James T. Harris: Long on Rhetoric Short on Facts, Calls Obama a Poverty Pimp

It shouldn’t surprise me that Charlie Sykes’s new creation, James T. Harris would resort to the typical right-winged derisions when attacking an adversary. In his latest example of disdain, his blog post called “A Storm of Stupidity,” James attacks Barack Obama’s speech in which Obama references “Quite Riot” in describing the plight of African Americans who are living in poverty.

Harris starts his ridiculous oratory with this;

On Tuesday, Barack Obama said that the Bush administration is at fault for doing nothing to defuse a quiet riot brewing among blacks.

The problem? Black people displaced by Hurricane Katrina. He went so far as to compare the resentment and frustration of the federal government's response to Katrina, to the Rodney King riots of 1992.

(Remember those gems of black frustration? Los Angeles erupted after a jury acquitted four police officers of assault charges in the 1991 beat down of Rodney King. Several days of rioting ensued where black people really proved a point by burning down their own damn neighborhoods.)

Wow.

Of course Harris does what many right-winged scoffers do; he takes Obama’s speech out of context. Obama is alluding to the fact that under the Bush Administration, poverty among African Americans has increased. Reversing the trend of the 1990’s. This is what Obama stated in his speech;

Much of what we saw on our television screens 15 years ago was Los Angeles expressing a lingering, ongoing, pervasive legacy -- a tragic legacy out of the tragic history this country has never fully come to terms with. This is not to excuse the violence of bashing in a man's head or destroying someone's store and their life's work. That kind of violence is inexcusable and self-defeating. It does, however, describe the reality of many communities around this country.

[…]

You tell yourself, my school will always crumble. There will never be a good job waiting for me to excel at. There will never be a place that I can be proud of and I can afford to call my home. That despair quietly simmers and makes it impossible to build strong communities and neighborhoods. And then one afternoon a jury says, "Not guilty" -- or a hurricane hits -- and that despair is revealed for the world to see.

And that reality is on going; the reality of poverty and the reality of institutional racisms that continues to concern African Americans today. Obama points out that when all hope has seemingly vanished and the end result of years of despair explodes on our evening news.

James response to Obama’s last sentence as “just plain stupid.”

James Continues with his disdain rhetoric;

This begs a few questions for the new "Chocolate Jesus."

Chocolate Jesus, was poverty and hopelessness in the black community when Mr. Clinton was President? How about hopelessness and despair under President Jimmy Carter?

Yes they were.

So why, Chocolate Jesus, are poverty, hopelessness and despair palatable under democrats but an abomination under Republican administrations?

And so my friends, this is why we need to elect the "Chocolate Jesus" to the highest office in the land, right? Because Barack Obama has the answer to black people's poverty and despair.

No, he doesn’t.

It looks like Barack Obama is nothing more than a high profile poverty pimp. His attack on President Bush got ovation after ovation from the nearly 8,000 black clergy gathered in Hampton University's Convocation Center.

Well James I don’t think you will find anyone disagreeing with you that hopelessness, despair and poverty have also occurred under Presidents’ Carter and Clinton. It would be impractical to argue that since it has been occurring since the time of slavery. However, under Clinton poverty was reduced and under George Bush it has augmented.

Here are some facts to back that up;

Under Clinton the Poverty Rate among African Americans fell to 21.2% from 32.9% the day he took office in 1992.

African-American unemployment has increased by 13 percent since Bush took office. (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

Under President Bush the typical African-American family has seen its inflation-adjusted income decline by $3,251. The income gap has also widened. The amount African-Americans earn for each dollar earned by whites fell from 69 cents in 2000 to 65 cents in 2004. [Census Bureau]

The cost of family health insurance has skyrocketed 57 percent since President Bush took office. The typical American family must now pay $9,950 per year for health insurance compared with $6,348 in 2000. [Kaiser Family Foundation]

African-Americans still get far fewer operations, tests, medications and other life-saving treatments than white Americans, according to three studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August 2005. The studies found that African-American patients are less likely than whites to receive life-saving treatments after a heart attack, less likely to get new knees and hips, and less likely to have dangerously high blood-sugar levels controlled. One study found that black women were the most likely to die while being treated after a heart attack. [New England Journal of Medicine, 8/05]