Just read it. Because this here is fascinating, particularly when paired, mentally, with Stanley Kurtz’s work on Obama’s past, and with the bits and pieces of information coming in from the loons concerning Obama’s transcripts or birth certificate, etc.
A bit:
Intellectually, Obama has always been a consumer, having left no record of formulating new ideas or of penetrating old ones. Politically, he is a follower and figurehead: having grown up in the ever branching stream of socialist voluntary organizations, he surfed its leftward eddies, never forming or leading a faction. He was handed a safe seat in the Illinois state senate, a nearly safe one in the U.S. Senate, and was surprised when Harry Reid informed him that influential Democrats wanted to run him for president. The Democratic campaign of 2008 pushed against an open door. As president, he rides his party’s center of gravity.
In short, Barack Obama himself is not that remarkable. He can give a rousing political speech, of course, but that is usually not sufficient to get oneself elected president. So, since he seems to have been reading from a teleprompter all his life, and since words certifiably his own are both few and opaque, it is most fruitful as well as relevant for us to focus on whom and what he has been following.
What accounts for his smooth, unlikely ascent? Both his advancement and his character seem most likely attributable to the network into which he was born, and out of which he never stepped for an instant. That network’s privileges, wealth, and intellectual-social proclivities always depended to some extent—and nowadays depend more than ever—on its connection with the U.S. government. Its intellectual and moral character, like that of modern government itself, has always been on the left side of American life and, as such, has undergone splits and transmogrifications surely the most important of which in our time combines upscale social norms with radical disdain for the rest of America. Barack Obama came of age through these.
[…]
According to hagiography, Barack Obama was born to a hippy girl from an insignificant family and raised in poor circumstances, out of which he rose through brilliance. Yet his haughty demeanor, his stilted language when off the teleprompter, his cultural likes and dislikes, bespeak an upbringing in an environment at once so upscale and so leftist that it makes him almost a foreigner to ordinary Americans. No one raised in ordinary American circumstances, much less straitened ones, would cite with a straight face, as Obama did, the price of arugula at Whole Foods, the yuppie boutique, as an example of the cost of living. No one at home in American culture could refer to a U.S. Marine medical corpsman as a “corpse-man.” Nor do ordinary folk talk about (or even understand) the need to “change the rules of power” in America. “Rules of power” belongs to the argot of doctrinaire nouveau socialists. How many American college kids would describe, as did Obama, his studying with Marxist professors as an attempt not to look like a “sell out”? No. Obama’s official story is counterintuitive.
Consistent with the Barack Obama we know, however, are his real family, his real upbringing, and his real choices of profession and associates. His mother’s parents, who raised him, seem to have been cogs in the U.S. government’s well-heeled, well-connected machine for influencing the world, whether openly (“gray influence”) or covertly (“black operations”). His mother spent her life and marriages, and birthed her children, working in that machine. For paradigms of young Barack’s demeanor, proclivities, opinions, language, and attitudes one need look no further than the persons who ran the institutions that his mother and grandparents served—e.g., the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as well as his chosen mentors and colleagues. It is here, with these people and institutions, that one should begin to unravel the unknowns surrounding him.
[…]
Two new books deal with Barack Obama’s paternal and maternal families. British journalist Peter Firstbrook’s The Obamas takes us all the way from the origins of East Africa’s Luo tribe to Barack’s father’s relationship with Barack’s mother. Generally fact-filled, it gives vivid portraits especially of Barack, Sr.’s, father, Onyango, who tried to raise a son as upright as he and was deadly disappointed when that son turned out to be a wastrel in the train of Tom Mboya, political leader of Kenya’s Luo. The closer the book gets to the present, however, the less trustworthy it becomes. For example, it tells us that Mboya organized the 1959 airlift of 280 Africans to study in America, bypassing the U.S. State Department. Nonsense. This was high U.S. policy and touted as such at the time. The CIA considered Mboya one of its most important covert action agents. The people chosen by him and the CIA to go to America were his flunkies. But the book is irrelevant to understanding the current president of the United States because his African family had only a biological influence on him. […]
The maternal family that raised Barack Obama, which is highly relevant to our understanding, is the subject of New York Times reporter Janny Scott’s A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. But though this book tells us that grandmother Madelyn Dunham’s favorite color was beige, that Stanley Dunham and daughter Ann (Barack, Jr.’s, mother) shared a certain impulsiveness, and contains interviews with and personal information on countless of Ann’s high school friends, it sheds no light on what the Dunhams were doing with their lives that led their daughter to take a practical interest in international affairs. Magically, Ann Dunham goes from peeking her shy 17-year-old head out of Mercer Island, Washington (“a young virgin,” writes Janny Scott), to intimacy with a very foreign person, and a few years later with another, and then to work in one of the Cold War’s key battlegrounds. Meanwhile her mother, about whose professional activities the book says nothing, becomes a bank executive. Did Ann speak any foreign language? Had the Dunhams ever taken any trips abroad? The book does not say. A Singular Woman gives the impression that Ann’s Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro, was just a geographer drafted into the army, a minor, unwitting part of the bloody campaign that wrested Indonesia from the Communists; and that Ann’s work in that country was anthropological-humanitarian, as if for her U.S. policy were irrelevant. It certainly was not for her employers—the U.S. government and contractors thereof.
[…]
Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen’s credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its “gray” and “black” activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily “witting” (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next.
Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack’s grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut’s elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham’s daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA.
Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann’s second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a “civilian employee of the Army.” But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA’s most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia’s dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible.
After the overthrow, Ann ran a “micro-financing” project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia’s most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late ’60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America’s official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore’s Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.
In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.’s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government’s then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.
…
…
Okay, I’ll say it. Just who in the hell is our President, anyway?
Perhaps Rick Moran can tell me. Because I sure would like to know.
(many, many thanks to newrouter; this piece is just wild)
Wasn’t that piece linked here about a month ago?
I don’t remember it if it was, Ernst. Which means I didn’t read it at the time.
New to me, as they say.
Just who in the hell is our President, anyway?
He’s a home grown Manchurian Candidate; the product of an eighty year genetic breeding program. No doubt Gozer the Gozerian is involved.
I think GeoffB linked it. I remember reading it and thinking “no more Manchurian Candidate jokes.”
Ah. Well, apologies to geoffB, then. I sometimes miss links in the comments.
damnit. I screwed up my own joke. He’s a home grown Manchurian Kwisatz Haderach.
The interesting thing for me, and it relates back to the Shelby Steele piece, is that it seems the east-Coast establishment types have been trying to “manage” American decline almost since the moment we became a superpower.
I saw the link only a few days ago in the comments here, but this is definitely worth a post. Everyone needs to read it.
My conclusion after reading the whole thing was if Obama had been vetted, there is no way he would have won. Then again, it sure looks like he was hand-picked for what he’s doing now, doesn’t it? The entire narrative of his life is a fraud. Future historians are going to look back on this and wonder what the hell we were thinking by allowing him to be elected.
Of course, none of this can be used against him now, unless the left does it. We can all point this piece out, and leave it at that.
Remember how SEK went after me for suggesting that, had his “autobiographies” been written with help, then “Barack Obama” is a kind of fictional character being played by the current occupant of the White House?
Yeah, well, then.
Stuff like that got me thrown out of the conservative intelligentsia, now being occupied by former “RIGHTWINGERS WANT TO CARPET BOMB ALL THE BROWN PEOPLE” purveyors like, eg., “Jazz Shaw,” and taught how language actually functions by lefties like SEK and Thersities (while relegating my arguments to “pseudo-intellectualism”).
Up is down, etc.
I linked it in a comment a couple days ago but sdferr sent me the link 6 weeks ago so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had linked it here back then too. Good piece and deserves all the linkage it gets.
Now that you remind me, I do remember that. It rang true to me then (given that we had some pretty good evidence that ‘Dreams…’ was not written by Obama, or at least was heavily edited by Ayers, but we could not be positive), and now we have even more evidence to back up “Barack Obama” as being a fictional character.
It takes a very strong sense of denial to keep up the farce that Obama is who he claims to be. Perhaps that’s why progressives tend to get so emotional about him. When you are emoting, it’s almost impossible to think rationally. Too much introspection would bring the house of cards crashing down; it’s better to keep screaming “RACIST!” at the top of your lungs than really think that you have wasted years supporting a man who doesn’t actually exist.
Ernst,
Angelo’s been on the “Both Dems & Reps are screwing us, it’s just a matter of degree” theme for a while now. Apparently, he’s been reading Outlaw! posts since at least 2010.
Fever dreams for me tonight. Can someone ask Angleton’s ghost about Cord Meyer and BIC?
Explains all the golf outings and vacations. Hard to stay in character 24/7. Many breaks needed.
Clinton too had more than a few mysteries around his life and he also had much of it left unexamined by the press as if the storyline might unravel if tugged on too hard.
oh i saw that at rand simberg’s place today but had read it earlier this week somewhere else i can’t remember.
“Just who in the hell is our President, anyway?”
Hell could be the key word there. (Oops, looks like I’ll be joining Jeff on the C.I. Team’s waiver wire)
This needs to go viral. Codevilla really knows how to nail these bastards dead to rights.
I think I’ve seen pieces of it, but this is the first time I plowed through the whole thing.
Indispensable.
“then “Barack Obama” is a kind of fictional character being played by the current occupant of the White House?”
Link
He shields the persona by controlling the environment, his MBM allies, and the prompter. He has a glass jaw, we just have to get him out of an environment that he controls, out from behind the MBM cannon fodder that is protecting him to their dying gasp. Which is what I was going for here.
ot momma grizzly news
Link
All that and he still manages to be absolutely no one. I suppose that would be the point.
Do we know for a fact that he didn’t actually kill bin Ladin? It would be at least a little comforting if SCOAMF were a secret badass.
“Can someone ask Angleton’s ghost about Cord Meyer and BIC?”
i tried:
Link
Mama Grizzly doesn’t seem to be running.
As Republicans debate, Palin expected in South Korea
That’s well beyond her self described drop dead date. I suspect she’s going to endorse Perry, and sooner rather than later.
You didn’t get thrown out, Jeff. Depending on how literally you take the term “intelligentsia”, that is. It’s one of those I didn’t leave the party, the party left me things.
“As Republicans debate, Palin expected in South Korea”
i think she wants another shot at the vp spot to show the “beltway boys” how it is done.
That seems a little off. Who does he claim to be that he isn’t? He is what he says he is, as far as biographical details go. But he’s also no one, and thus, everyone. This is a guy with a long history of walking into an argument, never taking a firm position and leaving competing factions all believing he was on their side. And he’s never produced anything that wasn’t vapor.
Our President is a fucking magic trick.
“Stuff like that got me thrown out of the conservative intelligentsia,”
nah it is a circle jerk: just google morrisey, moran and their sidekicks
Addendum: While he is who he says he is, he does not tell us everything he is. Which, Kurtz, Codevilla, etc. Thanks, guys!
Link
oh here’s the last of the poem
“All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame. “
Revelations and tells.
“The speech would be dignified, sober and important. But the planning turned out to be a mess, a mess that illuminates just how hyper-partisan politics have become on Capitol Hill at exactly the time Obama is calling for bipartisanship.”
@18 belmont club
” That was why the President couldn’t speak in the Oval Office, the East Room or just anywhere else. He needed the optics. He needed the setting. He needed the magnificence imparted, not by his presence, but by the props which surrounded him. Because if he didn’t need such things then it would imply that such trappings were unimportant and half of Washington would be out of a job. Therefore he needed a Joint Session of Congress to deliver his lecture to the nation.
Link”
From the link in geoffb’s #31:
The House of Representatives doesn’t work for you, asshole. Comity between branches of government doesn’t obligate the House to ask “How high?” when Feckless Leader mumbles “Jump.”
That Roger Simon character gives John Harwood a decent run for his money as the most credulous White House conduit in the DC media circus.
Reporters.
Too stupid to Google “George Mason University.”
Google it !
Too stupid to understand the significance of the google I guess… cause all I noticed was an entry that reminded me that they now have that POS Bball Coach Paul Hewitt that someone at GT finally awakened out of a racial coma and dumped.
Barack’s mom was kinda slutty I think
she’s a cia harlot so there’s that. plus slut walk in indonesia !!11!!
“While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore’s Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.”
the baracky spent some unpublished time there too. all in the family fun. good times and also the jeffersons
I meant slutty more like she was a whore what liked to fuck a lot and wasn’t very particular about who she spread her legs for
Obama could have given the speech yesterday, tonight, tomorrow — from the Oval Office.
He just needs him some pillars and marble.
Fuck the Democrats. Listen to them squeal. All it does is make people want to bitch slap the little whiny fucks.
Pablo, the hagiography of Obama doesn’t match the reality of Obama. He is a construct.
I saw in a crawl under the newsshow that Obama is going to be handing out some sort of medal or award to Jimmie Johnson and Nascar for service to the community. They did say this was going to be the most transparent administration ever.
“I meant slutty more like she was a whore what liked to”
jeez i went for the the trifecta of ’70’s shows and lost. sh*t i forgot rockford
these folks are bureaucratically still doing a ’70’s show. jimmy on steroids.
Mr. Obama the Junior certainly didn’t have his daddy’s way with the ladies. Or his momma’s, either. Little BHO didn’t have time: he found a Calling, a Mission, and as of yet no one has managed to sidetrack him. His power is not in backstroking the waters of academia, of intellectual pursuits; instead, he found community organizing, the moving of large numbers of people with magic words.
God help us if he ever masters the teleprompter.
He doesn’t claim otherwise, is my point. He’s slight of hand.
He’s an empty suit. A perfectly pressed empty suit.
An update to newrouters #20
“Palin Will Blast ‘Compromised Political Class’ in Iowa“
BLUF: The CIA used one of their operative families to produce an ’empty suit’ able to weave through the Marxist / Socialist political hierarchy and mouth their left wing political bromides to achieve . . .
1) the overthrow of a free market democracy.
2) the complete discredit of Marxist / Socialist policy.
Looks like #2 is occurring!
“Stuff like that got me thrown out of the conservative intelligentsia,”
Then they aren’t the intelligentsia are they? More like the nomencultura.
Our young president has to vacation a lot.
He has no depth.
It isn’t an act.
There is no “there” there.
Mueller, are you saying Obama is Oakland?
Raaaaacist!
I’d love to see the GOP walk out of the speech during one of the (I have no doubt) many times in which this asshole berates the republicans for the debt. Or better yet, they should just not show up. He’ll have one half of the house slobbing his knob with the other side empty. That would teach him to insist on something so ridiculous.
Or better yet, they should just not show up.
That would be best. No reason for the House Republicans to sit and listen politely to the speech kicking off a campaign that will largely be directed against them.
Given Baracky’s tendency to berate others and count on their sense of decorum to not cause a scene, I’d suggest allowing congresscritters to populate the gallery with “guests”. Give the invites to TEA party types and encourage heckling. Narcissism despises ridicule.
Peashooters
Spitballs
Pelting
Guffaw
Tickle
Sniggers
Targeted measures
Payroll tax holiday
Extend unemployment insurance
Ideas for infrastructure
Something to help repair the schools
Backlog of maintenance
Stock of public schools
Splat
SplatSplatSplat . SplatSplat
ThwapSplatSplat
I’d suggest allowing congresscritters to populate the gallery with “guests”. Give the invites to TEA party types and encourage heckling.
The problem I have with that is twofold:
First, Obama is doing a bang-up job of diminishing his office all by himself. We don’t need to help him.
Second. Just as we get no credit for refraining from Leftist tactics, we gain no advantage from engaging in them. I guess it’s our version of the soft bigotry of low expectations.
True, Ernst, but attempting an appropriate application of the “Wm. F. Buckley gambit” gets you some up-close-and-personal time with Secret Service.
But the planning turned out to be a mess, a mess that illuminates just how hyper-partisan politics have become on Capitol Hill at exactly the time Obama is calling for bipartisanship.”
This is utter bullshit. The administration picked the date and time they did because that’s the time they had open. They didn’t even think about the GOP debate or anything else. They simply don’t believe that some people don’t want to hear another speech from the professor. This happens over and over with these guys. We like to think that these guys have their nose in everything, but they don’t. Witness their public statements on the economy, these are people who actually believe that they can continue to spend and spend and this spending will create private sector jobs. They also believe that public sector jobs drive the private sector economy. They just don’t pay any attention to any evidence to the contrary. Then they accuse us “Reich wingers” of living inside an echo chamber.
I think it would suffice to publicly annouce that the emperor has no clothes.
Of course prior to that, it would be politic to express the hope that he doesn’t show up naked for once.
I don’t think that Obama has any trouble getting a different tee-time at any course he wishes to play at.
Normally, I’d agree —Hanlon’s razor and all that— but in this case I think they tried to upstage the Republicans. It’s not enough to give an “I’m still relevant!” speech or photo-op anymore. He has to try and show he is by overshadowing the opposition.
What we’re witnessing is the incredible shrinking Presidency of Barak Obama.
WWII redux.
So who are “we” at war with? Oh, right.
Strange noises from the tomb:
“Angleton! That BASTARD!!”
Considering that the entire purpose of the Obama “jobs” speech is to layout a “proposal” [quotes because the proposal may be vaporware like his “budget”] which will be declined by the Republican House so he can run against them by blaming them for the economy then this:
Could have been deliberate. He doesn’t want his proposal to succeed in being passed. It needs to remain a wishful vapor containing hopes and dreams. That is the place where progressive plans always do best.
His proposal will be more of the same stuff that got us here in the first place. Don’t worry, this time they’ll get it right.
#52
More like Detroit.
RACIST!!!!!11
Contra Ernst’s correct assessment of the proposed tactic, instead of TEA party types acting out perhaps we could instead insert false flag lefty types vocally demanding MOAR spending and decrying every one of Obama’s half measures as too little too late?
Some Code Pink type action regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Libya could also go a long way.
Image Barry during Question Time in the British House of Commons…
=^D
[…] one to ask, just who do you have to know to get such […]
heh, “schedule conflicts”. Barry knows from schedule conflicts after this week:
http://www.sbnation.com/nascar/2011/9/1/2399376/nascar-drivers-decline-president-barack-obama-white-house-invitation-jimmie-johnson-2011