Now that Justice David Souter has announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, I’ve been thinking about the retirement announcement 18-years ago, of Justice Thurgood Marshall. He was salty, and he took no prisoners that day. Me, the "Race Man" in attendance, I was a little put-off by his brusque, almost bitter comments about race.

"My dad told me way back that you can't use race," Justice Marshall snapped when pressed as to whether or not his successor should be Black. "For example, there's no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They'll both bite. So I don't want to use race as an excuse." Ouch.

And he was right. Look what we got when President George H.W. Bush scraped the barrel to find a confirmable Black candidate who was compatible with his conservative agenda.

So now, I’d like President Barack Obama to nominate a Black woman, who exemplifies some of Justice Marshall’s finer qualities.

He was a successful trial lawyer, arguing 32 cases himself, before the Supreme Court. His side prevailed in 29 of them! He fought on the side of the downtrodden and dispossessed. I applaud that.

He went to Howard University Law School, not Harvard University Law or the other federal "judicial monastery" Yale Law School!

Because of racism in his home state of Maryland, "The Free State’s" policy when young Thurgood came along, was to pay the tuition for qualified Black students to attend any law school in the world, so long as they did not go to the University of Maryland Law School. At Howard, young Marshall fell into the clutches of a dean who was a cum laude graduate, Harvard Law Review (the "Original Barack Obama") trained and an Amherst valedictorian—Charles Hamilton Houston. So much for Jim Crow laws.

Current University of Maryland Law School professor and—like Justice Marshall—civil rights lawyer, Sherrilyn Ifill lists a number of other excellent qualities Justice Marshall possessed when he was named to the court in a commentary on CNN.

I still long to see a "real" Black person on The Court. This time, how about a woman who reflects Thurgood Marshall’s principles and ideals?

Could President Barack Hussein Obama’s "historical memory"—inherited from his paternal grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama—of the brutal British suppression of the Kenyan independence movement in the 1950s affect the "special relationship" between the United States and America’s long time ally, the United Kingdom?

But what if his grandfather had been Palestinian? Would Mr. Obama ever have been able to become President in the first place? I doubt it very seriously.

After reporting on the barbaric torture inflicted on Hussein Onyango Obama in a Dec. 3, 2008 article published online by The Times of London, writer Ben Macintyre says that the first African American President’s views towards the United Kingdom just might be different from those of the previous 43 White U.S. presidents.

"Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence," Mr. Macintyre and co-author Paul Orengoh reported. "He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency," they wrote.

"The African warders were instructed by the White soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed," said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman the President refers to as "Granny Sarah," the article states.

Hussein Onyango Obama, a Kenyan Muslim, served with the British Army in Burma during World War II, yet just four years after the war, his employer, a British Army officer for whom he served as a cook, rewarded his loyal manservant by firing him, then denouncing him to the authorities on suspicion of "consorting with troublemakers."

The irony is that Mr. Obama was a member of the Luo people from Western Kenya, not the dominant Kikuyu people. Some Kikuyu persons took secret oaths and formed the dreaded Mau Mau, which conducted a bloody rebellion against British colonial rule. The country’s first President Jomo Kenyatta was accused and put on trial for being a Mau Mau. Jamaican attorney Dudley Thompson successfully represented Mr. Kenyatta at trial.

The British soldiers "would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down," Granny Sarah told The Times of London. "The alleged torture was said to have left Mr. Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly anti-British," the authors wrote. "That was the time we realized that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies," Mrs. Onyango said. "My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained."

The President writes of his Black Muslim grandfather in his best-selling memoir Dreams From My Father. He says only that his grandfather was "found innocent" and held for "more than six months."

While a total of only 32 Europeans were killed by the Mau Mau, the British slaughtered as many as 50,000 Africans during the seven year state of emergency which they imposed, trying to maintain their unjust, racist, colonial rule. But the American body politic did not hold the President accountable for any potential anti-Anglo-ism.

Now. Just suppose that Barack Hussein Obama’s grandfather had been a Palestinian Muslim, arrested in Palestine in 1949, or expelled from Jerusalem in 1948 by Zionist authorities in that colonial settler territory which was annexed in defiance of the British Palestinian mandate and which declared itself to be the state of Israel—the Jewish state. Would that simple difference in paternal geography have made any difference at all in United States history?

Duh!

You bet it would have! This article would never have been written, because Barack Hussein Obama Jr. would never, never, never have been elected President of the United States had his grandfather been Palestinian, a people who suffered an almost identical or worse oppression at the hands of the Israelis (which continues until this very day) than that which was inflicted on the Kenyans by the British.

Never mind Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, his kindly, Kansas-born, Caucasian maternal grandparents. If Mr. Obama had an Arab-Muslim (even an Arab Christian) paternal grandfather, that would have made him categorically ineligible for the presidency, by definition.

Talk about "historical memory!"

We’d probably be talking about history-making President Hillary Clinton now, because Barack Obama might have graduated Magna Cum Laude and been President of the Harvard Law Review, but he would never have even been elected dogcatcher in this country, let alone to the U.S. Senate, or to the U.S. presidency had his grandfather been a Palestinian Arab, instead of a Black African.