The Black Informant | African American Commentary, News and Community Building

According to Thomas L. Friedman of the New York Times—”Yes!”

(dispatch.com) While in Kenya last week, my wife, Ann, a teacher, visited Mukuru-Kayaba Primary School in a Nairobi slum, where the U.S. helps finance a lunch program that keeps kids coming to class. When she returned from the school visit, she remarked to me that there was a poster on the wall of the school showing Sen. Barack Obama and his wife, Michelle, during their visit to Kenya last August. The poster said: The Obamas know their HIV status. Do you know yours?

The Illinois Democrat and his wife had volunteered to be tested while in Nairobi.

[...]

Yes, Obama’s father was Kenyan, but nevertheless, that poster and those pictures got me thinking: When was the last time you saw a U.S. president or politician being held up as a role model abroad? It’s been awhile. And that got me thinking about Obama. It seems to me that the strongest case one could make for an Obama presidency is rarely articulated: It is his potential to repair the broken relationship between America and the world.

As I travel around, I have never seen a president and a vice president more disliked in more places than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Some of the animus arises from an attitude they project of not caring much about what the world thinks. Some of it is spawned by Bush-Cheney policies toward Iraq, the Kyoto protocol or the Geneva Conventions. Some of it is unfair: President Bush, for instance, has been at the forefront in combating HIV-AIDS in Africa. And some is nonsense: foreigners blaming America for their own ills. It annoys me no end to read about how China is now more popular in Asia than America. China, which censors Google and has supported a Sudanese regime engaged in genocide in Darfur. (more…)

He should have just cut to the chase and used three words “VOTE FOR OBAMA”.

This entire article is a contradiction to itself because while he acknowledges the leadership role America has played throughout the world in recent years, he still feels guilty that some of the people he has met in his travels seem not to like America. What he fails to mention in his piece is the fact that each year, THOUSANDS of the same people he believes he speaks for migrate to this country every year. And THOUSANDS also become legal citizens. If Friedman on a personal level still has not resolved the fact that in life some people just will not like you no matter what you do, my advice to him is not to make a personal issue a national issue. Obama will not win the admiration of Americas haters no more than Bush or any other past president. Deal with it!

And what’s the deal with pouting about how China is more popular in Asia than America? Seems I have heard something similar to this before……the school yard.

“Waaaah, why did you pick him as your best friend and not me?”

I think he just needs a hug and a warm blanket.