up the Bin-Laden family left in the US and fly them out for “safety” reasons.

Yes sir, your judged by the company you keep. Thanks for reminding me.

I was trying to find more news on this story, in the paper, today. Can anybody tell me what page it is on?

Bubba Union - I respect your admiration, support and defense of Obama’s candidacy. I respectfully disagree with some of the items you have posted. I believe the following about this week’s controversies with Obama and Ferraro.

1) I think most American’s would agree with you that Fallwell and Robertson’s statements were crazy. I also think there are a lot of so called “men of God” who say wacky things that they know are not true. Wright is a minister like Fallwell and Robertson. Obama’s problem is that he has been under the influence of Wright for over 20 years. Wright has played an integral part of his life. Clinton and McCain do not have the same relationship with Fallwell and Robertson or any other controversial ministers that I know of. I know they have been endorsed by controversial ministers, but they are not a long standing member of those churches. I do not have a problem with Obama being endorsed by Wright or Farrakhan - that is their right to do so. However, it is my right to examine the relationships he has with these ministers and make a judgment on who I think Obama is as a man.

2) You have to admit that if it were Clinton or McCain who had a spiritual mentor say the things that Wright has said, they would be packing up their campaign offices and thanking their supporters. The media would have fried them by now.

3) The media manipulates public opinion on a daily basis with their selection of stories. This Wright stuff is not new. Everyone has known about it for over a year now. It’s only getting some mainstream media attention because of the Ferraro debacle.

4) One of Obama’s problems is that he has marketed himself as a different kind of politician who can bring change to this country. However, the public now has to face the reality that Obama is just like any other politician. He will say and do whatever it takes to be elected. We all know politician are like that, but I think some people are disappointed because they really thought Obama was different.

5) Another problem for Obama is that he is asking the American public to take a huge leap of faith to believe that he did not know what kinds of things Wright would say from the pulpit. even though he has been a member of the church for over 20 years. I think it’s safe to say that’s a leap of faith a lot of American’s are not prepared to make. Obama is an intelligent man - he knew what kind of man Wright was during that time. Obama’s problem is that he didn’t know that he would run for President of the U.S.

6) Obama is also asking the American public to believe that he has evolved as a man after writing his first memoir, “Dreams From My Father” in which he makes many remarks about race that some people in the public would have problems with. Obama then churns out another memoir in 2006, “The Audacity of Hope” in which he waters down and removes all lot of the inflammatory language. Personally, I think he wrote the second book because he knew he was going to run for President and he wanted to calm people down who would be upset with what he wrote in the first book..

7) There are people in this country who are going to vote for Obama because he considers himself to be African-American. There are also people in this country who are not going to vote for him for the same reason. There are people who will vote for Clinton because she is a woman. There are also people who will not vote for her because she is a Clinton and she’s a woman.

Obama has a right to go to Trinity and listen to the retired Wright and his new minister. Wright has a right to say what he said. But American’s also have a right to cast judgment on Obama and the influences he has had in his life.

This controversy is not going to change the votes of the hardcore supporters of any of the candidates. It’s the people who are undecided who are going to be impacted by what has been reported. Obama will win the democratic nomination, but I do not think he will win the presidency .

As a independent black male voter, I have not decided who to vote for in the fall. However, I do know it will not be for Obama.

I told my wife back in December that I had a problem with Obama staying at a church whose magazine gave an award to Farrakhan, a man who I detest with every bone in my body. I expressed surprise that an intelligent man like Obama would stay at Trinity when he could to so many other churches in the Chicago area. This was before I knew of his mentor’s comments in January.

I have been to churches where ministers have said or done crazy things that I did not believe in. I walked out of those churches and never went back. People have a right to attend those types of church services, but I do not believe those people should be elected to lead the greatest country on this Earth.

Obama projects himself to be a nice guy and he may be. I just don’t trust him and those closest to him.

http://www.unfilteredopinion.com

Some of you might like to read this article from 2007. I always suggest to people that they should get as much information about issues and candidates as possible before they cast a vote. I read and listen to the liberal, conservative, moderate, and independent media. I know the truth is always somewhere in the middle. Read the article and then form your own opinion.

http://www.unfilteredopinion.com

Jan 30, 2007 12:00 AM (411 days ago) by Bill Sammon, The Examiner

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Sen. Barack Obama, the only major black candidate in the 2008 presidential race, has spent much of his life anguishing over his mixed-race heritage and self-described “racial obsessions.”

Descended from a white American mother and black Kenyan father, the Illinois Democrat once wrote: “He was black as pitch, my mother white as milk.”

In his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” Obama observed that when people discover his mixed-race heritage, they make assumptions about “the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds.”

Indeed, Obama acknowledges feeling tormented for much of his life by “the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong somehow, that unless I dodged and hid and pretended to be something I wasn’t, I would forever remain an outsider, with the rest of the world, black and white, always standing in judgment.”Obama’s views on race are certain to be an issue in the upcoming presidential campaign, according to Princeton University professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell, who specializes in African-American politics.

“There’s no question that race and all the permutations that it’s going to take for Obama are going to be central issues,” she predicted.

Although Obama was raised by his mother, he identified more closely with the race of his father, who left the family when Obama was 2.

“I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” he wrote.

Yet, even through high school, he continued to vacillate between the twin strands of his racial identity.

“I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds,” he wrote in “Dreams.” “One of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved — such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

Although Obama spent various portions of his youth living with his white maternal grandfather and Indonesian stepfather, he vowed that he would “never emulate white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own. It was into my father’s image, the black man, son of Africa, that I’d packed all the attributes I sought in myself, the attributes of Martin and Malcolm, DuBois and Mandela.”

Obama wrote that in high school, he and a black friend would sometimes speak disparagingly “about white folks this or white folks that, and I would suddenly remember my mother’s smile, and the words that I spoke would seem awkward and false.”

As a result, he concluded that “certain whites could be excluded from the general category of our distrust.”

Donna Brazile, who managed former Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, said Obama’s feelings of distrust toward most whites and doubts about himself are fairly typical for black Americans.

“He was a young man trying to discover, trying to accept, trying to come to grips with his background,” she explained. “In the process, he had to really make some statements that are hurtful, maybe. But I think they’re more insightful than anything.”

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other “half-breeds” who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

Such candid racial revelations abound in “Dreams,” which was first published in 1995, when Obama was 34 and not yet in politics. By the time he ran for his Senate seat in 2004, he observed of that first memoir: “Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.”

Thus, in his second memoir, “The Audacity of Hope,” which was published last year, Obama adopted a more conciliatory, even upbeat tone when discussing race. Noting his multiracial family, he wrote in the new book: “I’ve never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe.”

This appears to contradict certain passages in his first memoir, including a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

“There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names.”

He added: “To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites.

“To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred,” he wrote.

After his sophomore year, Obama transferred to Columbia University. Later, looking back on his years in New York City, he recalled: “I had grown accustomed, everywhere, to suspicions between the races.”

His pessimism about race relations seemed to pervade his worldview.

“The emotion between the races could never be pure,” he laments in “Dreams.” “Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.”

After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss.

“There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”

Harris-Lacewell said such expressions of distrust toward whites will not hurt Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries, which are dominated by liberal voters.

“To win the Democratic nomination, he’s got to get a part of the progressive, anti-war, white folks,” she said. “And those white folks tend to be suspicious of any black person who wouldn’t be suspicious of white people.”

Such liberals would have little basis for suspicion after reading some of Obama’s conclusions about the white race, which he once described as “that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”

“That hate hadn’t gone away,” he wrote, blaming “white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

Obama’s racial suspicions were not always limited to whites. For example, after making his first visit to Kenya, he wrote of being disappointed to learn that his paternal grandfather had been a servant to rich whites.

He wrote in “Dreams” that the revelation caused “ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House nigger.”

Such blunt and provocative observations about race are largely absent from Obama’s second memoir.

“I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime,” he wrote in “Audacity.” “I insist that things have gotten better.”

An adolescent confrontation

Barack Obama recalls punching out the “first boy” who “called me a coon” in seventh grade.

“I gave him a bloody nose,” Obama wrote in his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father.”

“Why’dya do that?” the boy said through “tears of surprise,” according to Obama.

It was not the first time young Obama would be subjected to racial slurs. He recalled an assistant basketball coach in high school referring to a group of black men as “niggers.”

“I told him — with a fury that surprised even me — to shut up,” Obama wrote.

“There are black people, and there are niggers,” the coach explained, according to Obama. “Those guys were niggers.”

Obama answered with contempt.

“’There are white folks and then there are ignorant motherf—ers like you,’ I had finally told the coach before walking off the court,” he wrote.

Thank you for your views unfiltered, I throughly enjoyed reading many of Obama’s quotes and your intelligent narration of your views. Words like yours are the kind of readings I enjoy.

That said, I have not committed to either candidate. As I stated in an earlier post I voted early for John Edwards. My defense of Sen. Obama is more about being fair. Many of the posters on this blog only see one side. I’ve read enough about Obama to believe that he is a good man. So is Sen. Clinton and I truley believe that while I disdain Sen McCain’s voting record on trade, employee free choice act, S Chip and various other issues he is another very decent and honorable man. I’ve defended him against the attacks of the McCain swiftboaters.

I believe that we can all agree to disagree without spewing hate and personal attacks. Few men or women live their lives without instances of bad judgement. Sen Obama’s decisions to stick with a church that preached hatred is wrong. Sen. Clinton’s vote to go to war was wrong. Sen. McCain’s positions on the afore mentioned issues is to me wrong.

No candidate for any office is going to be completely free of faults. They are human. To point out one man’s flaws and ignore the others in the race to me is again wrong. Just my thoughts.

Again thank you for the political discussion.

Bubba Union,

I don’t think that a church exists that have not preached what someone would consider hatred, this is how the unknowing see it. It is not hatred but it certainly offends the guilty.

If your church does not offend anyone then it is a good chance that it is not preaching the true gospel of Christ. The true church who preach the gospel offends the world.

Nothing in Rev. White’s statements show or should cause any remotely sane or intelligent person to believe he is a racist. America is again showing its ignorance to the world.

Most of the people posting do not want to see progress in the area of race. The one thing for certain is that no true progress will ever be made if people, Black or White who really want to overcome race and racist attitudes cannot acknowledge or express their feelings concerning race issues without all the corrupt motivations we are seeing here.

Don’t trust Obama, some of you are saying? Why, because his pastor recognize what is true?

But, you trusted Bush and President Clinton? It sometimes appear that this country is just hopeless. Go ahead and place either McCain or Hillary in office. McCain’s Vice President will become our President and this country will be finished off.

And if Hillary is President, she and her husband will finish off this country. The Clinton/Bush regime is one of the same, you better believe it.

The one thing for certain that I do know is that we as a country are being tested, it is the last test we will be given to prove the condition of our hearts here in the U.S. before true devastation hits us. I just suggest that each and everyone judge themselves honestly and the true motivations of their heart because your hearts are being judged.

We want to see a better and great America that is truly respected and not feared. In fact, there is not much to fear anymore because of our weak army. You better place as a leader of this country someone the world can respect. I don’t think that there is a African American that exist that do not want to see America as a great country that they can be proud of and truly part of. It is in the best interest of this country to do everything in its power to overcome the racist past and present history in this country.