… making up a girlfriend as a plot device to prove his black bonafides …
“In Dreams from My Father, Obama chose to emphasize a racial chasm that unavoidably separated him from the woman he described as his New York girlfriend,” Maraniss writes, offering a passage from the book in which they go to see a play by a black playwright:
One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over, my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust, I think I said—and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said that anger was just a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.
“None of this happened with Genevieve,” Maraniss writes. “She remembered going to the theater only once with Barack, and it was not to see a work by a black playwright. When asked about this decades later, during a White House interview, Obama acknowledged that the scene did not happen with Genevieve. “It is an incident that happened,” he said. But not with her. He would not be more specific …
… as Obama’s whole success as a President, from the millions of jobs he’s created, the drop in unemployment, a thriving economy and even to stopping the rise in sea levels, has been nothing but imaginary.
typical black American humor
Racist!
Also, I don’t think Jews “remembering the Holocaust” is the same thing as “being angry all the time”. “Never forget” is not the same as “Never stop bitching and blaming white people, especially THE JEWS (and Koreans), for all your self-inflicted problems.”
Jews? Holocaust?
White House Cites Nazi Supporter In Jewish Heritage Month Proclamation
When we got back to the car she started crying.
why would they have a car?
You’d be taken more seriously, Pablo, if not for your name.
OT: Over at Ace, cob loggers revel in the power of this fully operational Presumptive Nominee:
Run what ya brung, boys. Meaning if the price of gas drops twenty cents, welcome to Term Two.
*I’ll say.
The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in a fucking movie theater full of people trying to watch a film.
maybe it’s just me, but
Sounds like the eternal question at the heart of Obama’s internal monologue.
Mathews got the right playwright, just the wrong play.
I’d wear my Team R outfit more proudly, but it makes my ass look too big. That and the pom-poms clash with my eyes.
nobody asks why Jews remember the Holocaust
So, do Jews really get together and watch movies intended solely for a Jewish audience? Movies that are effectively inaccessible to anyone outside of the group?
And how is it that intelligent and articulate Obama, who by the nature of his own professed internationalist upbringing shared next to nothing of the black American experience, is able to understand the movie yet is simultaneously unable to relate it to another person who likewise did not share directly in the black American experience?
Another instance where Obama is self refuting. He cannot help but patronize and insult one straw man in order to defend whatever group he chooses, a group he obviously elected to associate himself with, while also demeaning a third ‘other’ for her lack of inclusion, a state the apparently precludes her from any sort of understanding because she’s just not down with the experience (that he himself never had.)
It is rather amazing how a man so pathetic can strive to be be so insulting.
a state that…
It’s kind of creepy how fictional this man is – I mean how the story of the public character “Barack” varies from any normal, natural life. With this revelation – added to others – you really have to wonder who the real man really is.
The real man is a con-artist. It’s not too complicated, really.
The real man is a con-artist. It’s not too complicated, really.
I suppose what I’m getting at is how much it seems that he has been handled and groomed for so long. A con-artist usually serves his own interests. This is something apart. I can’t think of many people who would be so pliant as to go along with this consumption of his real self. He’s like the political version of Lady Gaga or something.
“. . . this consumption of his real self.”
I’m not clear then what a real self would be? Are you presuming there is some self present other than what Obama is? Sorry to be so block-headed, but it’s hard to project what that would be, or is, if that’s the way we should understand it.
In Obama’s case, he doesn’t know. He’s spent a lifetime trying on various silly hats looking for the one that’s him. POTUS ain’t it.
Mitt Romney is a con-artist. Barack Obama is better described as a sociopath.
Speaking of invented Obama women, meet Julia. Unlike Genevieve, Obama takes care of her for life.
The crew at Ace is now all about the horse race, pretty much like they always have been. They only seem to care if the nominee has an “R” next to his name and has been declared viable by their fellow pragmatists. So what if Romney was nominated mostly by voters in states that will never go for Romney in the general?
[Obama’s] like the political version of Lady Gaga or something.
He’s accepting the Democrat nomination this summer wearing a dog-meat dress.
Yeah, cranky, I have a hard time looking at Ace’s anymore. We’re told that Obama’s America is nothing but a rainbow-shitting unicorn, but in Team R’s America Mom will once again cool apple pies on the windowsill and Jeebus will smile down on the fruited plain.
Thomas D–re Jews and movies: Woody Allen ring a bell?
Sometimes I feel badly for the POTUS. He’s probably not a bad guy, one-to-one, and would have made a passable high school vice-principal. What he doesn’t get, and no pundit has the wits to note, is that he has been pushed into politics by white liberals who see in the guy answers to questions he doesn’t really care about. He’s not a victim, by a long shot, but rather the sort of guy who when he was elected State Senator and then Senator, didn’t realize that there was a whole section of his employers who cared about the fact that he made up parts of his autobiography.
“He’s probably not a bad guy . . .”
Ha! Kidding, right? That is, seeing as he’s nothing but a bad guy who’d be perfectly content to do nothing but lie to your face, one-to-one, just as he’s perfectly content to do nothing but lie to your face at whatever distance he stands to you now.
Speaking of invented Obama women, meet Julia.
Julia. Uh… yeah. Julia. This is how the ruling class sees us. As children to be led through a comic strip tale about a fictional girl, illustrated in friendly bold colors and pretty graphic design. Our fictional girl can grow up to be a heroine and a success, but only if we just tick the right box in November. It’s like texting your vote to Dancing with the Stars.
Don’t think that Romney’s campaign isn’t looking at that website, believing they need something just like it.
Political marketing is becoming indistinguishable from selling cable TV or iPads or perfume or organic fiber diet bars. And so what? Given that the octopus of bureaucracies that actually most closely affects our lives will remain unchanged no matter who wins, no matter what Barry or Willard promises, perhaps our vote is as unremarkable as our brand of cell phone.
Obama’s girlfriend was a fictional, composite character?
Huh. So much for opposites attracting…
One of the comments at the Politico story on this cracked me up…
“It was a very angry play, but very funny. Typical black American humor. The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church.”
That almost reads like he doesn’t consider himself a typical american black, he just smugly understands ‘them’ and their typical angry humor. He’s trying to sound sympathetic to yet detached from being black as if that tone has some dramatic thing to say about him and his life. How bizarre.
Just seen on Twitter:
@PoliticalLogic “I’m a little concerned that Obama is President for all 67+ years of #Julia’s life!”
Feature, not a bug.
Of course Julia only gets cared for for life if she makes it out the womb in the first place.
Glance at Ace mostly to get current headlines. But read it? Every third post is about a horror flick or superhero movie for teens. The substantive posts appear maybe once a day. Otherwise, the “I can’t believe Obama or his crew did X!” posts have become dull reading, littered with hackneyed meme humor. I mean, how many variations of tag lines about “What I promised to do in your mouth” do we really need?
It will be interesting to see, once Romney starts his Bush-Lite spending and moderation, if anyone over there posts any objections. Or will it become NRO with a potty mouth? Oh, wait. It is already.
I guess the morale is that to BArack all the white women he’s known just amorphously run together. He’s not dated white women ao much as he’s made contact with White Woman (TM). He has the phone number of an archetype that transcends mere matter and individuality, and they used to do things together. Naturally he had a lot to teach White Woman (TM) about life and politics in America.
What a strange strange bird. In a way I’d like Obama a little better if I knew for sure that he DIDN’T write this. I’d prefer to blame this on some academic lunatic shut-in who thinks in “deep” New Yorker-ish stories that John Updike would reject as too inhuman. The president should not be dumb enough to think like this and then tell people about it in a public medium.
morale -> moral
Obama’s entire life has been one endless college dorm bullshit session. I don’t think even Sartre could compete for such ennui and nausea.
Queen Bloomberg sends propaganda whore Josh Barro out with news you can use today
I don’t think Jews “remembering the Holocaust” is the same thing as “being angry all the time”.
Both Jews and Mormons have a reason to be angry all the time, but we got our revenge the best way of all: being successful.
Of course, that makes our former persecutors hate us even worse….
“He’s probably not a bad guy, one-to-one, and would have made a passable high school vice-principal. ”
I think he should have been a newsreader. He’d make a really good anchorman. He reads from a prompter and puts on airs of competence and hipness. That’s what newsreaders do.
you really have to wonder who the real man really is.
There is no real man. Narcissists have only their fictional selves, created to protect themselves from the intense pain of being made to feel utterly worthless. Remember Ward Churchill, the fake Indian who also invented his entire identity?
Like that.
Trust me, there’s nobody home. There’s not even a little man flailing wildly at the controls when you draw back the curtain.
With the exception of the U.S., every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has a value-added tax — one on business sales that functions much like a retail sales tax. It’s time for the U.S. to join that club.
The U.S. is still the most prosperous nation, head and shoulders above the others. Time to put a stop to this arrogant posture, and what better way to do it?
By the way, Josh Barro in fact will jump off a cliff if he sees his friends do it.
He’s probably not a bad guy, one-to-one
One-to-one he’s unbearably snotty, aloof, and condescending.
Unless you’re useful to him in some way, and then he might be charming.
One notes with a certain wry irony your moniker’s name source, Mr. Orwell.
Roddy, I too thought of Alvy Singer, Annie Hall , and “The Sorrow and the Pity”.
Trust me, there’s nobody home. There’s not even a little man flailing wildly at the controls when you draw back the curtain.
That is likely the absolute truth. Reading what has come out lately makes your skin crawl, when considering this is how he describes his romantic life. Can one date or sleep with a cipher? A ghost? A foul congregation of vapors? Michelle Robinson can, of that we can be certain. Talk about creepy.
Well, it was probably the first time in her life she was proud of her…
No, I won’t go there. Ahem.
Political marketing is becoming indistinguishable
Becoming?
Dude, we’ve been there for years.
I don’t. There isn’t one. See also palaeomerus:
Obama wasn’t raised to be a person, but to serve as an archetype — and I don’t think the notion of individuality has any place in either his worldview or his self-concept. He really does see himself as The First Black President of the United States, and no more.
As a consolation, Barack sent his date a boxed set of “Shoah” on DVD, but it was in PAL format.
Dude, we’ve been there for years.
I know, I know. It’s just that this execrable “Julia” page at Barry’s website really encapsulates the children’s book flavor of his marketing.
I won’t say Obama isn’t comfortable in his own skin, because that would be racist. But I’ll bet only half of him is.
So Obama took “Julia” to the play?
Anyone following this weird story about some Romneybot staffer getting axed purportedly because he is gay?
http://bit.ly/J2Npoh
Is this the way Mittens is supposed to suck up to conservatives? Fire a gay guy? Or do I have this all wrong? Is this pretzel of a story much more complicated? Probably, but who cares? It’s emblematic of how enervated our politics have become. This story is so “inside baseball” that it’s only out there to give wonks something to cover. You might think we could spend our time asking Mitt just how wide his government “safety net” will be, or how strongly he will push for a federally mandated minimum wage adjusted to inflation, or precisely what parts of Obamacare he wants to keep.
But you would be wrong.
“Anyone following this weird story about some Romneybot staffer getting axed purportedly because he is gay?”
Was Leviticus involved somehow?
George, the guy wasn’t fired he quit, over the Romney camp’s objections. This was prior to ever actually starting the gig. Apparently, they wanted him to keep a low profile until the the various firestorms regarding him blew over. He chose not to.
Has Dan Savage been notified? Have anti-bullying cruise missiles been launched?
They ought to counter with “Winston”, if you get my drift and I know that you do. Adventures at MiniLuv or some such.
Pablo says May 3, 2012 at 10:38 am
Hmm. Okay. What puzzles me is why this should be a story at all, given what else is out there. I guess if it has “gay” in it, it gets space. Just another attempt to smear Mitt as a hater, I suppose. Mitt’s problem is hardly that he is too divisive. There is no aisle he won’t cross.
Mr. Orwell, I tried to follow the story, but found myself becoming more confused and caring less and less about getting unconfused. I think you’re right, this gave some Beltway geeks a chance to get all wee-wee’d up over stuff us’n bitter clingers don’t get.
Yup.
Yup. But he’s not Obama and he has that nasty R, so…
In my morning funemployment sloth, I flick on Rush and he’s playing Elizabeth Warren rationalizing about her Native American identity. My Gaia, this woman sounds like a complete moron, babbling about “high cheekbones.” Massachusetts can really produce some top-shelf lunatics.
And the big stink among the usual suspects on the left about a gay political staffer being allowed to quit a major campaign allegedly because of things The Usual Suspects™ on the right (note the difference in presentation) said about him, was the first I’d ever heard of the guy.
It tells us something about Etch-A-Sketch’s leadership that he apparently reacted so defensively in the face of what amounts to assumptions about what The Usual Suspects™ on the right say or might say.
Next she’ll tell us her grammy did beautiful beadwork, and admonish Scott Brown to walk a mile in her moccasins before saying nasty things about her again.
CNN was all over this yesterday. Mitt hates teh Ghey! Mitt is a pussy in the face of the right wing fringe Jesusbot nutjobs, like Bryan Fischer. Because reality isn’t news, apparently.
There was no mention of how Occupy tards tried to blow up a bridge Tuesday, though.
Ah, that must be it Pablo. I don’t watch CNN. Why waste good blood pressure medicine?
I’m not so sure about that. He also had a rather salty Twitter feed with a number of comments about prominent women in particular that leftists were picking apart. It doesn’t strike me as a bad idea to have the guy lay low while all that played out and burned out on both sides. They did not throw him under the bus.
Next she’ll tell us her grammy did beautiful beadwork, and admonish Scott Brown to walk a mile in her moccasins before saying nasty things about her again.
Now appearing at the North Boston Summer Stock Theatre: Elizabeth Warren in the stage version of “A Man Called Horse.”
I saw Barack playing the Jack Kevorkian role in the screen adaptation, “A Man Called Hearse.”
Good catch on Julia, Pablo. Rush is talking about it.
Like I said, I’d never heard of this guy until he resigned — I have no idea what you’re referring to. Who was saying what about whom and why were the leftists picking it apart?
he’s acting like someone what realized hey I can make a lot more money somewheres else and deal with significantly less bullshit, but that doesn’t mean Bryan Fischer and Focus on the Families and some random shithead at the National Review et al weren’t playing a raucous game of smear the queer, cause they were
bullies
Heh. Michelle Malkin has a good collection of tweets about Julia.
http://bit.ly/IIV6SA
I am also reminded Julia was the name of the ass which bore the knight with the gigantic nose (Pinocchio?) from Slawkenbergius’s Tale in Tristram Shandy.
Kenton Jacobsen@kentonjacobsen
It’s pretty sad when one candidate’s policies only benefit fictitious people #julia
julia!
ladies and gentlemen it’s… the cataracs
YankInGeorgia@YankInGeorgia
#Julia is impregnated by a bigamist from Kenya, who abandons her. She remarries, takes her child to Indonesia, and feeds him dog.
julia!
ladies and gentlemen it’s… the cataracs
Well, in the video Julia is an artificial white woman. That is Barack’s kind of gal.
good catch!
After years of contributing to Social Security, [Julia] receives monthly benefits that help her retire comfortably, without worrying that she’ll run out of savings…
This allows her to volunteer at a community garden.”
No mention of the forced collectivization of farms, so I guess we dodged that Stalinist bullet. On the other hand, “volunteering” in Obama’s world may be equivalent to “volunteering” when you are in the Army.
Nota bene at the original story’s link up top:
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this blog post stated that Obama had acknowledged using composite characters in the reissue. In fact, Obama acknowledged the use of composite characters in the first edition of the book.
When this whole story came up, the first thing I remembered was way back in 2007 it was already revealed that Barry fictionalized much of his “memoirs,” but the MFM refused to discuss this. It stayed at a low level among blogs actually interested in, you know… facts about Obama.
Obama’s girlfriend was a fictional, composite character?
Huh. So much for opposites attracting…
Boy, howdy!
“volunteering” in Obama’s world may be equivalent to “volunteering” when you are in the Army.
Ha! I was just going to say this.
Re: Obama’s ficticious girlfriend. I submit that there was no girlfriend, unless he was the girlfriend. He talks about himself so much in those “letters”, he sounds like the girlfriend in the Toby Keith song where he is lamenting that she talks about herself so much that he can’t get a word in edgewise.
Obama: So, then I blah blah blah…..Say, you’re not saying much.
GF: Well, I just–
Obama: Ha ha! Enough about me. What do you think about me?
At the end of Julia’s composite life,
IPABdeath panels await.http://bit.ly/IprweX
Julia, age -6months. Future Julia’s mom to be decides not to be and because of Obamacare’s coverage of birth control is able to satisfy her wish and make the choice for Julia to not be, at no cost to herself. Cost to Julia? Who cares.
With the help of some dusty old books that she found at an estate sale of an old country lawyer (she bought them for their bindings which would look fabulous in her lounge). She ended up leafing though them one night when her internet access was interupted–again, and there was nothing on the telescreen, and discovered that they covered a quaint notion of law with which she was unfamiliar.
It dawns on her that she is in possession of contraband, but it is like manna from heaven. Julia decides at the age of 21 that cradle to grave government intervention in her life is cramping her style. She must learn more about these Federalists and their refreshing ideas about liberty.
Someone elsewhere noted that Julia was the name of Winston’s girlfriend in my novel “1984.”
When you’re dead, your memory suffers.
You know, if you peel apart the pages of “Dreams From My Father,” you will discover a copy of “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism” by one Emmanuel Goldstein.
… and he ‘didn’t have a black bone in his body’
Well, we know he is half white. I guess we know which half.
“great ‘sexual warmth'”?
What the hell does that mean?
I read somewhere years ago, that in Obama’s case it is not “true what they say”. /lily von schtupp
“12 schnitzengrubers is my limit, baby!”
Here. He was the The Oppressor before he was The Victim.
lede, buried
Race in America 2012.
If my girlfriend is “composite”…do I have to remember her name in the morning?
I know I don’t have to remember our anniversary or buy her shinny stuff for her birthday. I’m just trying to figure out how much I can get away with at this point.*
*I bet I still have to get her something for Valentine’s Day
You know, you can see a really weird thing about our racial politics in this absurd Julia website. Julia… what color is she? She had to be some sort of color. You just know there were discussions about the palette of the design. She couldn’t be black or brown… why? She couldn’t be pink, because that would be “white.” So she’s yellow, perhaps “ffffcc” in hex values (web safe color). Asian? Is Julia of Asian extraction? Isn’t it racist to color people with Asian ancestry “yellow?” So she can’t be intended to be understood as Asian, right? Who the hell is she?
The Left insists we be painfully conscious of race in order to redress our obvious racial prejudices. Well, that must apply to our representations of people too. We hear about proportions of racial representation in movies and TV shows. Don’t we deserve to have it in campaign ads!
Where is the brown, black and pink Julia?
(Stealing from James Taranto’s Twitter thought) It would be unfair for me to make a shabby composite of my ex-girlfriends. Each is an individual, unique, and, each alone, determines the appropriate level of disdain they hold for me.
Truer words were never spoken.
“12 schnitzengrubers is my limit, baby!”
“Please, baby. I am not from Havana!”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/timstanley/100155478/why-it-matters-that-obama-dated-a-composite-and-ate-a-dog/ Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog…
Hint: It is something Breitbart (and before that PW) brought up. Lack of vetting.
It should be embarrassing to the media that most of the trenchant pieces casting a gimlet eye upon Obama have to come out of the UK.
———-
My Gaia, what am I saying? Embarrassment presupposes a sense of shame.
The British and to some extent the newspapers on the Continent have been covering a lot of things that our papers and news media don’t seem to feel are important or at least not as important as whatever their cause de jour may be.
And wtf with dem presidential candidates talking up Eliot? Is he the only poet they remember from high school or English 101 in college? There was a big deal made out of Kerry reading “Prufrock” back in the day.
Obscure reference, but here goes. The MFM’s relationship to Obama seems to be described by the giggling 14 year old girls stalking the pianist in “The World of Henry Orient.” The catty, blushing, obsessive devotion of the press to Barry seems right out of this movie. Frivolous pubescent girls crooning over a pathetic middle-aged, brilliantined “maestro” of politics, forever flitting from one political tryst to another, be it the “war on women” to student loans to “green” energy.
If “Julia” is any measure, this guy ain’t any kind of maestro, and never was.
Romney hired a jackass and didn’t want to catch flak for it? Well, one of these things tells us about Mitzi. Maybe both. I’m leaning toward both: Romney’s an idiot AND a wuss.
http://bit.ly/JuJT1o
Best viewed upside down.
“Julia” shouldn’t be too hard to find. How many places in the last 3 years have hired noob Web Designers and then kept them on ever since? SEIU, maybe?
I’m newly familiar with him myself, but he apparently came well recommended. Regis endorsed him, and I’m not gonna argue with a ‘stache like that.
Hmm. Althouse sees Oedipus in the imaginary girlfriend.
Take a look a the picture at the head of the column.
I think she looks more like this woman than this one.
At IOTW, Obama solves all of Julia’s problems before she has them.
Been there tweeted that.
She does look like Bernardine, doesn’t she?
She looks like Sandra Fluke…only less beefy and moon faced.
[…] on what hit the internet yesterday, Romney can put Obama on the defensive about wearing skirts or imaginary girlfriends. And since you can’t talk about economics for six months straight, doing so serves a clear […]
Ah, serendipity. Self discovery. It’s like when you wake up at the garage sale and the auto-pilot is off and you open your bleary eyes and you wonder “Why am I buying all this macrame stuff to put around my old bronzed black ceramic 70’s lamp? What the hell happened to me? Why do we no longer wear gold watches? What is real? What do I really think about various stuff? Does cheese actually taste good or did I train myself to like it like beer and okra ? Who am I? Why do my jeans have a fob-watch pocket? What happened to those sharp handled plastic combs we had in the back pockets of our shorts in the early to mid 80’s with our half tucked long OP t-shirts? Why did I dress like that? Why did I buy Jordache jeans that had no room for my scrote? Why did I buy a pair of checked vans? I live in central Texas? The only part of the Pacific Ocean I’ve ever seen first hand is Puget Sound! ” I’ve never even seen San Francisco bay! ”
Here’s someone who feels the same way about art and blogged about it.
http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/im-sick-of-pretending-i-dont-get-art
pala, have you ever seen the execrable show “The Next Great Artist” or some such? It’s is full of angsty whiny hipster/hippy douches who make “art” that is generally the same crap described in the article you liked. Bonus points for guys: Lots of boob shots from the exhibitionist angsty chicks.
linked not liked
This is the part where I point out that one of the Frankfurt School’s goals was to transform art into a display of pointlessness and ugliness.
From what I’ve seen of modern art, I believe they were successful.
I have a friend who’s a very highly-regarded conceptual artist, and while sometimes her work has a modicum of wit, I usually tell her that “I like it a lot” and hope that I don’t projectile vomit while I’m saying it.