Obama Ipsum

We're not going to agree on everything, but we can disagree without being disagreeable. But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.

It's a journey that takes us back to our nation's founding, when none other than a UCC church inspired the Boston Tea Party and helped bring an Empire to its knees. The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind. Six million Jews were killed - more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today.

But we shouldn't use our humility as an excuse for inaction. To Chairman Dean and my great friend Dick Durbin; and to all my fellow citizens of this great nation; We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country. Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President. It is costly and politically difficult to continue this conflict. It's a faith in other people, and it's what brought me here today.

He told me he'd joined the Marines, and was heading to Iraq the following week. And it's a testament to what we can achieve when good people with strong convictions stand up for their beliefs. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton's Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. You don't defeat a terrorist network that operates in eighty countries by occupying Iraq. Instead, it is that American spirit - that American promise - that pushes us forward even when the path is uncertain; that binds us together in spite of our differences; that makes us fix our eye not on what is seen, but what is unseen, that better place around the bend.

These enemies must be found. He was nominally a Muslim since there were a number of Muslims in the village where he was born. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

Thank you.