Dreams from my Crony Socialists

Ann Althouse quotes a telling passage from Obama’s first book:

Looking back, I’m not sure that Lolo ever fully understood what my mother was going through during these years, why the things he was working so hard to provide for her seemed only to increase the distance between them. He was not a man to ask himself such questions. Instead, he maintained his concentration, and over the period that we lived in Indonesia, he proceeded to climb. With the help of his brother-in-law, he landed a new job in the government relations office of an American oil company. We moved to a house in a better neighborhood; a car replaced the motorcycle; a television and hi-fi replaced the crocodiles and Tata, the ape; Lolo could sign for our dinners at a company club. Sometimes I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask her how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout.

They are not my people.

Which is an odd quote from a guy who later became the personification of Chicago politics and crony socialism, where “progressive” American businessmen grovel for Obama to grease their palms. Or to put it another way:

In a video appearance from 2009, venture capitalist Paul Holland — who had given the maximum legal contribution to Obama, and whose companies received over 6 million in government dollars — described his feelings when heard about the billions up for grabs.

“He came in to do his talk and opened his talk with, ‘I’m Matt Rogers I am the Special Assistant to the Secretary of Energy and I have $134 billion that I have to disperse between now and the end of December,’” Holland told the audience. “So upon hearing that I sent an email to my partners that said Matt Rogers is about to get treated like a hooker dropped into a prison exercise yard.”

Holland continued: “And I had the lack of judgment to go up and share that with him and the other people who were all standing around him…Fortunately for me they all laughed and thought it was funny.”

Flash-forward to today: “Will debt hit $16 trillion as Romney delivers his acceptance speech?”

Update: George Savage at Ricochet, “Forward: Obamanomics in Pictures.”