Mark Responds to a Non-Response

OK, so now I know everything I wanted to know about how Senators Clinton and McCain are preparing to spend every last American dollar and life on the fruitless and bootless war in Iraq. But Sir, that's not what I asked about. Here's my response to the Obama campaign's screed on foreign policy and repeated entreaties for donations to a campaign which answers a perfectly reasonable set of questions with a form letter, and not even a form letter on the subject at hand:

Dear Mr. Plouffe:

Thank you for your timely reply to my interrogatory. The single flaw in it is that it fails to address the subject on which the campaign was queried.

I believe one of your staffers read the intro, mentioning that the open letter had been sent to alternative campaigns, and predicated his/her form letter response on that, rather than the actual content of the email.

I'm keeping a record of my questions and the responses they generate from each campaign. It will make interesting reading in the final months prior to November, no matter which of the excellent candidates vying for the Democratic nomination winds up facing off against Senator McCain.

So far, even your bungled response is better than the non-responses from your candidate's competitors, so you're ahead of the game in that regard.

Now, if your candidate's campaign can answer two questions with reasonable responses, you will stand head and shoulders above the competition. Those questions are:

1. Why would Senator Obama attend for so many years the church of a man who, in the face of all the internally-generated pathologies which afflict poor communities, chooses to blame America and, more importantly, ask his Creator to damn an entire nation? Why would the history of race relations in America justify such a virulent response? Is hatred the right way to put paid to hatred? Especially for a man of the cloth? Excuse me, but this particular Rev. sounds more like a Grand Klaxon of the KKK than Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

2. Why are native-born Americans of color incapable of finding the workforce opportunities so readily located by my foreign-born Americans of color? Is America really to blame, or are there other factors extant in communities of color which kill dreams and mire persons in poverty? My Ethiopian friends don't damn America, and they've all got two jobs, are back in school, take excellent care of their families and are starting their own businesses. Why can a 20-something legal immigrant do what a 20-something native-born person cannot? If it has to do with America's treatment of persons of color, it would seem the immigrants, who are just as black and also have funny accents, different religions and different cultural backgrounds should suffer at least as much discrimination.

Please address these issues, and don't go looking for a the predigested wisdom of a form letter for the answers. These are issues not being addressed by any candidate now, and the Obama campaign could score a big ideological win if it would be the first.

Thanks for your time,
Mark Dorroh





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