On the one side, David Goldman (aka Spengler) of First Things. On the other, John Podhoretz, of Commentary. Both longstanding friends, both talented writers, both critical of President Obama. But John is very upset about the last paragraph of an essay by David. Here’s the graph by David:
I’ve been screaming about this for more than two years: Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men. He is a Third World anthropologist studying us, learning our culture and our customs the better to neutralize what he considers to be a malignant American influence in world affairs.
And here’s John’s critique:
This is…disgusting. In the first place, Obama is not responsible for his mother or her political views, any more than Ronald Reagan should have been held accountable for the fact that his father was a drunk. In the second place, Goldman’s speculation about her sexual history is appalling …the idea that the lower-middle-class daughter of a furniture salesman from Mercer Island, Washington, would be awash in “white guilt” — far more a species of upper-middle-class Northeastern opinion — speaks more of Goldman’s inability to achieve imaginative sympathy with someone from circumstances different from his than it does anything about the president or his family.
Finally, there is Goldman’s casting of Obama, who lived for less than a year in Indonesia, as a “Third World anthropologist studying us.” Casting Obama as a malign foreign influence is a particular and unforgivable intellectual madness on the Right over the past two years. There is nothing foreign about Obama’s ideas or ideology, alas, which can be understood, in my view, almost entirely from the curricula and extracurricular ideas endemic in the American university in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he was in college.
David has been saying these things for quite a while, and has offered plenty of evidence to explain why he believes them. John hasn’t felt obliged to pick a fight before, and I think he would have done better if had taken a bit of time to study the facts of Obama’s life. Contrary to John’s dismissal of any Indonesian influence (he was only there for “less than a year”), for example, young Barack spent four important years (from age 6 to 10) there, and attended a Muslim school (which wasn’t “very Muslim” actually, but I digress). And his characterization of Mrs Obama’s family as “lower middle class from Mercer Island, Washington” is not quite right either: the parents were from Kansas, and lived briefly on Mercer Island (which is a pretty pricey neighborhood, at least in recent years); the mother was a bank vice president, and I can’t find an account suggesting that Obama’s mother had an economically challenged childhood. That came later, as a result of moving to Indonesia.
Michael, it seems to me that the efforts expended by BHO
and his minions to seal the records of at least part of his early years is fuel for the fire.
Am I wrong?
The issue isn’t about trashing his mother; it’s about trying to figure out the messages he received about the world from early childhood on. If his mother was critical of America and Americans (wasn’t there something about her not liking her second husband hanging around American businessmen?) and this was followed by similar anti-American worldviews throughout his teens and young adult life, then he never had to resolve any conflicting viewpoints. He would have been less likely to question what he heard.
As to the anthropological approach, this can be explained by his moves and by his always being something of an outsider.
I frankly think both men, David and John made very good points in both articles. It is quite excusable to be exasperated to the point of venomous outbursts in this time of confusion. Especially since it is going to cost so damned much money and capital (human and otherwise) regardless of wether or not Obama makes the right or wrong “call” on anything. Clearly this juncture in our country baffles and at the same time mystifies any and all paying attention to who Obama is and what is his/their game plan.
I sincerely hate to draw this conclusion BUT…having just finished reading Ron Chernows book on the Warburgs, I cannot help to notice how angered and mystified the Jewish population was in Hitlers Germany. I was left the impression a lot of those Jews stayed while saying to themselves, “It couldn’t get any worse than this”. Mr. Ledeen…I will understand you not posting this if it appears too sporadic. In closing, I wonder does anyone have a clue as to what is next from our mysterious leader?
Forget all that talk about President Obama’s family history when he was young, or who his parents were. Certainly, they had influence on him and while the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, once he turned 18 he was able to make his own choices.
The fact that he has never held a productive job (other than a short summer job as a carpenter) or that he has no experience with a business of any kind or that he seems to have no common sense – those are the real problems. None of this will matter soon, because the country will be completely bankrupt before the end of his second term, the currency worthless and he’ll have gotten the country into WWIII by then, too. Happy Days are Here Again!
I too grew up in Jakarta. Am exactly BHO’s age and lived there at the same time. Java at time was overrun with America hating Americans. Particularly from Hollywood. I had number of the as teachers. They were often very talented in their specialities but were moral nullities. Their hatreds overwhelmed their moral sense and my tweener moral sense was perhaps poorly undeveloped, but certainly sophisticated to smell out haters when I sniffed them. America hating Americans: a very tedious, unsophisticated and childish tribe. If found them to be a profound embarrassment when I was younger and cared.
Bill,
If what you say is true ( and I don’t doubt it), where do we go from here?
John Podhoretz picked his fight through a post at the Commentary website, which recently terminated reader comments at the urging of its editor – John Podhoretz. Actually his post reads more like an ill-considered reader post, and would undoubtedly have spawned numerous well-considered ones if Commentary – NoCommentary? – still allowed them.
Just the facts, Ma’am
Based on what is known of Obama:
Could he obtain a security clearance ?
Would you want your sister to marry him ?
Would you vote for him as President of the US ?
All I know, and need to know, about the man,
I learned by watching his campaign for President;
The unending series of bad moves since his election
is redundant confirmation of his unfitness for office.
“Based on what is known of Obama: Could he obtain a security clearance ?”
Glad you raised this question. Could he obtain a security clearance? Yes. In fact, he DID get the top level of security clearance in 2004 when he joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, with access to our intelligence on nuclear issues, etc. (Aside: you think he would have gotten such a security clearance if the FBI had any question about whether he was born in Hawaii, or if he was lying about anything in his past?) And as president, I am willing to bet he has unfettered access to any state secrets he wants, since he has the US nuclear football and is the commander in chief.
“Would you want your sister to marry him ?”
No, because he is already married and so is my sister. Indeed, he has been married to the same woman for about 20 years and, from what anyone knows, been totally faithful to her, too. He has two wonderful kids, both by the wife and born after they married, to whom he is a good parent. He is, in all respects, quite conservative in his own private life. But to answer your question, if Obama and my sister were both single, I think they would get along well.
“Would you vote for him as President of the US ?”
Yes. And I did in 2008. If the GOP had run someone better, I would have voted for him or her.
“All I know, and need to know, about the man, I learned by watching his campaign for President;”
What did you learn, exactly? And maybe more importantly, why do you think the majority of the country, i.e., “real America,” learned a very different lesson? Because not only did Obama beat his opponent handily, he did it by turning a lot of Red States blue and whipping the GOP among the young and the educated. You are left with a paradox: the vast majority of Americans like Obama personally, even if those who do not think he is doing a great job.
No matter what anyone says about Obama, the Democrats will run around crying: “mommy, they are being mean to me”. And the mainstream media will provide an echo chamber. They will frame the whole thing as controversy over the alleged meanness of Obama’s opponents, and their pundits will intone soulfully about how the opposition is alienating middle America by being so mean. Yawn.
McCain internalized that process, and it crippled his campaign.
John Podhoretz is a guilt tripped white dude. He deleted at least one of my comments on the Contentions blog before the election concerning white guilt and Barack Obama. Podhoretz apparently is the one who ultimately banned me from the site. I unhesitatingly asserted that Obama would stick it good and hard to whites. He had unresolved issues with them. The current president is existentially committed to the notion that whites are the oppressors of dark skinned individuals. They are responsible for most of the evil in the world. Needless to add, the evidence is now abundantly clear that I was right about Obama. I might mention that I’ve had similar problems with David Swindle of Front Page Magazine. Roger L. Simon was also initially upset with me until I mentioned that Shrinkwrapped, Phyllis Chesler, and I were essentially on the same page.
How many times have I declared that white guilt may be the greatest threat to the very survival of Western Civilization? I am not even slightly indulging in hyperbole. The narcissistic Obama is a poorly read and intellectually shallow man. Nonetheless, he is a genius when it comes to exploiting white guilt. This is, by far, the number one reason why he won the presidential contest. The man’s resume is a complete joke. He should be no more than another ho-hum Illinois state senator. Hollywood mogul David Geffen was one of the very first individuals to sense Obama’s ability to attract white voters. He called the inexperienced U.S. senator immediately after the famous Democratic Party convention speech in 2004. Geffen is brilliant in figuring out what attracts the masses. The guy is not a multi-billionaire because he is dumb. On a gut level, if not even consciously, he knew that Obama had the stuff to lead the Democrats to the Promised Land.
I thought Obama was elected primarily because he wasn’t either a Bush or a Clinton, and, secondarily, because McCain assured us that he was a good man.
I think to reduce Obama’s antipathy to America, the Western tradition, capitalism and so on to mere racial animosity is shallow, misses a whole lot of the point, and just invites ridicule and dismissal. I have little doubt he picked up some of the racial grievance catechism along the way. But I see little evidence that is his prime driver, or anything like it, He is a lot more Saul Alinsky than Jessie Jackson.
He sees Western Civilization itself as the prime oppressor of the world. Not because it is white, but because its culture, according to the influences his shallow thinking parrots, has consisted of exploitation, oppression, yada, yada. He seems to have no problem, for example, with Vladimir Putin, and Russians are notoriously racially chauvinistic. Obama obviously buys the entire Marxist narrative. Nearly all of his actions reveal that, and increasingly, so do his words, as he thinks he can let his guard down now.
“Not because it is white, but because its culture”
The radical left-wingers disagree with you. They fail to distinguish between Western Civilization and white people. You and I may adhere to the Matthew Arnold formulation that Western Civilization is merely the best that has been said and written—but your typical multicultural graduate of one of our so-called elite schools is convinced white people are the cause of most of the evil in the world.
Since Obama said his grandparents were racist, I would think his teenage mother’s involvement with a blue-black African might have been rebellion against them, rather than white guilt, and maybe partly for naming her Stanley.
Everyone on this thread is right, as are David and John. The American President is the most important job in the world, and Obama has a murky past which he continues to take great pains to obscure. So for this great job, we are left to reading tea leaves and speculating on Ann Dunham’s mothering and Obama’s academic record to fill in the considerable gaps. These academic speculations are important – we must theorize in order to make sense of him and his likely future moves. But a third world, anti-American upbringing and Ivy League Marxism are not mutually exclusive ideologies, just very unfortunate ones for an American President to have.
David P. Goldman is fundamentally correct about Barack Obama. Even if the latter’s poisonous views can be ascribed to his leftist education rather than to the prodigal women in his life, that simply means that his views were overdetermined. In the absence of his Harvard brainwashing, his mother’s brainwashing would have sufficed. The fact of the matter is that both causes were present, and both have done their insidious work.
There is one respect in which Obama’s views are partly foreign – Progressivism has its roots as a 19th century German import that ultimately polluted American (though British influenced) thought. But it’s been pretty thoroughly assimilated into mainstream American philosophy – particularly via Dewey – so one may as well call it native.
Being American, however, is no guaranteed inoculation against being wrong. Men have free will and can observe facts and think logically or not.
Best explanation is:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/04/obamas-afrocentrism-as-his-mothers.html.
“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.”
Etc., etc.
You could read Obama’s books, too, but the truth in plain sight seems to have become invisible.
The President is almost 49 years old…he lived, not full-time in Jakarta for four of those years. From the time he was ten years old until the time he first sought public office (approx. 23 year period), his mother resided in the U.S. for just six years–and only five of those were with her son. He saw his father once in his lifetime after infancy. He never lived with his stepfather past the age of ten. Yet, somehow, all these Commie/pinko/Muslim influences led him to act as the first and only U.S. President who is actively and openly moving to actually destroy the country he was elected to lead–as a concious act he is doing this.
Well, I guess since his grandmother was a Bank of Hawaii VP, that’s why he is protecting the banks. And his grandfather was an unsuccessful furniture salesman, and that’s why he is anti-small business. And he lived in L.A., and that’s why he bought up the automakers. And he lived in NYC, so that’s why he is so arrogant. And then he lived in Boston, so he must be a bigot on the inside. Just as logical as the conclusions drawn in this piece and by the armchair nuts…well, logical is the wrong word: idiotic, assinine, bizarro, take your pick.
Protecting the banks? Bush bailed out the banks and that is the only bailout I felt was needed. Most of the money lent has been paid back or attempted to be paid back. Some banks were even forced to go along with the deal. Now the President feels he should have the power to dictate how those banks operate, who they should loan to, what mortgages should be forgiven, when they can foreclose, how they compensate employees, how big they should be, and whether they can go to Vegas for a convention or training. Not to mention the new taxes on banks he’s proposed and the takeover of student loans. Lord help me if Obama ever tries to protect me.
I agree with Petey that far too much can be, and often is, made of Obama’s early influences. But childhood influences are hardly irrlevant, either. I remember my years aged 5-10 very clearly, and the influencer of the relatives I spoent all my time with was profound. Obama’s influences during his teen years in Hawaii were also shall we say, not exactly mainstream or America-friendly.
Claiming Obama’s Indonesian years made him inherently anti-American or some such, is clearly an absurd reach. But saying he grew up outside mainstream American culture is very obvious, from his own books and from most of what he says and does. He knows this country mostly from what he has been told about it from others. And the most influential of those others were not fans.
You left out a whole slew of influences. The grandparents were Communists too. The mother went to Mercer Island school where they taught Communism and used the Communist Manifesto.
Then there is the influence of Frank Marshall Davis, a friend of his grandfather.
Add to that the fact he went to Occidental and Columbia Colleges, both well known for student Marxist activism.
When he was at both of those colleges his friends were Marxist. His ideology was so obvious that another now ex-Marxist who knew him has stated that he was the real deal back in those student days.
Then in Chicago he sought out and befriended other known Communists such as William Ayers, Bernadine Dorhn, Michelle Robertson, Louis Frarrakhan, Rev Wright… to name but a few of those people.
The influences are obvious… and those influences are the sources of great hatred.
Bill Reeves @ no.5
Bill, thanks for the first-hand information. It certainly adds to the man’s background.
For a year or so before John Podhoretz became Commentary’s editor he was a poster at the “Corner” feature of National Review Online. There are only a few conservative big feet who are allowed this privilege, and I tended to tense up every time I came across his name because it seemed he was all too often going ballistic over something someone else had posted. He would — not always by any means but nevertheless on a regular basis — lose his temper and use abusive language to disagree with what someone else had posted, and then the rest of the Corner regulars would seem to collaborate with each other on line to soothe his feelings (or least that’s what it looked like to me as an outsider reading the thread). I was relieved when he left the National Review Online for Commentary — someone who cannot easily tell the difference between reasoned disagreement and personal attack does not belong in a collegial environment.
I get the distinct impression that one would not want to be an employee of The Commentary—especially if you are a recent university graduate. Race is a touchy subject. Norman Podhoretz, after all, wrote the famous essay, “1963 essay, “My Negro Problem–And Ours.” Here is a link to it: http://tinyurl.com/y4tdeb7
David Geffen and the early supporters of Obama knew what they were doing. Race guilt pervades American society. A white man would have had to chance whatsoever of pushing Hillary Clinton to the side. She lost the nomination fight because a black male outranks a white female in the politically correct hierarchy.
And because he is a compelling speaker, and she sounds like fingernails on a blackboard. And because the media backed him, not her. And because the money and power flowed to him more than her. But, yeah, let’s ignore all that and focus on race as the most important factor.
Okay, we’ll talk about race for a minute.
My own opinion on the 2008 Democrat primary campaign is that the wheels came off the bus for Clinton 2008 when Bill Clinton supposedly made the South Carolina primary about race. Prior to that, most of black superdelegates were pledged to the former first lady of our “first black president.” That support quickly eroded once the liberal political-media establishment began to ponder whether pointing out that, like Jesse Jackson before him, the black candidate won the primary in a state where black voters dominate said primary was or was not “playing the race card.” In other words, by trying to marginalize Obama’s win, Bill Clinton separated his wife from a constituency that had supported him, and was, for the most part, supporting her, if only because she was the establishment candidate and therefor a safer bet than the largely unknown first term Senator from Illinois. It was a colossal blunder, given the doubts that then existed about Obama’s “authenticity.” The smarter move at the time would have been to start a whisper campaign talking up his “white” upbringing.
Unless of course it was the Obama campaign that played the reverse race card by making the alleged intent behind Bill Clinton’s remarks the issue. That intent, according to Obama supporters and navel-gazers alike, was to remind everyone that a Black candidate couldn’t ultimately win out. So, is Mr. Thomson right when he says that Obama “is a genius [at] exploiting white guilt?” I’m inclinded to think so, if by white guilt what we’re talking about is the hypersensitivity to the allegation of thoughtcrime brought about by political correctness. And by exploit we mean allowing himself to be carried along in the wake of the racial grievance mongers and pc scolds.
On the other hand, maybe Bill just couldn’t stand the thought of being in Hillary’s shadow, and he meant to blow up Hillary’s campaign.
Wheels within wheels.
“Forget all that talk about President Obama’s family history when he was young, or who his parents were. Certainly, they had influence on him and while the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, once he turned 18 he was able to make his own choices.”
You’re more forgiving than I am. As the Catholic schoolteachers used to say, “give us your child for the first 7 years, and you’ll have a Catholic for life.”
Mr. Obama has NOTHING but leftists in the important roles of his childhood, early adult and young adult life. Fatherless children quite often develop certain emotional / moral characteristics. You want to dismiss them, which is understandable were it not for the fact that a 30-something Barack wrote a book titled “Dreams from My Father.” His father was a Marxist who abandoned his son to go oppress his own native Kenyans.
If you have an issue with citing Mr. Obama’s past when discussing who he is at present, you should begin with Mr. Obama and his autobiography.
I suppose the fact that Obama’s mentor’s FBI file has been somehow deep-sixed is irrelevant too.
Richard Condon couldn’t have written a better novel.
He had an American birth, what’s lacking is an American soul.
What a terrible wound to the country.
Exactly! Which is the purpose of the Natural Born Citizen requirement to be POTUS and VP in Article 2 Section 1 clause 4. Natural Law requires that a nation be led by one of it’s own, from within, an indigenous citizen.
Obama admits that at birth his citizenship was “governed” by Britain (due to his father’s Kenyan citizenship). He owed allegiance to a foreign power and was an admitted dual citizen at the time of his birth. Natural Born Citizenship requires the unity of Blood and Soil to form a citizen which is naturally the citizen of and with allegiance to, only one country.
Obama is not an eligible Natural Born Citizen and he knows it, no matter if born in the White House.
Interestingly, if I recall correctly from his biography, it was Obama himself that realized while watching a movie with his mother that she had a kind of “jungle fever”.
My recollection is that he was kind of disappointed with her on that point.
I think that BHO is both the sum of the influences upon his life and his own response to them.
We do know his mother was a left-winger, and it is a known fact that she knew her father’s good friend Frank Marshall Davis, known Communist and black activist, growing up in Hawaii. There has been speculation that she had an affair with Davis while quite young.
It’s a fact she married Obama Sr. and had the child BHO. Whether O Sr. was the father and/or where BHO was born are not known facts: I’m not saying he was born outside the US or that someone else (Davis?) was the father, but we don’t have the DNA evidence of paternity that could easily be determined or a credible birth certificate.
It’s a fact his mother married an Indonesian and that BHO lived in Indonesia for about 4 years, attending a Muslim school at least part of the time, and that his religion was listed as Muslim on school records. Just sayin’. We really don’t know what he thought then or what his mother thought.
Upon his return to Hawaii, he lived with the grandparents in comfortable circumstances, but not privilege. It was a somewhat incongruous situation: he was attending the most prestigious private preparatory school in Hawaii — indeed Punahoe is one of the most prestigious in the whole West, if not the whole US and was where the social and military elite of Hawaii sent their kids — and at that same time, his grandfather arranged for him to be mentored by Communist Frank Marshall Davis. These are facts. We don’t really know how left wing the grandfather was, although his friendship with Davis and the incident with his reaction to the grandmother being worried about some thuggish-seeming blacks would suggest he was well to the left of the then American mainstream. No one knows how well BHO did at Punahoe.
BHO began college at Occidental, a good private college in Los Angeles. In his own words, he associated with the radical feminist and Marxist students and faculty. That’s about all we know of his career at Occi. We do not know how it was financed.
BHO then transferred to Columbia. How? That was not quite a lateral transfer: Occi is good, but not at the same level as Columbia. It’s usually difficult to transfer “up” and only those with very strong records or some particular interest (influence) ususally do so. Was his record that good? Who supported the transfer? Why? These are legitimate and basic questions. We know little about his Columbia years, though he was apparently (from the only writing we’ve seen) a radical. We also know – I saw a comment from someone who supported his law school application – he was not an exceptional student at Columbia. Did he meet Ayers then? We just don’t know.
We also don’t know how he got into Harvard Law (ordinarily difficult, even for blacks with good degrees), who supported his application (pull?) and how he paid for Harvard. We don’t know how well he did. Was he a write on to Law Review?
Then, of course, there’s the whole Chicago career, both before and after law school. All in the radical world of community organizing, the Ayers’, the New Socialist Party, activist law, etc.
It looks to me like BHO literally doesn’t know anything other than radical thought, and that he doesn’t know any history to speak of.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter whether his radicalism comes from his mother and grandparents or from his education: they are all of a piece, and he segued from one radical environment into the next, in most cases the sort of comfortable radical environment in which one lives a very bourgeois life while denouncing the bourgeoisie.
John Podhoretz, meet your argument … poof, it’s gone.
I think it’s all rather irrelevant at this point as to how Obama got to be who he is other than from a historic perspective. We should have been looking at this, and many of us were, before the election and warning others, and many of us were, that he was not who he portrayed himself as being. No one believed us and now all we can do is say I told you so.
There’s too much of an air about of the “Someone should tell Stalin these terrible things are happening – he would do something if he knew!” variety. Face it folks: BHO is a Leninist of the classic Comintern variety. There is *absolutely no chance* he is not a Communist, whether or not he is aware of the pedigree of his thought. But of course he isn’t an idiot; he obviously knows. He was insulated from the World by these mentors, university environments, and community organizing, a revealingly vacuous concept. The man’s biography career are *unreal.* He was grown like a hothouse flower, and here he is today. He is a Leninist. Accept it.
CatoRenasci:
Thank you. Excellent summary!
John Podhoretz is a mercurial fellow. Anyone who used to follow him on the Corner has seen him blow up before, and when he generally accuses his opponents (on the right!) as being either insane, evil, or both. His insults aim at destroying the other guy and leaving himself on a moral pedestal. He’s a weird cat.
BHO worked as a carpenter? Really? He did hard, skilled work in the hot sun, in a cramped crawl space, a cold, windswept construction site? Somebody trusted him with a circular saw? He could drive home nails at arms length above his head? Run up and down an extension ladder?
Really?
My thoughts exactly! Barry would be afraid to break a nail or get sawdust in his eyes.
The more likely scenario would be that Barry was hired on as a ‘gopher’ rather than actually doing any carpentry work.
Given that you have to be an apprentice for awhile I think Delia is probably correct.
In many ways he’s a product of the left oriented education system he grew up in. Had he been born ten years earlier he might have been a back to the land enthusiast. Instead of learning to “get together with Brother Ass” he learned to emulate leftist intellectuals who were so superior to the rest of us. It’s clear his family failed to instill integrity as a core value. Or maybe he lost it after studying Marx and Alinsky. So much of his sources of income spent on expensive travel and education are hidden that it’s fodder for countless speculation and, hopefully, entertaining conspiracy theories. But we may never get why he bows to dictators and a Florida mayor. He may not know either.
Thank you Mr. Ledeen for your insightful critique of the two men. I find myself leaning more towards Spengler’s reasoning than to Mr. Podhoretz’s. The latter is a talented writer who, when he restricts him self to reviewing the arts, is well-worth reading, but, like Corner Reader pointed out, is unbearable when he opines on other matters.
Over at Washington Rebel, Rob De Witt has penned a slightly different take on BHO that is well-written and well-reasoned and I commend it to you all:
http://washingtonrebel.typepad.com/washington_rebel/2010/04/jump-how-high.html
In law, and very reasonablly, a person is imputed to have intended the natural and probable consequences of his action. If O’s actions will probably lead to bankrupting our future, it is probably what he intended. If alowing Iran to have the bomb, likewise. If Israel is put in danger of its existance, he knows it. If children will be aborted, he doesn’t mind. If government leans totalitarian and he emulates, lauds and cavorts with dictators and surrounds himself with pederasts, communists and thieves, well, that is the window to who he is.
Well he is certainly not a Natural Born Citizen.
http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/04/10/lifelong-democrat-breckinridge-long-natural-born-citizen-means-born-on-the-soil-to-a-father-who-is-a-citizen/
Nobody with the least acquaintance with the real world could find much in common between Obama’s rather conservative politics and some sort of rabble rousing leftism. American democrats are rather to the right of the mildest variety of European social democrats or even German or French conservatives. They’ve got a lot more in common with Eisenhower than with Mao, but then, as I remember, you’re ideological forebears did think Eisenhower was a communist.
I chalk it up the political fantasies on this site to the psychological mechanism of projection, especially when I consider how you treat even the mildest criticism of the United States (let alone Israel) as a heinous thought crime and yet harp endlessly on the purported taste of your political enemies for mind control. The only extreme radicals with any pop on the American political scene are you reactionaries who faithfully reproduce all the worst features of would-be revolutionaries including, as this particular discussion underlines, a tendency to personal viciousness and the imputation of criminal motives to the people you dislike without any evidence whatsoever. Well, I will admit you are overachievers. The Marxists merely dreamed of a classless society, but you’ve already managed a total lack of class without any visible effort. Congratulations.
i can’t resist: Jim Harrson’s got an appropriate name for his blog.
I might be Catholic but I cannot read Latin
and looking at the name of that blog, I will take a stab and suggest that it is saying something like “vacuous and hot air” 
You’ve obviously never read – to pick but one book out of hundreds – Lenin’s “Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder.” Available free online. You’ll probably find it interesting. You probably have no idea about what Marxism or Marxism-Leninism really are, do you? You probably picked up what you take to be M-L from leftwing stereotyping of its “right wing” opponents, didn’t you? See: just like in Ghostbusters, “you never studied.” You think the “right wing” invents all these ideas about who’s a Communist, who a Socialist. You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about, do you Jim. Go, little grasshopper, go! Go to http://www.marxists.org! There’s a whole real 20th century there waiting for you!
Whether Obumble’s “thought” process stems from his parents, his Welcome Back Koran school days, his academic brainwashing, or the nasty pea soup of it all jumbled together, the result is he’s ended up in a all-too-common Leftist place best exemplified in the famous quote from Susan Sontag.
Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.
Much of the Harvard faculty would agree fiercely with this corrupt and demented statement, as would Barry O. That’s where his head is at. From this, all things follow.
Ledeen is disingenuous as usual in claiming to be baffled by Podhoretz’s disgust over Goldman’s “speculation about [Obama's mother's] sexual history,” as merely a statement “that she married a Kenyan and then an Indonesian, and produced children from both.”
Yes, a statement that a white woman expiated her guilt “by going to bed with Muslim Third World men” is EXACTLY the same as saying she married and had children with a Kenyan and an Indonesian.
Which is why we’ve so often heard McCain or Bush described as the loyal sons of women who “went to bed” with white American men.
Speaks well for the commenters here that not a single one of you is bothered by this.
i agree that David should have phrased it as I did.
Doesn’t really bother me. (1) Sounds most likely true, and anyway (2) everyone’s too sensitive about this kind of crap. What do you think her mother and father thought she was doing? Something cognate with Spengler’s characterization, no doubt. “Well looks like our silly little communist daughter’s found another colored man to show us what freedom really means… Again…” Although I don’t really get the Muslim preoccupation re Obama. He’s obviously not a Muslim; no hothouse Ivy League flower of the Obama variety is capable of practicing an actual religion. As David Brooks pointed out, their resumes are their religion, and lo it is a jealous one.
Since Ann Dunham was pregnant at the time she married the man Obama claims was his father, I think the imputation of “went to bed with” is justified. As to how guilty she felt, I dunno. Maybe she just thought he was sexy.
While two instances are not necessarily a trend you have to take into account the other factors that go into that analysis, who she hung out with for example and her politics.
I may have some insight into this. As the child of lefties, a sister of mine (raised in another state), rebelled by shacking up with a Muslim guy she (horrors!) threatened to marry.
This had the intended effect of shocking what was essentially an un-shockable parent. Thus I think Stanley’s choice of bedfellows was a pointed act of hostility toward her parents.
BTW, I know of a lot of girls given male names by their fathers. Those with a healthy sense of selve grow beyond the anger.