Remember that? If you don’t, don’t be alarmed, because most Americans, and more disturbingly, most in the mainstream media seem to have forgotten as well. Into that mess, Barack Obama stepped up to lead us through, which he has, in a big way, even if people want to ignore, lie or distort what he has stood for and been able to accomplish. It angers, though doesn’t surprise, me that such facts no longer matter in our political discourse.President Barack Obama has taken all of the combat U.S. troops out of Iraq and has officially turned over power — and responsibility — to the Iraqis, a war that was controversial from the outset, a war that cost us the lives of more than 4,400 U.S. troops, devastating injuries to 36,000 others, and mental health issues that have lead to record-high suicides in the military. That doesn’t include the more than 100,000 civilian Iraqis who were also killed, the 10,000 Iraqi soldiers, the roughly $1 trillion in costs — and that’s only so far, given that caring for the troops’ physical and mental injuries over the next five or so decades will likely add another $2 trillion.

President Obama is ending a war — A WAR — like he said he would, on time and in an orderly fashion. “We will be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in,” he said a thousand times while campaigning to become president.

And that’s what he’s done, with firm plans to pull the remaining 49,700 troops out of the country within a year. Yet talk is dominated about why he didn’t give President George W. Bush and his administration — which either misled us into war with incessant talk about weapons of mass destruction and potential nuclear attacks or simply made an ugly, horrible mistake based on faulty intelligence — more credit for a “surge” that was supposed to lead to a functioning government in Iraq, something that has not yet occurred.

President Obama not only ended this war but from the outset of his administration treated our other war in Afghanistan with the seriousness it deserves, a level of seriousness it had not received in many years. Commanders on the ground in Afghanistan were begging, pleading, for more troops and resources during the final few years of the Bush administration. They didn’t get them until President Obama took office when he tripled the size of the force, something else he promised to do. Yet, though he increased the number of troops in Afghanistan twice — bucking his political base because he believed it was necessary — he was accused of dithering because he simply didn’t give the commanders on the ground everything they wanted. He was criticized harshly for taking time — time well spent according to Gen. David Petraeus — to go through the possibilities of what would occur in that country if we added more troops or if we didn’t. He was doing the kind of analysis we obviously didn’t do before going into Iraq, a failure that needlessly led to the loss of many more lives, a failure that put inexperienced political supporters in charge of rebuilding Iraq, including a 24-year-old who had no finance background in charge of getting the Iraqi stock market up and running again.

President Obama made a serious commitment to Afghanistan because it was the place from which the Sept. 11 attacks were planned and launched, and it is the place that can become that kind of terrorist launching ground again if we aren’t careful. That’s also why he has tracked down and killed more top Taliban and terrorists leaders in his 19 months in office than President Bush did during his entire two terms. And he did it, in large part, with the use of unmanded drones flying into Pakistani airspace — just like during the campaign he said he would, even though he was called naive for thinking such a thing, or for saying it out loud.

President Obama has gotten Russia to agree to a historic nuclear-arms reduction treaty (the Senate still has to ratify it), something that hasn’t occurred since the Reagen era. That, too, was downplayed, even though it is probably one of the most important things he has done to make this country safe. Like Reagan, Obama knows that the scariest threat we face is the possibility of nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists.

And speaking of keeping this country safe. President Obama has beefed up security on the U.S.-Mexico border in ways the Bush administration never did and has greatly increased the deportation of criminal “illegal immigrants.”

He has also prevented another 9/11 from happening, something else you wouldn’t know considering the way he has been covered for the past year of his first term. Remember when President Bush was leaving office? And the talk was about, “Even though I disagreed with many things he did, the one thing he did was keep us safe.” It doesn’t matter that 9/11 actually happened on Bush’s watch. (For the record, I believe, as always, the only blame for 9/11 lies with the terrorists, not Bush.) But no such attack has occurred on Obama’s watch — not even close — yet the conversation is no longer, “Even though I disagree with his polices, he has kept this country safe,” it has turned into a re-writing of history and a purposeful, co-ordinated effort to claim that every bumbling, stumbling terrorist attempt, even when it fails, is somehow evidence that Obama has not kept us safe, even though such bumbling, stumbling terrorist attempts have been happening during every presidency since at least Jimmy Carter — including under Saint Reagan and both presidents named Bush.

President Obama has done this while enacting polices that have kept us out of another Great Depression. According to an economist who advised Sen. John McCain and a former Federal Reserve official, the unemployment rate would be closer to 16.5 percent now and several million more people would be out of work if not for the work of the Obama administration, with an initial assist from the Bush administration. He’s done all of that while also finally — finally — getting the country to face up to the health care time bomb by enacting a policy that could, according to the non-partisan Congressional scorekeeper the Congressional Budget Office, provide health coverage to an additional 30 to 33 million Americans while cutting our deficit by more than $1 trillion over the next 20 years.

Under his leadership, the economy has grown for four consecutive quarters and the private sector has added jobs every month this year, yet the talk is that the recovery hasn’t moved fast enough. Never mind that it is impossible to fully recover from the greatest recession since the Depression overnight. 

He’s done that while enacting the first and strongest financial reform policy in decades and is in the process of forcing public schools to undergo the kind of long-term change that is way overdue.

He’s done much more than that, including providing the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of our country, cracking down on credit card abuses and created a consumer protection agency and set up a deficit-reduction commission when elected officials in both parties, after initially being in favor, reneged on their promise to approve one. Oh, I forgot that he also added two new Supreme Court justices, creating for the first time in our country’s history a Court which has a make up that is a third female.

Yet, those on the right are quick to dismiss or distort what he has accomplished and many on the left ignore all that he’s done because he hasn’t done everything they wanted. Never mind that up to 33 more million people will receive health care coverge for the first time, the left thinks it’s shameful he didn’t fight harder for the public option. Never mind that he has already begun the process of overturning the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy — a sensitive which must be handled properly, not hastily, given the stresses on our military — yet they are angry he hasn’t used his magical powers to have it repealed already.

Even given all those facts, people still shout about a liberal media in bed with Obama and a blind allegiance to him because of his race. It’s ridiculous. Obama has done more for this country in less than two years than the previous president — and most modern presidents — have done over the course of entire terms.

In the political world, you’ll be called a “flip flopper.” In the real world, you’ll become more successful.

On those points, I agree with her. Nigger is a word, and like every other word in the English language, its usage should be dictated by its intent and context — no matter the skin color of the person uttering it. Obviously, a speaker who chooses to use it must understand the potential backlash from those who disapprove of it in all or almost-all settings — just like they should the response any emotionally-charged word would garner.

Fellow South Carolinian Randall Kennedy, a Harvard University professor, wrote a book about the history of that word and raised the same point. The book was titled “nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.” It dissects the word’s history, transformation and how it was being used in ugly and uplifting — yes, uplifting — ways among blacks for several generations, not just among young rappers today.

A few of the points Kennedy made in his book (which I highly recommend):

“Excellence in culture thrives, like excellence elsewhere, in a setting open to competition — and that includes competition concerning how best to dramatize the N-word. Thus, instead of cordoning off racially defined areas of the culture and allowing them to be tilled only by persons of the ‘right’ race, we should work toward enlarging the common ground of American culture, a field that is open to all comers regardless of their origin.”

And … “Progress, however, begets new problems, and our subject is no exception. The very conditions that have helped to stigmatize nigger have also been conducive to the emergence of certain troubling tendencies. Among these latter are unjustified deception, overeagerness to detect insult, the repression of good uses of nigger, and the overly harsh punishment of those who use the N-word imprudently or even wrongly.”

And … “These entertainers don’t care whether whites find nigger upsetting. They don’t care whether whites are confused by blacks’ use of the term. And they don’t care whether whites who hear blacks using the N-word think that African Americans lack self-respect. The black comedians and rappers who use and enjoy nigger care principally, perhaps exclusively, about what they themselves think, desire and enjoy — which is part of their allure.”

And … “Protecting foul, disgusting, hateful, unpopular speech against governmental censorship is a great achievement of American political culture.”

That’s part of the reason I had no problem with Dr. Laura’s use of the word in the context in which she used it, and it is why even though I disagreed with many of the other things she told the caller, I was not offended.

It wasn’t until she went on “Larry King Live” on CNN last night and painted herself the victim who has no First Amendment rights that I got offended. Here are the facts: Dr. Laura has had a radio program and been making TV appearances for 30 years, speaking her mind in ways that have offended a whole host of people. What did she receive for being given the privilege of having a megaphone to the nation’s ear? Tens of millions of dollars in salary, endorsements and book sales. She’s not a victim. She has successfully used her free speech rights maybe better than anyone else on the planet.

Yet she paints herself a victim because people who disagree with her views and words respond in kind by using their free speech rights. And she must not understand the First Amendment very well. It is about protection from the government — not a groundswell of citizen protesters.

Dr. Laura has spent the past three decades warning audience members against the tendency to fall for the comfort of victim hood. It’s time she took her own advice.

I believe the bigger danger is not the fear of acting white, but a feeling of inferiority, something many black people grapple with privately and is too often reinforced not only in popular culture, but in schools as well. I went to an almost-all black high school and an almost-all-white private college and never felt the fear of “acting white” for doing well academically. But I definitely struggled with the idea that my blackness made me inferior to my white peers.

The obvious question is how is that sentiment not a form of reverse racial bias. I don’t see how it can’t be — though it’s not the same thing as reverse discrimination, given that the woman has been given the job —  even while I understand the reaction, given that publications like Essence exist primarily because the image of blacks have been denigrated — or ignored — in the mainstream media for such a long time, and it is still hard for many to penetrate the top ranks of such publications, in part because of race. I get that. (Let us also not ignore that Essence has been criticized in recent years by black women because the images it has been presenting have too often been superficial and emphasize stereotypes of beauty rather than genuine beauty.)

I’m a black man who would be a horrible fashion director for not only black women or men, but also for the Munchies in Oz, so I’ll try not to get too far out of my expertise by simply saying this: Judging a person solely by their skin color, which is happening here, is not the route we want to take. It’s wrong and dangerous and in the long term will be counterproductive. We’ve long howled about the lack of minorities in high-powered positions on Wall Street and in Fortune 500 companies and elsewhere. We can’t on the one hand tell them it’s bad to hire only whites then on the other demand that companies which cater to the audiences with which we are more familiar only hire blacks.

Which brings me to a column written by Virginia Sen. Jim Webb for which he is coming under fire from some quarters. What he essentially argues is this: Diversity programs aimed at bettering the lives of all non-whites should be revamped to include the millions of poor whites who also face generational poverty and other challenges.

I agree with him and have been making the same argument for awhile. I also agree with what President Obama has said about his own daughters — that they should not be able to benefit from race-based affirmative action, given their truly privileged station in life. It makes no sense for diversity programs to prioritize the Obama girls — given that they have everything they need and more — over poor white children who don’t have access to nearly as much power .

And I’ll go further. I’m neither a rich man nor as influential as the Obamas, but my two kids should not benefit from race-based affirmative action either. They live in a middle class household with a mother who is about to attain her doctorate in education in the next couple of years and a father who is a writer and teaches. They are not rich but have every resource they need to become productive, successful citizens, as well as the kinds of opportunities many poor children — of all colors — simply don’t have. They grow up in a stable environment, have access to strong teachers as well as a family tree with loads of people willing to help them. Race-based affirmative action programs were not designed for them. It was designed to level the playing field. My kids and the Obama girls and many other black kids are already playing on a level field. That’s a fact we don’t discuss much, but it is true.

And many poor white kids, like Sen. Webb explained in his piece, are being left behind and to their own devices. I imagine those who are angry with Webb feel that anger because they see this as a zero sum game, in which if poor whites are invited to the table then invariably that means blacks and other minorities will be removed.

Yes, there are many black people who still need the kind of help these programs were designed to provide. Yes, there is a higher percentage of blacks than whites who need that kind of help. Yes, blacks have had a unique history in this country that should never be forgotten, as Webb acknowledged in his piece.

But given that by the year 2042 or 2050, we all will be minorities, it makes sense for us to think through long-overdue changes today to be ready for that tomorrow. And already, it is poor whites as a group — not blacks and other minorities — who are the most under-represented group on elite college campuses. Race continues to provide unique barriers to blacks and other current-day minorities. That is true, but those barriers are not as overwhelming as they once were. A larger barrier is poverty, an evil that affects not just blacks and Latinos and Native Americans, by millions of whites as well. There is no shame in acknowledging that.

It is a shame that too many of us continue to deny it, though.

She’s the USDA employee who lost her job because a right-wing Website posted a heavily-edited and misleading video which painted her as a racist, suggesting that she treats white farmers poorly, when she was actually telling a story about overcoming her own prejudices and biases and hurts and pains to come to realize that poor people of all color, who are too often shut off from privilege, need help, not just poor blacks. It’s the kind of story that needs to be told more often, by more of us. Yet, it was distorted and twisted directly in response to the NAACP’s Tea Party resolution.

I believed the resolution was counter-productive because it got us all focused on the petty, the irrelevant, and set up the perfect environment for a tit for tat game of racist tag, in which each side does its best to paint the other with a racist brush. It inspired that right-wing Website to identify and expose racism within the ranks of the NAACP — even if it meant taking down an innocent USDA employee in the process. And it made a part of the Obama administration and the NAACP look small and scared. They quickly took the word of a right-wing blogger — without checking out the facts or giving Sherrod a chance to explain — because they were afraid of being called hypocrites by the likes of Glenn Beck. Why do they even care what Beck says? Haven’t they realized by now that no matter what they do or say he will continue labeling them as such, and much worse?

The resolution was designed to put pressure on the Tea Party to rid itself of racist elements. What it ended up doing was forcing the NAACP to rush to judgment and potentially harm the career of a woman who had nothing to do with the unnecessary fight between the NAACP and Tea Party. Fortunately, the NAACP has apologizedand the USDA is reconsidering Sherrod’s forced resignation.

What this illustrates is that we don’t live in a post-racial world. We live in a Bazarro race world, one in which even attempts to bridge racial divides are used to bury your opponent without regard to who gets hurt in the process. When you go down the road of demanding some sort of racial perfection in others, it will always boomerang.

The truth is we all have shortcomings when it comes to the issue of race, all have thoughts and maybe even actions we have regretted thinking or doing, but that we have overcome — or continue to overcome — by acknowledging and recognizing our own flaws. Sherrod shared her story and was initially slammed for it. Here’s to hoping she can now get some praise for it, like the praise sent her way by the white farmers who she supposedly discriminated against.

“Don’t worry about that vase,” she told him.

Shortly after Neo said “What vase?” while looking for it, his hip knocks it on the floor and it shatters.

“How did you know that was going to happen?” he asked The Oracle.

“Oh, what’s really going to cook your noodle is when you wonder later if you would have broken the vase had I not said anything,” The Oracle returned.

In the recent uproar of the NAACP’s decision to pass a resolution asking the Tea Party to expel the racist elements within its ranks, to not tolerate that sort of nastiness, I argued that the resolution was unnecessary, a waste of time, even though the Tea Party needed to do more to not tolerate the idiots at its rallies who come with obviously racist signs. I didn’t believe anything would come of the resolution.

Yet, something has. One of the most high-profile members of the Tea Party Express penned an ugly, racist, nasty supposedly satirical diatribe on his blog in response to the NAACP. Initially, he seemed proud of himself, even saying it got the kind of reaction he wanted. (He has since removed that post.) He was tired of people being cowed by the charge of political incorrectness. What he missed — and what the National Tea Party Federation seemed to get — was that his attempt at satire could easily — and rightly — be seen as a racist attack against all African-Americans for a resolution penned by the NAACP, of which roughly 98 percent of African-Americans are not members. And just how painting blacks as lazy and wanting to return to slavery if they can’t get handouts is somehow a smart, bold move to proud that the Tea Party is neither afraid nor racist is beyond me. Maybe the good Mr. Mark Williams will explain himself further one day, though it seems he has gone into hiding the past few days.

In The Matrix, Neo was left to wonder if he would have broken the vase if The Oracle said nothing. In this “racism resolution” dust up, the NAACP is playing the part of the wise Oracle while the Tea Party is playing the role of Neo. Would this kind of blatant racist rant been forthcoming from a leader of the Tea Party had not the NAACP passed that resolution?

That the question is even on the table makes the NAACP seem prescient and the Tea Party in need of some long-overdue pruning.

The president hasn’t been perfect and has yet to fulfill all of his campaign promises. His administration obviously moved too slowly to revamp the regulatory agency in charge of offshore drilling, and his pledge to close the detention facility holding suspected terrorists in Cuba has long come and gone. Immigration and energy reform are still on the horizon, not on the accomplishments list. And people complain that he hasn’t seemed tough enough or angry enough or in touch enough. You can decide if all of that criticism, or some of it, has been warranted.

But I want you to take a look at the things this supposedly wet-behind-the-ears guy has been able to get done in less than half a term in office.  Taegen Goddard at ‘CQ Politics’ recently wrote: “Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform this country.” Presidential scholars have been saying the same thing. I agree.

It makes sense to wonder if he’s taken the country in the direction if you oppose him on idealogical grounds. I get that. That’s normal and natural and healthy in a democracy like 0urs. What I don’t get is when I hear people say “Why hasn’t Obama been able to get anything done?”

Here’s what he’s done:

– Historic Wall Street reform for the first time in generations, which includes a Consumer Protection Agency designed to protect the unsuspecting person from mortgage and credit card fraud, the kinds of things that pushed the economy into its worst tale spin since the 1930s. And his administration just came up with a $550 million fine against Goldman Sachs — one of the largest in the country’s history — for its suspicious actions leading up to the economic downturn.

– His educational agenda includes billions of dollars for a “Race To The Top” competition, which has already forced many states to revamp its standards and honestly re-evaluate teacher performance. He has authorized the extension of charter school creation and has set aside billions to fund “Promise Neighborhoods” — built upon the concept made famous by Geoffrey Canada in New York that has shown amazing results for low-income students — and saved taxpayers billions of dollars by revamping the student loan program by cutting banks out of the process, which means millions more students will get Pell grants to help pay for their education. He did this even in the face of strong opposition from teacher’s unions, an important Democratic bloc.

– He is winding down the war in Iraq ahead of schedule, with troop withdrawals already under way. And he tripled the number of troops in Afghanistan — something the commanders on the ground were screaming to get for more than a year under the Bush administration — while killing more top terrorist and Taliban leaders, with the use of drone strikes, in his first year than Bush was able to do in his final two.

– Historic health care reform which the Congressional Budget Office says could expand coverage to more than 30 million currently uninsured people as well as bring down the deficit by $1.2 trillion over the next 20 years. According to studies, maybe as many as 45,000 people die every year because of lack of insurance.

– He extended the states’ kids health insurance program to cover an additional four million poor kids.

– Signed into law the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, designed to combat pay discrimination against women.

– He put two women on the Supreme Court (once Elana Kagan is confirmed next week), meaning for the first time in the country’s history women will hold three seats on our most powerful court.

– The HIRE Act provided $18 billion in tax breaks for small businesses to spur hiring and $20 billion for transit and highway programs.

– Entered into a historic new nuclear treaty with Russia to cut our stockpiles of nuclear weapons — which are so large we could destroy the entire Earth and probably a few other planets with them, or, God forbid, allow a small terrorist group to get its hands on one and cause damage, which should be our real concern. He also created a new global nonproliferation initiative to keep nuclear materials out of the hands of terrorists.

– He signed into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act (or “The Matthew Shepard Act”) to combat violence against gays, stopped gay men from being banned from giving blood and just announced the first domestic, sweeping program to fight AIDS and HIV, and is in the process of getting rid of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy,” which discriminates against men and women who sacrifice their lives for our freedom.

– Helped usher through a $862 billion fiscal stimulus package — which the CBO has said already has created roughly 2.5 million jobs and was primarily responsible for the recent growth in our GDP — and took other actions that kept us out of a second depression, all the while calming nerves enough on Wall Street that the market restored more than $2.5 trillion in value after bottoming out in March of 2009, returning roughly $800 billion to the 401ks of everyday Americans. He did this in one of the most polarized political climates in modern history, being fought every step of the way by an opposition party more interested in finding Obama’s Waterloo than helping steer this country from an economic abyss. People complain that the unemployment rate of 9.5 percent is still too high and that claiming that things would be much worse — which they surely would have been had not Obama pushed through what he did — is a denial of reality. It’s precisely the opposite, actually. It is the reality. Obama could have followed the GOPs lead and let us slip into another depression, with millions more in job losses, or he could have done the right thing — even when it wasn’t popular. He chose to do the right thing.

By the way, the fiscal stimulus, or the Recovery Act, also included the largest tax cut in American history, which is part of the reason the American tax burden last year was at its lowest level since 1950, and it set aside billions for building infrastructure for a green energy economy, which will be creating thousands of jobs for years to come while helping us catch up with places like China, which has lapped us on that front.

– His Omnibus Public Land Management Act is the “most sweeping land-protection act in 15 years,” according to USA Today. It designated more than 2 million acres of public land as “wilderness” to protect them.