An article by Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and accomplished writer and economist, sheds some light on the integrity and character of Barack Obama. In his column Sowell addresses the speech given by then Senator Obama to a mostly black audience at Hampton University on June 5, 2007.
Speaking in condescendingly affected black accents not natural to him
Senator Obama pointed out that after 9/11 and after Hurricane Andrew the government waived the Stafford Act in New York and Florida. The act requires that communities contribute 10% of disaster relief received from the federal government. But, Obama told this audience of black ministers, the government did not waive it after Katrina hit New Orleans. The reason, he suggested, is because the government, i.e. the Bush administration, just didn't care about the black people of New Orleans.
Perhaps Mr. Obama really believed this, but it's false, and it's hard to give him the benefit of the doubt on it because, as Sowell points out, he must have known it was false.
Two weeks earlier, on May 24, 2007, the U.S. Senate voted 80-14 to waive the requirement of the Stafford Act for New Orleans and more federal money was subsequently pumped into New Orleans than was spent in New York and Florida combined.
Moreover, Senator Obama must have known of this vote even as he was denying it to his audience because, according to Sowell who cited the Senate record, Obama himself took part in it.
But here's the kicker. Not only was Mr. Obama indulging in racial demagoguery, not only was he falsely claiming that the government wouldn't do something for blacks that it, in fact, did do two weeks earlier, but when the bill came up for that vote two weeks before he gave that speech in Hampton, Barack Obama was one of the 14 who voted against waiving the ten percent requirement for New Orleans.
Keep this in mind as you watch recently discovered video of his speech. The relevant portion begins at about 2:42:
As we saw again in the wake of the Benghazi attack, after which the administration insisted for two weeks that the assault on the embassy was conducted by a motley mob outraged by an offensive video when in fact they knew almost from the first day that it was a pre-planned terrorist assault, truth is just not held in very high esteem by this president.
Maybe there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all this. Maybe Sowell somehow got his facts confused. But if not, the hubris and mendacity Mr. Obama displayed in this speech is breathtaking.