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Building the Perfect (Progressive political) Beast

What do we know about Barack Obama, the earl(ier) days? Not much, save what he’s written for us in his pair of autobiographies.

But even there, it seems not everyone agrees with his recollections — and didn’t in 2005, well before Barack O! was a Presidential contender.

But, you know. Literary license. Self-fulfilling narrative inscription. The vagaries of memory. The incorrigibility of Truth.

Hayden White knows what I’m talking ’bout. Can I get an amen…?

22 Replies to “Building the Perfect (Progressive political) Beast”

  1. happyfeet says:

    The thing is, while Baracky was doing his $12,000 a year community organizey job, he had his student loans placed in forbearance. So basically he just paid interest probably, if that. With a Harvard Law degree. This is called “giving back” but really it’s called taking the money and not paying it back until you’re darn good and ready. People who paid their student loans like they had agreed understand what I mean.

  2. happyfeet says:

    Also Baracky said he had money in the bank but M’chelle said they didn’t pay back their student loans until he got his crazy book money. Slacker.

  3. mojo says:

    Gosh, puffing up the resume? I’m shocked!

    Not.

    I’ve been saying this dingleberry’s as fake as Joe Biden’s smile for how long now?

  4. Sdferr says:

    Who that sees this “…[several pages on his suffering half-sister] …a few months after Auma called, I turned in my resignation at the consulting firm and began looking in earnest for an organizing job. …” and simultaneously knows about the half brother found living on a few dollars a year in a hut in Kenya a couple of months ago can avoid wondering at this great man Obama’s enormous capacity for absorbing into his own conscience others’ human suffering and acting to end that suffering by selflessly offering himself up for the awful responsibilities inherent in the Presidency?

  5. I defecate in PBS tote bags says:

    I’m so tired of the saintliness of self-sacrifice crap in his fake biography. While this clown wasted his twenties whipping up a bunch of toothless illiterates to agitate for asbestos removal, chumps like myself used our fancy educations to make lots of money and pay a small fortune in taxes to build the projects his freeloader subjects inhabited, fund the asbestos removal and jobs programs he agitated for and subsidize the nauseating organization ACORN on whose behalf he gets to play the penniless martyr. The guy is an assclown and has no business in the oval office.

  6. dicentra says:

    Hayden White. He’s the dude what established New Historicism, wherein you cannot tell the difference between fictional accounts and factual accounts because they’re rhetorically identical (dur, both being created with language, which is the medium both for telling the truth and lying).

    So it’s OK for historians to spin stuff, because there’s no way you can relate history without doing so. Ergo, there’s no need to get all insistent on whether a history is written fairly or truthfully, because they’re all imbued with narrative tropes. Just sit back and analyze the tropes!

    Accuracy delenda est!

  7. Sdferr says:

    Jesus was a Community Organizer. Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

  8. Diana says:

    Well … he does smile purty.

  9. Hadlowe says:

    So, we’ve got a fabulist at the top of the ticket with a plagiarist in the second slot? I guess this opens alot of doors for future candidacies.

    Stephen Glass/Jayson Blair 2012

    Did we ever find out what happened to Obama’s nutty attic uncle who rescued the Jews from Auschwitz?

  10. JBean says:

    The thing is, while Baracky was doing his $12,000 a year community organizey job, he had his student loans placed in forbearance.

    I don’t know, happy, did he really have student loans? We just have his word for that. Oh, and that $12,000 — Byron York asked his Baracky’s old boss about that, and O could have been making $30,000 by the end of a year of so. Not great, but not bad for somebody who can make their own hours while not really having to show any results.

  11. Bob Reed says:

    O! is a legend in his own mind…

    Just read his book!

  12. JBean says:

    Ergo, there’s no need to get all insistent on whether a history is written fairly or truthfully, because they’re all imbued with narrative tropes. Just sit back and analyze the tropes!

    Well, yes, that works great, except when the media puts forth the “narrative tropes” as fact — because The One said so! (Not to mention that it’s so much easier just to copy out of a book rather than actually report something original.)

    But if they’re challenged, well, you know it’s just a trope, dude — lots of literary license, and, of course, diversity!

  13. ushie says:

    Well, if leftism is narcissism, then of course Obama is their king.

  14. Ric Locke says:

    “Historians, you think,” said Miss Tilney, “are not
    happy in their flights of fancy. They display imagination
    without raising interest. I am fond of history–and am
    very well contented to take the false with the true.
    In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence
    in former histories and records, which may be as much
    depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually
    pass under one’s own observation; and as for the little
    embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments,
    and I like them as such. If a speech be well drawn up,
    I read it with pleasure, by whomsoever it may be made–and
    probably with much greater, if the production of Mr. Hume
    or Mr. Robertson, than if the genuine words of Caractacus,
    Agricola, or Alfred the Great.”

    Regards,
    Ric

  15. Pablo says:

    Pontius Pilate was a Governor.

    Like Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter and Mike Dukakis.

  16. mojo says:

    Grandpa was a carpenter
    He built houses stores and banks
    Chain smoked camel cigarettes
    And hammered nails in planks
    He was level on the level
    And shaved even every door
    And voted for Eisenhower
    cause Lincoln won the war.
    — John Prine

  17. B Moe says:

    If heartaches was commercials, we’d all be on TV.
    -John Prine, too.

  18. Mikey NTH says:

    To write a good autobiography, I think, you have to wait until all your contemporaries are dead. Else it is likely to get eaten by a pig.

    I read that somewhere.

  19. dani says:

    check out the wikipedia entry for Business Internatinal. someone has made sure to insert some comments about their side consulting business and the direct client meetings. you know, just in case anyone investigating obama’s claims decides to look up BI.

  20. WillNotBeFooledByObamaNATION says:

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