Ambition

I'm probably the least ambitious person I know.

That's one side reason why I can't help but watch the Presidential race shenanigans with morbid curiosity.

Like I read in an article recently, everyone who runs for President of the US has to be ambitious, prideful, and self centered enough to declare to themselves, "I should be the next President of the United States."

Which makes my head spin in imagining the simply massive amount of ambition to go through all of that rigamarole.

This is way beyond normal people's desire to make a better life for ourselves and our family that will, say, drive a person to earn a college degree or slave at a low paying entry position until they can land a more lucrative job somewhere up the ladder.

The other day, Presidential candidate Barack Obama gave a speech on race. Of course the main stream media ate up every word with two spoons. Genius! He's the new Abraham Lincoln! And these were remarks of supposedly hard-nosed, skeptical, seasoned "journalists."

I've never exactly respected journalism as an occupation. No disrespect to the honest used car salesmen out there, but journalists are lower than they on my personal scale of which jobs are respected.

So to see the big name "hard news" folks on TV just gush on and on about Obama's race speech left me shaking my head and wondering even more than ever if any of them have any brains at all.

Point #1: Listening to our church's pastor is a good indication of the beliefs and deeply held feelings in mine and Lovely Wife's hearts.

When Lovely Wife and I moved to Florida in 1996, we quickly found a great church, and we still are members of this same church. Our pastor and his wife are true living examples of all the things Jesus commanded of his followers. Sometimes I watch our pastor and his whole family with such awe at their unfailing willingness and sometimes even insistence on self-sacrifice, that I am always humbled to my very roots.

I could hand you a stack of CDs containing every sermon preached in this church for the past 11+ years, and you wouldn't find one thing to be offended by. Well, I'm sure somebody trying to be offended could find a few things, but absolutely nothing anyone normal could be offended by other than the natural offense that the Gospel of Jesus Christ causes in those who hate it.

But the pastor and his whole family live as close to Christ-like lives as any people I've ever known.

Consequently, you could listen to 11+ years of sermons that we've listened to and come to understand quite a lot of what is living inside the hearts of Lovely Wife, me and my family.

In other words, if we've been attending this one church for so long, then the words of our pastor when he preaches, is something we believe in quite strongly.

Point #2: I loved my grandmothers and would show them the respect due to them from me in public, even their memories since they have both been dead many years now.

Can't really explain that one any better. I loved, and still love both grandmothers even though they both passed away years ago. I might not have agreed with every belief either or both of my grandmothers held, but that's something that's between them and me, and my Bible says for me to show them honor and respect. So I do, still.

Point #3: Barack Obama is a conceited, ruthlessly ambitious liar.

Barack Obama is certainly no Abraham Lincoln.

Abraham Lincoln would never have thrown his pastor of 20 years under a speeding bus like Barack Obama did the other day during his "race" speech. I can understand it if he doesn't agree with each and every tiny, esoteric point that his pastor has ever uttered, but I DO believe that he agrees with his pastor on all the big things that his pastor has spoken over the last 20 years, or he would have taken his family away to a different church.

I believe the same things theologically, on every mid-sized and major point that my pastor preaches, or I would leave the church. Spiritual matters are simply way too important to treat any other way.

Barack Obama has attended this church in Chicago with his family, and had his pastor baptize his daughters in that church, and he attended that church through 20 years of HUGE theological AND political hate messages preached from his church's pulpit by Jeremiah Wright.

Barack Obama CANNOT convince me that the man has a few odd ideas, like a weird family uncle, that can be just laughed off as of no consequence.

Barack Obama either agreed with the hate and craziness that his pastor preached for 20 years, and whose church the Obamas supported each year with many thousands of dollars, or he simply ignored the hateful things spewed from this man's mouth in order to have the help and backing of one of the major black churches in Chicago to advance his political career, and give him "street cred" with the black community of Chicago.

Either way, Barack Obama is a liar, or a flat-out cold political opportunist, no different than any other politician in history who made useful but often shady contacts to help themselves along.

At the very least, Barack Obama is nothing near approaching the wonderful, righteous, rarely different politician that his worshippers have tried to make him out to be.

When I hear the man speak, I see and hear nothing that hasn't been said before, and better, by innumerable politicians in the past.

Obama is nothing new at all.

Barack Obama at the very least should be ashamed of holding his grandmother, the grandmother who raised him, up for public ridicule.

I don't care that his grandmother felt scared when black men walked by her. In fact, all we have is Obama's word that she ever said such a thing, and I've seen enough to convince me that Barack Obama is every bit the cold political opportunist that Hillary Clinton is made out to be, so I would be more inclined to believe that he made that whole story up, unless others of his grandmother's family were willing to step forward and say that she did feel that way.

But even if Barack Obama's grandmother ever said such a thing, she wasn't enough of a racist for her and her husband to bring Barack into their home and raise him with love and care as their own child.

Barack Obama's grandmother and grandfather show from the grave just how much they loved him.

On the other hand, Barack Obama, by throwing his defenseless grandmother under the speeding bus with his pastor, shows that he has no class, he has no respect for his loved ones, and that he cares only that he become President of the United State by hook or by crook.

Barack Obama is no Abraham Lincoln.

Barack Obama proved with his "race" speech the other day, that he will shamelessly stomp on the very people who helped him get to such a lofty estate in the first place.

The messiah that others have seen in Barack Obama is nowhere to be seen when looking through my eyes.

To me, he's just another ambitious political hack. Nothing more.

And shame on him for being so disrespectful to his grandmother, and for not having the guts to say that yes, he believes much the same as his pastor.

Coward.