[editor’s note: this post was submitted and published a couple weeks back, only I placed it under “pages” rather than “posts”. Oops. Also did this with a couple of my own posts, which I was convinced you all had simply decided to ignore. I now accept the error as mine and apologize for calling you all dickheads, and hoping all your cars got flat tires in the middle of Texas hill country – jg]
On bloggingheads, TNR’s John McWhorter to Glen Loury of Brown, at 20:10 “You and I have discussed off the record the, the strange hole in what he did up in Morningside Heights. We are both involved at Columbia this semester…”.
More
The Official Bio (Wikipedia , 29 April 2011)
79 – 81 California: Occidental
81 – 83 New York: Columbia, BA
83 – 84 Business International Corporation
84 – 85 NY Public Interest Research Group
85 – 88 Chicago: Developing Communities Project
88 – 91 Cambridge: Harvard Law School
91 – 04 Chicago: Visiting Fellow UC Law
95 “Dreams” is published
94 – 02 Board, Woods Fund
94 – 02 Board, Joyce Foundation
95 – 02 Founding President and Chairman of the Board, Chicago Annenberg Challenge
The Premise
Obama played the Birther Blowoff when Trump went on to his college records. They are the crown jewels, and must be hidden! They can’t release his class list because smart, observant people who went to Columbia at that time, who took and taught those classes, might wonder why they do not remember Barack Obama, in the immortal words of Sheriff Joe, a “.. mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” who would incidentally go on to become President of the United States.
The Back Story
79 – 81 California: Occidental & radicalization
81 – 85 Start Columbia, study socialism, connect with people. Rarely attend classes. Eventually convince the right people he is a serious person and gets himself onto the Left payroll, at Business International Corporation (and there is either something really, really funky here or it is another birth certificate-style honeypot ). After a thorough evaluation and shake-out, it was on to NY Public Interest Research Group and into the bosom of the NY left.
85 – 88 The team decides the Chicago socialists are more advanced; it is after all the home ground of the original First-Among-Equals, Alinsky. They send Obama to Chicago as President of the Developing Communities Project, he develops relationships with Pfleger and Ayers and the rest of the radical Chicago left. At some point he passes muster and the NY team fixes his Columbia records to get him into Harvard Law.
88 – 91 Harvard Law School
91 – 94 Chicago, and on with the plan. Tries and fails to write “Dreams”. Hands off notes to Ayers who completes manuscript. They now have two solid levers on Obama. He may have gone off the reservation sometime here, but eventually gets over it or just does the handoff to Ayers and is brought back into good graces (well, the kind where the party the team has something on everyone). The relationship is settled and Obama goes full bore, rewarded / entrusted with positions on the Board of the Woods Fund (first funder of Obama’s first Chicago job) and the Joyce Foundation. The “mind map” on that wiki page is informative; the leadership is commingled with all of the other Chicago radical groups, including …
95 – 02 The Chicago Annenberg Challenge This is the big enchilada, and really, on a practical level, really the absolute weakest link in the official fiction. Officially Ayers did not pick Obama for this position. Now please. Anyone who has gotten within 50 feet of Billy Ayers would know that he would chew his own arm off before he would give control of his baby, this at-the-time culmination of his life’s work, to anyone, ANYONE, who was not #1 absolutely politically reliable and #2 controlled personally by Billy Ayers. Mostly #2. This community organizing effort ran alongside the existing Chicago school reform movement, which wrestled control of the Chicago Public School system away from the City and into the hands of local community organizers. These in turn formed the leadership cadre for Organizing for America, coming from and then assimilating the rest of the Chicago left: your ACORNs, enviros, old labor, new labor, radical Catholics, the Wright-style black churches and the Nation of Islam (Rainbow/PUSH not so much, we know how Jesse Jackson feels about The One).
And onto the White House, with Pfleger making a crucial intervention, really absolutely critical intervention that allowed Obama to jettison Jeremiah Wright and his on-the-record progressivism. That in turn allowed the Media 500 to conflate discussion of Obama’s radicalism with tabloid style Jeremiah Wright related race-baiting. A bank run here, a financial panic there, and the next thing you know, America has elected a radical leftist.
The Story
Our intrepid hero is a quiet, brooding man of honor who has stepped away from a corrupt system to focus on raising a family and fighting unshackled for the ideals he believes in. Beset on all sides by enemies and “allies”, he leads a small group of dedicated individuals working to advance the Enlightenment ideals of the American Revolution in the ongoing meme war for the future of America. Able to tear off a grammatically correct paragraph on enslavement through language as easily as he tears a phone book in half. Then a bombshell from an anonymous guest poster lands on his editorial desk – a revelation so shocking, a conspiracy so disturbing: is the President of the United States an, an, an….
Obamaton.
The post goes up, the Internet goes down, the power goes off at Casa Armadillo, and our hero is on the run for his life – can he protect his family, save his source, get the truth out, and save America? Writes itself from there.
Expected Dedication
~To Andrew Sullivan, ObGyn. Thanks for just asking questions.
So that explains the flat tire on my pickup. That’s gonna cost you some karma points at the very least….
Wonder if any of that writing is archived somewhere.
link
i can see eddie murphy as baracky
So that’s where he got wise to the profit/earnings ratio.
Obama writing financial reports on Brazil and Mexico in 1983 sure is illuminating, though.
Why haven’t we seen any of these jeenius reports on the innertubes?
@3 is linked from here
I thought people would be focused on the implication that someone at Columbia “fixed” his transcript to get him into Harvard Law.
Your questions make a lot more sense than Andrew Sullivan, ObGyn’s. Maybe Trump can open his fat trap about that? Especially since Columbia is just a few dozen blocks north of him.
I can’t believe what a mean-spirited raaaaacist you are, motionview.
Linked as information related to this post but of unknown veracity.
That’s very interesting geoffb. Is no one at Columbia or Harvard ever going to leak these transcripts?
Rush should get on this issue. geoffb’s linked email is really interesting. I have seen that credit argument before. Columbia is big but it is not that big. There should be more students who can confirm what classes Obama was in. Hell I remember Dean Barnett (to those who don’t know who he is, he was Hugh Hewitt’s fill in until he sadly passed away a couple of years ago) contacting old pals from Harvard Law to find out about Barack Obama. Granted law school is smaller than the undergraduate class at Columbia, but I am sure his classmates remember him.
Here is an off topic bit about Rush taking on Krauthammer about Palin. http://althouse.blogspot.com/2011/06/rush-limbaugh-goes-after-krauthammer.html
One thing I took from the email was that he must have not been too memorable if the thing that made his presence memorable to a classmate was his having a spat with someone of the status of Brzezinski at that time.
As long as you didn’t also hope my truck’s battery would die while waiting to make a left turn on a busy highway.
Trump could easily buy his transcripts and have them leaked.
Or buy Columbia.
16. Trump’s not really that rich. If it wasn’t for The Apprentice, he’d be an affluent fellow with a strange haircut.
Reporters were very interested in Bush’s business background and his oil patch troubles. They have not been terribly curious about what is a remarkably diverse and eclectic background. I have long suspected that just like Al Gore and John Kerry at Harvard and Yale, Obama’s undergraduate grades were nothing special. Because of his then ease at speaking publicly and his lack of a regional accent, it became conventional wisdom that he had been an excellent student and had a diverse, far-ranging set of interests and capabilities. I think we can now see this as a mistaken assumption.
Then again, liberals get passes all the time simply for being liberal.
It’s a shame that a regional accent and an imperfect presentation cause one’s attempts to talk policy to be dismissed as a joke (when not ignored altogether, that is). Were it otherwise, we might be able to test the inverse of your suspicion.
Ernst,
Let’s look at Bush and Palin. Bush, had both an accent and a halting manner in public, as does Palin, who has an accent yet is VERY comfortable in front of a camera. Going back to his days running against Ann Richards, who was utterly beloved of the liberal establishment nationally (despite a thick accent), it was very clear that Bush had not only an interest in policy but saw levels of complexity and nuance that outstripped his rivals (and advisors.) His “compassionate conservatism,” whatever else can be said about it, is a fine example of this. Bush had a long string of very substantive business and political leaders who had known him for a long time and could attest to these things, in detail and on the record. Palin seems to have alienated everyone she gets close to and when her job became complex, quit.
Moreover, facebook postings aside–and you know the news items were handed to her by staff–absolutely no one says anything like this about Palin. If, as York argues in her link, really representative of her views, they are child-like. Foreign aid, 1% of the budget, is some of the smartest money we spend, at least as it pertains to Egypt. In her defense, she has 50 times the political and cultural instincts that Bush (and Rove) ever had and that really, really matters. Going to clambakes in NH is both effective in cutting Romney off at his knees in his backyard and continuing to circumvent the inept and tired “guardians of the message” (the old MSM).
It might be enough. I’d readily vote for her–and did once already–but really, it’s sort of funny to see pretty sharp people think that she’s any different than a right wing Obama. Which is to say, a candidate who simply makes partisans feel good about themselves.
My intended title of this post was A book proposal, in the thriller genre. Inspiration referred to the McWhorter/Loury interview. What do you think they were talking about?
Her job didn’t become complex, it became financially crushing and impossible to due after she became Public Enemy #1 for accepting McCain’s offer. That isn’t complex, it’s damned simple. She was rendered unable to perform the job, she recognized that, and she acted appropriately, while also averting economic catastrophe for her family.
Tell me, who are all of these close allies of hers that’s she’s alienated?
Forbes puts him at $2.9 billion. That’s a lot of TV.
There is likely no more readily manipulable “survey” on earth than the Forbes lists. He’s rich, no doubt of it. I’d heard that he brings in more than $50 million-$60 million annually from the Apprentice (and related franchises, like bottled water) alone. But beyond that, he lends his name out to builders/developers who own the real economics. There is good money in that but someone else has the risk and the reward. The NYT’s Tim O’Brien wrote a great book a few years back about Trump that used leaked bank docs to puncture that myth. Trump sued him. A few days before trial was to begin–where they would have had to lay out his economics in full–he settled with O’Brien, and handsomely.
As to Palin, she quit and that’s that. The POTUS is a bitch of a job that in this day is a guarantee of being sued by venomous slugs of sundry stripes. So when she winds up embroiled in some inevitable staffing or inside-the-beltway snafu, what then?
I’m not really buying the economic catastrophe angle. You may well be correct since you are a keen observer. Fair enough. I’m not running you down, just saying that I disagree. She’s not what HappyFeet or the Left makes her out to be but she ran for the job and there is ample precedent for sitting Governors having personal legal headaches and not quitting. Regardless: Obama is a running nightmare. If she were to do something, anything differently, I will be a grateful citizen and happy to have voted for her.
When POTUS gets sued, he’s not paying for his own defense.
A half million in legal fees is a mighty big nut, even for a Governor of AK, especially when you can’t fundraise for it.
Sure, but I don’t know of any other states that have an ethics law like AK’s, which allows any citizen the opportunity to file a complaint and have it adjudicated at no cost to them, and without regard to standing. Palin didn’t have a legal headache, she had dozens of them, which is a problem partly of her own making, given her championing of that law. She quit, and Sean Parnell got down to the business of running Alaska. That’s a win/win for all involved.
When POTUS gets sued, he’s not paying for his own defense.
POTUS cannot be sued for anything s/he does as President. And even private lawsuits are usually postponed until after term.
which allows any citizen the opportunity to file a complaint and have it adjudicated at no cost to them, and without regard to standing.
Even Palin’s defense fund was challenged.
This was a scorched-earth attempt to ruin Palin and her family by all means necessary, focusing on first financially bankrupting her and to making her totally ineffectual as a governor. It interfered with Alaska’s right to have a functioning government.
With respect, Roddy, the Left found an avenue in Alaska law by which to harass the Palin family to the point of destruction. Forcing the governor to spend every waking moment dealing with frivolous ethics charges, spending inordinate amounts of time and money that could not be spent on her family or her job, was a convenient way for Palin’s political enemies to neutralize her.
Would you have preferred that she stay and fight, bankrupting her family and leaving the state ungoverned while she spent every day in depositions?
I’m totally with Roddy on the Trump thing, though. I’d be surprised if he were worth nine figures, let alone ten.
True, they usually name the relevant Cabinet member, not POTUS. And it’s still not that person’s personal legal problem, as was the case with Palin in AK.
Right. She never spent a dime of it, and upon the determination that it would constitute an improper use of her office to raise those funds, all of it was refunded.
A couple of links to what little is available concerning Obama’s college years.
An interview with Dr. John Drew was a classmate of President Obama’s at Occidental College which Jeff G. linked to in this post.
About Business International there is this from the Wiki entry:
Here is the passage from the book “The Strawberry Statement” which is “a non-fiction book by James Simon Kunen, written when he was 19, which chronicled his experiences at Columbia University from 1966–1968, particularly the April 1968 protests and takeover of the office of the dean of Columbia by student protesters”
Ah. So Business International was probably a Soviet front.
I don’t remember what Tony Knowles was paid back when he was governor up there, or what the track has been in the meantime, but Parnell’s salary now is only $125,000, according to Wikipedia.
Wasn’t the old rule that you should only borrow twice your annual salary to buy a house? If she couldn’t use a legal defense fund she could be bankrupted with no way of ever recovering.
Re #30:
The left says it’s a CIA front.
I think it is the type of organization that would draw intelligence agencies like honey to flies. Any number of them would have had some form of contact on the inside or be foolish to have not done so.
Ernst I think I agree. It was well run, to the point that the CIA saw it as great cover and tried to use the operation to place 4 agents. BIC brought them in, surely tracked them for the Sovs, and then outed them when that was more useful (Church hearings era, no?). That’s where the CIA front charge comes from geoffb.
This is why I said in the post that either something was really, really funky or this was another birth-certificate style honeypot.
Anyone remember this?
Abe that is the nr link in #3.
Ah. My bad.