What’s in a Name?
At Power Line, John Hinderaker spots this telling passage regarding “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend” from his college days:
It was striking to me that when Genevieve met Obama he was a 22-year-old college graduate, but hadn’t yet figured out what his name was. In high school, he had generally been called “Barry,” but by this time he apparently was looking for something more formal:
She called him Bahr-ruck, with the accent on the first syllable, and a trill of the r’s. Not Bear-ick, as the Anglophile Kenyans pronounced it, and not Buh-rock, as he would later be called, but Bahr-ruck. She said that is how he pronounced it himself, at least when talking to her.
I find that very odd. Think how fundamental a part of you your name is: when you were in elementary school, did you have any doubt about what to call yourself? At 22, Obama was still trying out names.
And even as late as age 37, he may have still be trying them out. Note that in the 1998 poster and press release for the “World Premiere” of “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” uncovered in Andrew Breitbart’s last article, the future 44th president was billed as State Senator “Baraka Obama.”
Was that a typo, or was Barry/Barack/Baraka still taking new names out for a spin?
Related: “So What Else Did Obama Fake in his Memoir?”
Interestingly, “Barak” is a contraction of “Mubarak” or “lightning”. “Baraka” is the same in Hebrew and Arabic, and means “blessing” — Sufis use it as a phrase meaning something like what the Founders meant by “Divine Providence”, the special power that guides events.
“Buraq” was the name of Mohammed’s horse.
In his revisioning, Obama mis-speaks about “compression” with the fake girl friend, (as Rochard Fernandez brilliantly points out, he’s compositing or inventing, not compressing. Anyway, he admits the girlfriend is fake, but explicitly states the “angry black person”/typical white girlfriend incident really happened in front of a “new play” by an angry black playwright. Since he remembers clearly the specifics that the play was “new”, and that it was authored by an angry black playwright, surely he’d have a clear recollection of exactly which play, and which playwright … He asserts it really happened, and asserts verifiable facts (new, black, angry in the 1982 time frame). I’d love to see the question posed to him. I seriously doubt it ever happened.
The shyster who fabricated “A Million little pieces” got Oprah pretty pissed when he lied about the “compression” in his book. Obama somewhat immunized himself by his “compression” malapropism, but now we have him verve ally asserting the play, the playwright, and the incident really happened. I’d bet 10 bags of premium dog chow that he would claim to not remember which play, or which angry black playwright wrote his “new” play in that time frame…
Whaddya expect, of course he was trying out names.
He had only been activated a few weeks earlier.
It takes a robot some time to come to grips with it’s existence.
Some of Soros’ earliest models were downright suicidal (autocidal?) over the whole issue.