Many Americans believed that President Obama’s credibility problem rises from the fact that as a politician he couldn’t stop lying. In Africa, he wanted to look like Bush who was admired by Africans but failed miserably when he lied on foreign aid.

     Not just in the sad case of President Obama, but any president who is a liar at home is a liar anywhere. To win a political standing ovation, insecure presidents would lie through their teeth for approval and support.

     Obama’s example is a classic case … he has to lie to Africans not only to make himself look good but also to look better than former president Bush. But in Africa, Pinocchio’s extended nose didn’t look any better. It grew a mile longer.

     Obama’s speeches in Africa indicate that he couldn’t stand any success of any American president, especially when approval and admiration are attributed to Bush, other than his own historic feat as an African-American who became the first black president of the predominantly white, the richest and mightiest country on the planet!

     It is most likely that Obama’s aching discomfort had metastasized to envy when he discovered that George W. Bush was a hero to millions of Africans. To the chagrin of Obama’s image-makers, they discovered that Bush was the most generous American president ever recorded in the history of U.S. foreign aid for Africa.

     In 2003, Bush launched the United States President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief [PREPFAR].  It started with a resounding success when this U.S. AIDS relief spending overseas saved “… 1.7 million HIV patients in sub-Saharan Africa – the largest spending ever on a disease by a country.” [1] Today millions of Africans are alive due to President Bush’s compassion, benevolence and humanity; world attention was attracted to his goodwill policy and humanitarian effort and to what America did under his presidency to alleviate the African people’s misery.

     I can imagine that Obama’s jaws dropped in total disbelief when he tried to comprehend what Bush had done to Africans. Obama must do something about it in order to make Africans worship him instead of Bush; after all he is half-African and Bush is not … he must do something or anything to neutralize the veneration of Bush as if to Africans Bush is a living saint that had been canonized by the Vatican as a white god that saved lives out of human compassion and mercy.

    In behalf of all compassionate Americans except a few Bush-gun-slinging isolationists in this country who were committed to shoot Bush’s image dead at the drop of a hat, PEPFAR was just Bush’s emergency response to the outbreak of the AIDS disease that threatened to wipe out Africans from the face of the earth in just a matter of time.

     Note that in addition to PREPFAR, Bush also launched PMIP [the President’s Malaria Initiative Program] “… to swat a disease that kills more African children than any other …” , said global analyst Clare Byrne [see Monsters and Critics, Oct 30, 2008].

    On top of all these munificence concerns for Africa, Bush founded in 2003 together with PREPFAR, MCA [the Millenium Challenge Account], “… to reward developing countries in Africa for improved governance, with extra aid.”

     In Johannesburg, Brooks Spector, a visiting senior lecturer on US foreign policy at the University of Witwatersrand, summarized what made Africans idolized former president Bush: “On the whole the Bush administration policies in Africa have been quite compelling …”

     Citing the unadulterated words that portrayed this Bush African legacy, I quote the following: “Not just on aid, says Spector, who spent 31 years in the US Foreign Service, but also on trade. Since 2000, sub-Saharan African countries have enjoyed duty-free access to the US market for most of their exports under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).”

      It is on record that Bush’s genuine concerns for Africans were not only on matters of health but also on Africa’s economic well-being. Africans just consider Bush the human bridge of friendship between Americans and black Africans; to Africans and the rest of the world fighting the global war on AIDS, former U.S. president George W. Bush was the compelling reason why the world out there loves Americans and respects America.

     Within our shores, here in our home states and in Washington, D.C, political rappers, freedom drifters, terrorist coddlers and Media hookers bought by the radical left, charged that Bush was the reason why the world hated America.  Bush’s African legacy is one on record that proved them so stupendously wrong!

      Am I writing this for Bush?  Not a chance. I am writing to expose a despicable lie … for the truth to come out so that Americans, whose brains are unable to digest obliquely poisoned news making them vulnerable to the invasion of false propaganda, would see how hate-mongers had taken them for a ride.

       For example, when the innocent swallows hook and sinker the propaganda campaign of hate-peddlers that U.S. President Harry Truman was a “mentally unbalanced” president for dropping the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended the Pacific War in WWII, and that President George W. Bush was a “war criminal” for capturing and hanging Iraq’s internationally hated dictator-terrorist Saddam Hussein following the invasion of Iraq, is like riding a train to the North Pole in Chris Van Allsburg’s world of fantasy shown in movieland’s The Polar Express. 

       This deception to hoodwink the public into believing that today’s society is our prison, and that if we would not join the “revolution” this country would fall on the edge because the world is flat, is reminiscent of the drug culture of the 1960s where youthful murderers whose life was without purpose became the followers of Charles Manson whose counter-culture philosophy or propaganda led them to a rampage killing of innocent Americans at random or of no particular order and for no other reason than hate.

      Back to Obama’s problem to upstage Bush’s popularity in Africa, it was not necessarily this aggressive, violent antisocial thinking of the 1960s that drove Obama to hoodwink the African public. There was no need to because anyway to lie about it seems so easy and natural.

     To be admired by Africans like Bush, Obama has to lie to show how he also loves Africans. To eclipse Bush’s popularity, Obama promised to increase the funding of the Bush project. For fiscal year 2010, Obama committed a “bigger” budget, i.e., $8.6 billion for global health, “… up from $8.2 billion for the current year”, among others. It looked nice. But there is a contemptible deception behind it.  A serpent rears its ugly head when Africans did the numbers.

     Here’s how Obama’s budget trick was exposed by the Global AIDS Alliance: “[I]nstead of the $50 billion over five years that President Obama had pledged for AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria, the budget includes $51 billion, but spread over six years [instead of five years].” This resulted not in increased funding but in a seriously grave budgetary shortfall.

       Since truthfulness in health aid is critical to save millions of lives ravaged by diseases, this conjured agenda of statistical trickery and political dishonesty in funding is not only heartless but also a despicable affront to humanity.

      “On an annual basis, that [shortfall] translates into substantially less money than what was promised for PEPFAR, the AIDS program started by President Obama's predecessor George Bush, and the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria,” said Global AIDS Director Paul Zeitz.

       Obama’s natural tendency to lie -- this time by indulging himself in a foreign aid funding charade to fool not only Americans but also Africans -- endangers the lives of more than 33 million people infected with HIV. Due to shortfall in the promised funding, most if not all of these aids victims will die.

       And more will perish. Obama's failure to live up to his commitment set up a bad example. Other countries are likely to spend less to stop the spread of AIDS, a deadly killer not only in Africa but elsewhere.
       As a result, we cannot stop imagining that by lying, Obama played a joke on patients’ lives that are slowly fading away, without mercy and human compassion just to make his posturing look good.  

      It simply shows that Obama will do anything to make himself look good supposedly, in this case, by out-funding Bush’s aids programs to make Bush look cheap compared to him.  But he has to do exactly that kind of disgraceful deceit and public conjuring whenever there is an opportunity anywhere anytime to demonize Bush and his achievements as president of the United States.

     In Africa, there is no doubt that Obama wished he was former president Bush, the hero of foreign aid to millions of Africans so that he does not need to lie.

     The problem is it is more compelling to lie as an art of calumny for a president to gain approval than it is worrisome to lose a face or a friend who is dying of AIDS in Africa. #

© Copyright Edwin A. Sumcad. Access FP.com, August 10, 2009.

The writer is an award-winning journalist.  Know more about the author by reading his published editorials and feature articles or you may e-mail your comment to ed.superx722@yahoo.com.sg.