Obama, the current  “problem” all Americans are forced to “live with,” felt it was as good a time as any to hang in a hallway outside the Oval Office Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With” – a canvas that revives hurt rather than cultivates healing.

The President’s taste in artwork indicates that America’s “post-racial president” may be secretly nursing a deep-seated wound.  It’s either that, or he’s uninterested in fostering unity. If that weren’t a distinct possibility, why didn’t he choose Norman Rockwell’s “Murder in Mississippi (Southern Justice),” which portrays the deaths of three civil rights workers, two of whom where white, killed for their efforts to register African American voters, or “Negro in the Suburbs,” which depicts black children interacting with the white children in their new neighborhood?

Mr. Obama could have requested any painting, but he chose the one that depicts “U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community.”

The thrust of the painting is not subtle. America’s vilest racial epithet appears in letters several inches high at the top of the canvas. To the left side, the letters “KKK” are plainly visible. The crowds, mostly women who gathered daily to taunt Bridges as she went to a largely empty school, are not shown in the picture. But the racist graffiti and a splattered tomato convey the hostile atmosphere.

Rather than displaying a reminder of division and hatred, shouldn’t America’s first black president be focusing on the harmony that the historic nature of his presidency promised to deliver?  Instead, his attraction to an artist’s rendition of one of the “ugliest racial episodes in U.S. history” indicates that the President of the United States may harbor a measure of latent acrimony.

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Let’s first get THIS out of the way:  I do NOT believe the President is a Muslim.  OK?  I believe he is a Christian.  I’ve seen his Pastor in action.

That being said, I DO believe that a pattern has developed in the Obama White House to not only bend over backwards in praise of the Islamic faith, but to give what can only be described as short shrift (bordering on insult) to the Jewish faith.

The recent news about the second-class status given to the White House Hanukkah Party, in comparison with the Bush Administration’s handling of the event, brings to light a continual diminishing of the importance of the Jewish Holy Days.  Case in point:

Last Fall, the Jewish Holy time of Rosh Hashanah was acknowledged by the President with a 2:37 video greeting.  Unfortunately, President Obama used the occasion of the Rosh Hashanah greeting to lecture Jews around the world about the importance of tolerance.  (Lecturing JEWS about the importance of tolerance???  Because THEY keep blowing children up at pizza parlors?)

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