Politics is the art of making people believe that they are in power when in fact, they have none. It is a measure of how dire is the hour that they’ve passed the keys to the kingdom to a Black man. As in many American cities, Black Mayors were let in when the treasuries were almost barren, and tax bases were almost at rock-bottom. With the nation’s manufacturing base also a thing of history, amidst the socioeconomic wreckage of globalization, with foreign affairs in shambles, the rulers reach for a pretty, brown face to front for the Empire. ‘Real change that you could believe in’ would be an end to Empire, and an end to wars for corporate greed, not just a change of the shade of the political managers. That change, I’m afraid, is still to come. - Mumia Abu Jamal

I suppose we’ve all heard this news about Chip Saltsman’s song called “Barack the Magic Negro” (first played, of course, on the Rush Limbaugh radio show)?

Before you jump to conclusions:  The song is not aimed at Obama, but instead at this Los Angeles Times column by David Ehrenstein, although the song is brainless and utterly unfunny anyway.  The column, in a nutshell, warns that the election of Barack Obama might serve to alleviate “white guilt” without white people having to lift a finger to alleviate the actual ongoing suffering of people of color.

Now the good part: The media coverage, without exception as far as I am aware, pits the champion idiot Saltsman in one corner against (usually black) people who almost equally idiotically argue that the song itself is bigoted. Nowhere mentioned are people who actually agree with the underlying message in Ehrenstein’s column, nor has Saltsman been made to defend his childish ‘criticism’ of this most important of issues facing the USA. Ever.

Of course, the media coverage never includes any of the chorus of activists who have been saying for YEARS now that indeed to elect Barack Obama as POTUS might serve to overshadow the prison industry, the war on drugs, the disproportionate toll of the “Global war on terror” on people of color, and the abysmal treatment of the continent of Africa in general and the traditions of African culture in the United States in particular.

There is no mention in this dialog of the thousands of black or brown people who have expressed and continue to express skepticism regarding Barack Obama and didn’t need some juvenile song by some irrelevant wannabe radio personality to know it was time to speak their mind.

None of the three balloted Presidential candidates who echoed some form of Ehrenstein’s warning (Cynthia McKinney, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul) have come up in any corporate media coverage of this controversy.

Instead, it’s just another chance to obfuscate racism by pretending the argument is between (ostensibly) good-natured but ignorant white people and wholly misinformed black masses.