Posted on 11/22/2010 5:55:27 AM PST by libstripper
All true, but there's one missing from that list who played a huge formative (deformative!) role in his life - his maternal grandmother.
I don't have the cite handy, but I've seen information that Granny Dunham was the real hardcore marxist activist and severe disciplinarian and taskmaster of the family. Apparently she was the one pushing the rest of them into leftist activism, and there are accounts of her berating and humiliating young Barry in public for sloppiness and incompetence and failing to meet her exacting standards.
No wonder he threw her under the bus. I would have put it in reverse and did it again...
Sounds like a typical white person.
The Illegal was “President” of the Harvard Law Review, an elected (by the other student menbers of the Law Review) position much like the captain of a football team. As such it was much more an honorary and political position, rather than a real scholarly working position. The person who did the real scholarly work had a title similar to “Managing Editor” and essentialy did for the Review what a quarterback does for a football team.
>Obama’s biological father was just that. He was a sperm donor who had no real impact on his life except to manufacture a phony narrative to further his political ambitions.
True, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Barry’s sperm donor couldn’t still be a indirect influence on Barry’s ideas. After all, he could still have passed on some of his views to Stanley Ann (who was already favoably disposed). Also, he could have hung around his Kenyan family.
>Bill Ayers wrote the book.
True, but Barry may have basically told him what to write.
>The real influences on Obama’s life were his mother, grandfather, Frank Marshall Davis, Rev Wright, and Bill Ayers. They were/are all Leftists who hated this country.
I think that D’Souza has basically stated that they were indeed influences, as well as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said and others.
>And the fact that Obama spent four of his most formative years in a foreign country have contributed to his less than complete identification as an American.
Again, I don’t think that Dinesh would argue much on this point.
It is a valid observation that D'Souza did not emphasize the socialist trappings that naturally affixed themselves to the anticolonial era. But that observation should not be distorted into a criticism. In this age of simple-minded one size fits all soundbite excuses for critical thought, the idea that there can be more than one thing to say about a complex subject has sadly been lost
It is a good example of pop psychology. You haven't read D'Souza's book, of course.
No, just the article he wrote about the same subject.
“Not even Stuart Smalley would accuse Jordan of narcissism. In real life, as in the Smalley skit, Jordan simply exhibited the confidence that comes with being the world’s best practitioner of his art.”
Jordan had his problems, and is notable not so much for being serenly confident as carefully controlling his image and having great PR. If you happened to catch his Hall of Fame speech, for instance, you might have found his vindictiveness odd. However, his baser aspects have slowly trickled out over the years. His philandering and gambling addiction were open secrets, and then there was the massive delusion that was his baseball career.
Not that I seek to knock the guy. It’s good for public figures to have a little mystery. I’d rather we not know what an assh*le Ali was, for instance.
“If you happened to catch his Hall of Fame speech, for instance, you might have found his vindictiveness odd. However, his baser aspects have slowly trickled out over the years. His philandering and gambling addiction were open secrets, and then there was the massive delusion that was his baseball career.”
By the way, I don’t mean to imply vindictiveness, philandering, or gambling are necessarily signs of narcissism. Jordan’s vices are typical of men of his means. His misadventures in baseball indicate the sort of delusional overconfidence you’d expect from a neurotic. But, again, it is not in itself evidence of anything.
It’s just that his cluster of symptoms is suggestive. Not in a clinical sense, or in any sort of technical sense. Not even in a pop-psychological sense. But in a good, old-fashioned character-analysis sense.
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