Barack Obama campaigning in Kenya with his cousin, Odinga

How elections are worked out in Kenya

Kenya has an interesting history, and until recently was fairly stable for an African country. African countries have struggled with dictatorships, regardless of the form of government, poor infrastructures, ethnic violence, and weak economies built on handouts and guilt grants from their former colonial masters, now European liberals and socialists.

According to the CIA's World Fact Book, "Founding president and liberation struggle icon Jomo KENYATTA led Kenya from independence in 1963 until his death in 1978, when President Daniel Toroitich arap MOI took power in a constitutional succession. The country was a de facto one-party state from 1969 until 1982 when the ruling Kenya African National Union (KANU) made itself the sole legal party in Kenya. MOI acceded to internal and external pressure for political liberalization in late 1991.

The ethnically fractured opposition failed to dislodge KANU from power in elections in 1992 and 1997, which were marred by violence and fraud, but were viewed as having generally reflected the will of the Kenyan people. President MOI stepped down in December 2002 following fair and peaceful elections. Mwai KIBAKI, running as the candidate of the multiethnic, united opposition group, the National Rainbow Coalition (NARC), defeated KANU candidate Uhuru KENYATTA and assumed the presidency following a campaign centered on an anticorruption platform. KIBAKI's NARC coalition splintered in 2005 over the constitutional review process. Government defectors joined with KANU to form a new opposition coalition, the Orange Democratic Movement, which defeated the government's draft constitution in a popular referendum in November 2005.

KIBAKI's reelection in December 2007 brought charges of vote rigging from ODM candidate Raila ODINGA and unleashed two months of violence in which as many as 1,500people died. UN-sponsored talks in late February produced a powersharing accord bringing ODINGA into the government in the restored position of prime minister."

Raila Odinga is Barack Obama's cousin (in our system it would be first cousins according to Odinga, but others say they are just members of the same Luo clan). Odinga is a Marxist and named his first child Fidel Castro.

Mr. Odinga told a stunned BBC Radio interviewer the reason why he and Mr. Obama were staying in near daily telephone contact was because they were cousins. In a Jan. 8, 2008, interview, Mr. Odinga said Mr. Obama had called him twice the day before while campaigning in the New Hampshire primary before adding, "Barack Obama's father is my maternal uncle." Obama’s Kenya Ghosts

Odinga ran on a platform of Change and was apparently a very sore loser (close race). That's not an unusual campaign slogan, but a U.S. Senator giving money to a foreigner, even his own cousin, to run a campaign is at best unwise, and at worst, illegal. Then that same Senator taking money from foreigners to supply his grandiose campaign, is not the lend lease or foreign aid plan we Americans are accustomed to.

Watch the second video; the first has been pulled, so I don't know how long the second will be up. Here's another one covering his trip to Kenya and his interference in their election.

Barack's cousin Odinga

Jerome Corsi was being interviewed this morning on the radio. He was detained (not imprisoned) for a few hours in Kenya, and not for promoting his book (he only brought his personal copy) as the AP erroneously (surprise!) reported. All his papers were in order and clearly stated the research nature of his trip. He went to Kenya to dig up some more dirt on the relationship between Odinga and his cousin Barack Obama, who had been his campaign advisor (this is illegal, btw, for a sitting senator to be involving himself in another country's election). Seems the campaign theme was "hope and change" and that when Odinga didn't win, his supporters took to the street rioting in a seige of ethnic violence. In Kenya, there's a slight difference. You shout out the other tribe's name; in the U.S., you just shout "racist." And instead of threatening rape, as an Obama supporter Sandra Berhard has done during our 2008 campaign, you do it to women and boys as they flee their burning home.

The dead, who had been barricaded inside the church, were members of the country's dominant Kikuyu tribe. They were among hundreds that sought shelter in an Assembly of God church near the western Kenyan city of Eldoret. The city is a stronghold of the nation's main minority tribe, the Luo. According to witnesses, a mob barricaded the church and started the fire with gasoline-soaked mattresses. While many escaped through open windows, at least 30 victims and possibly dozens more were trapped in the flames.

The incident was the most violent of several that have erupted in Kenyan cities since a hotly contested presidential election. Sitting Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki, a Kikuyu, narrowly defeated opposition leader Raila Odinga, who is a Luo.

Odinga's followers have alleged that voting fraud perpetrated by pro-Kibaki polling officials tilted the election's outcome. The election took place Dec. 27, and Kibaki was sworn in Dec. 30. Riots in urban centers across the country quickly ensued, causing more than 300 deaths as of Jan. 2, according to Agence France-Presse. . . Baptist Press

Obama and his cousin are NOT members of the Kikuyu, they are Luo. Looks like Obama was destined to be a minority candidate whether he ran in Kenya or the USA, and he's just darn mad about that. Democrats have already warned us that American blacks will take to the streets if Obama doesn't win; they've accused their own party members of racisim when he was low in the polls in early September; they accused two of their candidates, Clinton and Biden, of racism early in the primaries; they've upped the ante on every possible criticism of Obama and his policies and friendships calling them racist. Do we see a theme here? Who is the person using race baiting in this campaign?