I keep trying to like Barack Obama, but I can't like him the same way suckers for his rhetoric and his cuteness on TV like him, so I keep trying to like him some other way.

Lately it occurred to me to try to like Barack Obama the way his personal friends like him! Who better to reveal the likeable human qualities of someone I usually think of as a hypocritical android?

A google search for "Obama's friend" wasn't very promising. Apart from numerous right-wing references to Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and and Father Pfleger... two hate-mongers, a crook, and a former terrorist... the best search result was Marty Nesbitt, who actually plays basketball with Obama, but Nesbitt is so useful as a fundraiser and conduit to the billionaire Pritzkers that I ended up back at square one, with the image of a manipulative machine and his army of tools.

Then I found Keith Kakugawa!

ABC News has the money quote from Dreams From My Father:

In his best-selling autobiography, "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance," presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., writes movingly about his high school best friend, whom he calls "Ray." In his first year at Hawaii's elite Punahou School, then-9th-grader "Barry" Obama was befriended by Ray, who was two years older. "Despite the difference in age, we'd fallen into an easy friendship, due in no small part to the fact that together we made up almost half of Punahou's black high school population," Obama wrote. "I enjoyed his company; he had a warmth and brash humor. ..."

Keith Kakugawa is "Ray!" This is my idea of a friend: Keith and Barry hung out, they partied together, they had heart-to-heart talks! You can't do that stuff with a stinking android!

So once upon a time Barack Obama really did have a friend, instead of just another tool, and what kind of friend is Barack Obama?

The Wall Street Journal describes a very disappointing reunion of the two high-school buddies:

Sen. Barack Obama had just come off the Senate floor last Thursday, rushing to get to New Hampshire for a weekend of campaigning for president, when his office patched through a call to his cellphone. On the other end was a long-lost high-school friend, Keith Kakugawa, calling from a pay phone in a rundown part of Los Angeles. Mr. Kakugawa was homeless and fresh from a California state prison facility after a third drug-related conviction.

Mr. Kakugawa was destitute and homeless. At a Los Angeles social-service agency he met a past acquaintance, an aspiring rap-music writer and performer, Jason Myles, who works as "Bobby Bang." He moved into the rapper's car -- a battered, dulled-silver 1989 Mazda 626, with nearly 156,000 miles on the odometer. At night they park on a street blocks from Skid Row, recline the front seats to sleep and share a quilt. They say they've pawned audio equipment, to help buy additional minutes for a shared cellphone.

At Mr. Obama's suggestion, Mr. Kakugawa says, he called Devorah Adler, a campaign researcher who maintains contacts with Obama family and friends who might get press inquiries, to advise them and act as a go-between. Tensions rose when Mr. Kakugawa asked for some money to be wired to him via Western Union, according to both him and Ms. Adler. Ms. Adler brought in senior adviser Robert Gibbs, and together they phoned Mr. Kakugawa last Saturday.

"Sen. Obama really does want to help," Mr. Gibbs told Mr. Kakugawa, according to both men's recollection. The advisers suggested Mr. Kakugawa get help from social-service agencies, and that the Obama office would help with that. But he would not get money, Mr. Gibbs said.

The exchange left Mr. Kakugawa upset. "Everybody's just abandoned me," he says.

ABC News has an update:

But Obama campaign officials says Kakugawa's comments were not as he is now portraying them. They say he threatened to tell negative stories about the senator to the media if money was not wired to him.

Since Kakugawa talked with ABC News, he's fallen on even harder times. Though the California Department of Corrections denies it, he has heard there's a warrant out for his arrest because of the extortion claims by the Obama campaign. His friend Jason's car broke down on the Interstate 10 highway. And he regrets how everything has gone down with his friend.

"He doesn't know realistically that if he just talked to me, took the time to just sit down -- I would just like to say 'Hey look, your campaign's great, but you need to do more or show more,'" Kakugawa says. "Whether I'd be that person who shows the world, 'Hey, he does really care about people that have had this and that,' that's what I would like have conveyed. Barry really does care about people. The people around him don't -- Win or lose, Barry will be able to get in contact with me."

So Barack Obama's best friend from high school is broke and homeless, and Barack Obama offers him directions to the nearest welfare office! "He would not get money." Not a penny from the multi-millionaire Barack Obama! Not even a job sweeping out campaign headquarters!

Thanks for nothing, you heartless son-of-a-bitch!

So I gave up my project of liking Barack Obama, but I'll probably still vote for the heartless son-of-a-bitch anyway, because a vote for Nader is the same as a vote for the psycho dinosaur John McCain, and a vote for McCain is a vote to keep running with the Bush/Cheney agenda of torture and genocide forever, and although Democratic collaborators with torture and genocide like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton keep voting to fund torture and genocide again and again and again, apparently they want to gradually phase out torture and genocide, or at least some of it, and that's why I'm still a goddamned Democrat!