Posted on 05/22/2012 5:14:42 AM PDT by SJackson
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in the September 1, 2008, issue of National Review.
Who is Barack Obama? Obama the presidential candidate presents himself as a man who has loved America from his earliest childhood, a man proud of his mixed-race roots who comfortably transcends polarized racial politics, a man who eschews the ideologies of Left and Right, an optimistic healer. But in his critically acclaimed autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama is something else entirely.
Obama published his autobiography in 1995, when he was in his mid-thirties. Unlike most books by politicians, which are concoctions of clichés penned by ghostwriters, Dreams was clearly written by Obama himself. Unlike most politicians, Obama can write and loves language. (He was contemplating a career as a novelist at the time he wrote Dreams.) Most important, Obama wrote his autobiography after he had become a political activist but before he was a politician; the book is therefore candid in a way a conventional politician’s memoir would never be.
Dreams is a complex, introspective book. Its theme is how Obama, born in Hawaii to a white student mother and Kenyan student father, grows to view himself and the white society around him. The Obama of Dreams abandons his multiracial roots to forge an alienated black identity — that of a man steeped in radical ideology who views history in terms of a huge chasm separating oppressor from oppressed, white from black, and rich from poor; a man who is never more emotionally at home than when sitting in the church pew listening to Rev. Jeremiah Wright rant about white racism.
People and politicians change, and the Obama of today may not be the one of 13 years ago. But he has never forsworn Dreams or given a detailed explanation of how he has evolved since writing it. The book thus remains an extraordinary window into Obama.
What does he like about America? Candidate Obama claims that “throughout my life, I have always taken my deep and abiding love for this country as a given.” He tells us his “heart swells with pride at the sight of our flag.”
In Dreams, his heart swells at many things but the sight of the flag certainly isn’t one of them. There he presents a warts-only history of the U.S., a story of evil and suffering. U.S. society is a “racial caste system” where “color and money” determine where you end up in life. He tells us of white children’s stoning black children, Jim Crow, and heatless Harlem housing projects. He describes “Japanese families interned behind barbed wire; young Russian Jews cutting patterns in Lower East Side sweatshops; dust-bowl farmers loading up their trucks with the remains of shattered lives.”
Obama says the Hawaiian islands, where he grew up, are beautiful, but quickly reminds us that behind the beauty lurks the “ugly conquest of the native Hawaiians . . . crippling disease brought by missionaries . . . the indenturing system that kept Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino immigrants stooped sunup to sunset in [the fields].”
Candidate Obama proudly tells audiences that his white grandparents were raised in the American heartland. But in Dreams he describes this heartland as the “landlocked center of the country, a place where decency and endurance and the pioneer spirit were joined at the hip with conformity and suspicion and the potential for unblinking cruelty.”
Candidate Obama fondly tells audiences that one of his earliest memories is of sitting on his grandfather’s shoulders proudly watching the Apollo astronauts return to Hawaii after their splashdown in the Pacific. But in Dreams, even this event is an occasion for outrage, as Obama asks: “How could America send men into space and still keep its black citizens in bondage?”
American affluence offends Obama. The vast upper-middle class lives in a land of isolation and sterility. As a teenager, he envies the white homes in the suburbs but senses that the big pretty houses contain “quiet depression” and “loneliness,” represented by “a mother sneaking a tumbler of gin in the afternoon.” American consumer culture is comforting but mentally and spiritually numbing, yielding a “long hibernation.”
Studying U.S. law at Harvard, Obama concludes it is mainly about “expediency or greed.” Working in a large modern corporation, he sees himself as a “spy behind enemy lines.” Even science and technology draw his disdain as he warns of “technology that spits out goods from its robot mouth.”
Finishing Dreams, I could not recall a single positive sentence about the United States or European society. I reread the book specifically looking for positive remarks. The pickings were lean. Obama does write glowingly of JFK’s Camelot and its promise of a “bright new world,” but concludes this promise was a mere illusion quickly transformed into “war, riot, and famine.” At the end of the book, Obama acknowledges that “faith in other people” can be found everywhere: among Christians as well as Muslims and in Kansas as well as his beloved Kenya. If you’re looking for rousing patriotism, that’s about as good as Obama gets.
Earlier this year, Michelle Obama made headlines by declaring that her husband’s primary victories were the first time she had ever been “proud of my country.” Michelle’s remark simply echoes the assessment Barack presents in his 442-page autobiography: Aside from a few comments about what he regards as the largely unsuccessful struggle for civil rights in the Sixties, Obama has nothing positive to say about his country. Even his hopes for the future are modest and “sometimes hard to sustain.”
Post-Racial Obama Obama is touted as a post-racial statesman who sees beyond the narrow issue of white versus black. The Obama of his autobiography is, to the contrary, obsessed with race: Almost all of Dreams is about race and race conflict.
Obama’s early life is marked by uncertainty and rootlessness. Born in Hawaii, he is abandoned by his black Kenyan father at age two. At six he goes to live in Indonesia with his white mother and Indonesian stepfather. At age ten, he leaves his mother and returns to Hawaii, where he spends the rest of his youth, living mainly with his lower-middle-class white grandparents and attending an expensive, almost-all-white prep school.
In multiracial Hawaii, Obama’s encounters with racism, he admits, are pretty slight. On occasion, he deploys what he calls a “bad-assed nigger pose,” but he understands its artificiality. Obama seems well accepted by the youth around him, but, inside, he feels anxious and apart. A turning point in the narrative occurs when some of his white teenage friends attend an otherwise all-black party with him but feel uncomfortable and ask to leave. Obama is enraged and wants to punch his friends.
He begins to inundate himself in black literature: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and W. E. B. DuBois. Saturated with themes of anger and alienation, Obama withdraws into a “smaller and smaller coil of rage.” He suffers a “nightmare vision” of black powerlessness and feels whites have maimed blacks with a tragic “self contempt.” Malcolm X becomes his favorite author, although he admits all the talk about “blue-eyed devils and apocalypse” is a bit much.
Teenage Obama now sees himself as a “would-be black.” He begins to deliberately craft a black identity with alienation and anger at its foundation. The reader of Dreams cannot help being struck by the unexplained contrast between the circumstances of Obama’s life — an opportunity to attend a fine school, white grandparents who love him — and his great anger at white society.
Today, Candidate Obama presents himself as a multiracial American who is proud of his mixed ancestry and can comfortably draw from both his white and his black roots. In Dreams, he takes the opposite stance. He deliberately and repeatedly rejects a multiracial identity. For example, attending an expensive private college in California, he meets many young people of mixed black and white ancestry who view themselves, not as black, but as multiracial. Obama specifically rejects this option as a sellout. He also rejects integration as a goal because it is “a one-way street. The minority is assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around.”
After college, Obama has an affluent white girlfriend who loves and wants to marry him. She brings him to visit her family, who warmly accept him. Obama is attached to the girl and respects the family’s deep cultural heritage, but he eventually dumps her because she is not black. He feels that if he marries her he will ultimately be assimilated into a foreign white culture, a fate that is unacceptable to him.
Obama comes to define and identify himself as a black man. As a young man he views his white ancestry not as an asset, but as an impediment to achieving authentic blackness. The dozens of cultural and historic figures appearing throughout Dreams are almost all black. (White author Joseph Conrad makes a token appearance as a deranged racist.) Obama identifies his principal role models: Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, and W. E. B. DuBois. He states that while he might love his white grandfather and Indonesian stepfather, he could “never emulate” them because of the racial difference: They were “white men and brown men whose fates didn’t speak to my own.”
Obama is fascinated by his black ancestry. When he journeys to Kenya he has a deep sense of joy and belonging — he feels he has finally come home. By contrast, he has very little interest in his white ancestors or in the history of white America. He views U.S. history simply as a melodrama in which whites crush blacks (although class oppression and brutality against other minorities provide secondary plotlines).
It is true that Obama never abandons his affection for his white mother and grandparents. The memory of his immediate white relatives does remind him that not all whites are culpable racists and that some “could be exempted from the general category of distrust.” But beyond this he has no identification or psychic ties to larger white society.
Dreams does present one exception to Obama’s black exclusiveness. As Obama studies radical Marxist-Leninist literature (Frantz Fanon, neocolonialism, etc.), he comes to see himself as the champion not just of blacks but of the downtrodden of all races. But this shift only distances him farther from the dominant white and European culture, which he views as the focal point of global exploitation. Even in his thirties, he writes with enthusiasm about the Viet Cong, the Mau Mau Uprising, and black rioters in Detroit who lashed out with “street crime and revolution” against complacent white oppressors.
Hatred Generally, Obama sees an unbridgeable gulf between races: “The other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart.” He states that at the core of black consciousness is the experience of white hatred of blacks. This hatred inspires an anger in turn that can either be directed out toward whites or in toward blacks themselves, in self-loathing:
Black awareness] hadn’t arisen simply from struggles with pestilence or drought, or even mere poverty. [It] had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate [of whites toward blacks]. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counternarrative buried deep within each person and at the center of which stood white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.
As a youth, Obama is shocked when a black mentor tells him that “black people have reason to hate,” but later comes to accept this view. He ponders whether the “ghostly figure” of white hatred can ever be “exorcised” from black dreams. And he goes so far as to ask whether blacks can love themselves without hating whites, but provides no answer.
Candidate Obama declared that he was shocked when he heard Rev. Jeremiah’s Wright’s outrageous remarks about American society. Despite the fact that he had been a member of Wright’s church for over a decade, Obama asserted that he had never heard such remarks from his spiritual mentor before.
But in the autobiography, Wright’s rants are in plain view. It is obvious that Obama is drawn to Wright’s ministry not in ignorance, but precisely because of the Reverend’s politics. In Dreams, Wright asserts: “Life’s not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be.” Obama apparently agrees, ignoring the obvious facts that nearly all black homicides are committed by other blacks, and that the number of violent crimes committed by blacks against whites is about eight times greater than the number of such crimes by whites against blacks.
When Wright, in the pages of Dreams, rants from the pulpit about Hiroshima and proclaims that “white folks’ greed runs a world in need,” it’s not so jarring, since Obama has been saying pretty much the same thing throughout the book. Obama expresses joy and a real sense of belonging in connection with only three places: his childhood home in Indonesia, Kenya, and in the pews of Reverend Wright’s Trinity United Church.
Obama and the Underclass In his personal life, Obama has received highly favorable treatment from white society. His grievance appears, at least on the surface, to be abstract rather than personal. It is the existence of the black poor and underclass that justifies his alienation from and hostility to his nation. For Obama, the black ghetto epitomizes the callousness, greed, and injustice of U.S. society.
Obama became a community organizer in south Chicago to save the black urban poor and underclass. This was no mere job to Obama; it was a quasi-religious calling, his mission in life, offering the promise of personal “redemption.” But at only one point does Obama pause in his narrative and ask the big questions. Contemplating the tangle of homicide, drug addiction, alcoholism, out-of-wedlock childbearing, and educational failure that blights the public-housing complex where he is working, he asks: What causes this? Who is responsible? After all, there are no white people there, “no cigar-chomping crackers . . . no club-wielding Pinkerton thugs.”
With this question, Obama broaches the central paradox of modern race relations. Why, at a point when white society ended segregation, created affirmative action, and erected a massive new welfare state, did the self-destructive behaviors of the black lower classes soar, and entire communities begin spiraling downward in devastating social entropy? But, having raised this question, Obama offers no answer. The only solution he suggests is increased HUD funding. Some pages later he returns to vague charges about racism and hidden structures of power.
Elsewhere in Dreams, however, Obama hints at an explanation for this silence. He says that focusing on the self-destructive behavior of the black underclass smacks of “the explanations that whites had always offered of black poverty: that we continued to suffer from, if not genetic inferiority, then cultural weakness.” A focus on behavior will only confirm the “worst suspicions” of blacks about themselves, pushing them deeper into helplessness and despair.
Black well-being therefore requires that the blame for black behavior always be placed in historic context — that is, shifted to whites. If 69 percent of black children are born out of wedlock, if blacks kill blacks, if black-run schools don’t teach, it is the white man’s fault. Alternative explanations will only relieve white guilt while raising black self-doubt.
Self-Portrait of the Author Dreams from My Father reveals Barack Obama as a self-constructed, racially obsessed man who regards most whites as oppressors. It is the work of a clever but shallow thinker who confuses ideological cliché for insight — a man who sees U.S. history as a narrow, bitter tale of race and class victimization. The Barack Obama presented in these pages is not electable to national office. No wonder that Obama, aided by a compliant media, has created a new self for public view, one the Obama of Dreams wouldn’t recognize and probably would disdain.
— “Michael Gledhill” is the pseudonym of a writer based in Washington, D.C. This article originally appeared in the September 1, 2008, issue of National Review.
bump for later
His heart swells with pride, indeed!
He’s anything the liberals desire him to be and a ghost, apparently.
Obama tells so many lies he cannot remember what he said - a big problem for liars.
Obama received criticism for no-longer wearing the U.S. flag pen on his lapel. In response, the President went of on this rant:
As I’ve said about the flag pin, I don’t want to be perceived as taking sides,” Obama said. “There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose. I like the song ‘I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.’ If that were our anthem, then I might salute it.
Imagine the Unabomber as President of the United States.
Forced to have a narcissist as an assistant I can testify that keeping track of the lies can be difficult. This one seems to have days or time periods that are far worse than others. So loopy at times its scary to think a president could have this illness.
Sounds a lot like every other place and time in human history, but people who hate their own country will always narrow down their perspective and make it appear that their country is a particular or outstanding source of foulness.
Bump
I think that quote is John Semmons, not The W0n.
“Obama published his autobiography in 1995, when he was in his mid-thirties. Unlike most books by politicians, which are concoctions of clichés penned by ghostwriters, Dreams was clearly written by Obama himself. Unlike most politicians, Obama can write and loves language. (He was contemplating a career as a novelist at the time he wrote Dreams.)” This passage is pure Bravo Sierra. As we all know the book DFMF was ghost written by Bill Ayers. Obama is incapable of clear concise writing as demonstrated by his fumbling attempts at speech and logic without the TOTUS.
In a sane world, having the following comments out in print via Obama’s racist books would have knocked him out of the running for president of the United States. (they would have crucified a white candidate for far less)
From Dreams from My Father, “ I FOUND A SOLACE IN NURSING A PERVASIVE SENSE OF GRIEVANCE AND ANIMOSITY AGAINST MY MOTHER’S RACE”. Barack Hussein Obama
From ‘Dreams from my Father’, “The emotion between the races could never be pure, even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, THE OTHER RACE (WHITE) WOULD ALWAYS REMAIN JUST THAT: MENACING, ALIEN, AND APART.” Barack Hussein Obama
From Dreams from My Father: “THAT HATE HADN’T GONE” he wrote, BLAMING “WHITE PEOPLE — some CRUEL, some IGNORANT, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.” Barack Hussein Obama
From ‘Dreams from My Father’, “There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs,” he wrote. “It remained necessary to prove which side you were on,to show your LOYALTY TO THE BLACK MASSES, TO STRIKE OUT and name names” Barack Hussein Obama
From ‘Dreams from My Father’, ‘I VOWED THAT I WOULD NEVER EMULATE WHITE MEN whose fates didn’t speak to my own. IT WAS INTO MY FATHER’S IMAGE, THE BLACK MAN, SON OF AFRICA, THAT I’D PACKED ALL THE ATTRIBUTES I SOUGHT IN MYSELF, THE ATTRIBUTES OF MARTIN AND MALCOLM, DUBOIS AND MANDELA’ Barack Hussein Obama
From The Audicity of Hope: To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
From The Audicity of Hope: After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss: “There was something about him that made me wary,” Obama wrote. “A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white.”
From The Audacity of Hope:..’the white race...“that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams.”
From “Dreams”: (after making his first visit to Kenya, he wrote of being disappointed to learn that his paternal grandfather had been a servant to rich whites. that the revelation caused)“ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House n-——”.
From The Audacity of Hope: “We are no longer just a Christian nation,” he argues in “Audacity,” which was published last year. “We are also a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
“To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists.”
From ‘Audacity’: “Her memories of the Christians who populated her youth were not fond ones,” Obama wrote. “For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.”
“Malcolm X’s autobiography seemed to offer something different,” Obama wrote. “His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me; the blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force
Then there is his love of Islam:
Quote from Barack Obama’s book, Dreams Of My Father:
“THE PERSON WHO MADE ME PROUDEST OF ALL, THOUGH, WAS MY [half brother], ROY..HE CONVERTED TO ISLAM”.
From ‘Dreams of my Father’, “IN INDONESIA, I SPEND TWO YEARS AT A MUSLIM SCHOOL” “..I STUDIED THE KORAN..”
From ‘Audacity of Hope: “LOLO (Obama’s step father) FOLLOWED ISLAM....”I LOOKED TO LOLO FOR GUIDANCE”.
From ‘The Audacity Of Hope, “I WILL STAND WITH THEM (MUSLIMS) SHOULD THE POLITICAL WINDS OF WAR SHIFT IN AN UGLY DIRECTION..” .
From The Audacity Of Hope, “WE ARE NO LONGER JUST A CHRISTIAN NATION, we are also a Jewish nation, a MUSLIM NATION, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.”
http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080101164820/http://www.examiner.com/a-536474~_Trapped_between_two_worlds_.html?cid=dc-article-obama . http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080101164815/http://www.examiner.com/a-534540~Can_a_past_of_Islam_change_the_path_to_president_for_Obama_.html?cid=dc-article-obama
_________________________
Don’t believe it? Think these comments taken ‘out of context’? Here it all here in his own works;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6zM5ldO35A
.
Obama mocks, makes fun of the Bible:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbLzhwvVR_M
To obama’s long list of American shortcomings and criminal failures, we can now add: failure to impart our values to the younger generation, and the resultant election of BO to the presidency.
Let’s hope people start paying attention to some of this stuff this time around. It was all out there before, but the average voter was so ga-ga over him, they either chose not to seek the information or to dismiss it as not relevant. We’re seeing how relevant it was in contributing to his destruction of the foundation of our country.
All this just for a flag
http://youtu.be/Tcehz0nd1kE
Re that long list of American shortcomings...
we have also slaughtered about one-sixth of the number of our current population. Herod was a piker by comparison to the liberals in their life-hating ferocity.
The lady Marine on helicopter Marine One gently pointed out that Obama’s lapel pin flag was UPSIDE DOWN.
He got her reassigned post haste.
Thank you for your service. I truly appreciate your sacrifice.
BO is nothing more than a polished turd.
RUSH: Here is Aaron in Chico, California. Hi, Aaron. I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on Open Line Friday.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. Mega dittos. I was listening to your program talking a little bit about Charlie Rose, what they didn’t know about Obama back in ‘08 and —
RUSH: Yes, Charlie Rose and Tom Brokaw.
CALLER: Yeah. And I’m a 24/7 member, and I like to listen to some of your previous broadcasts, some of your really great shows, and one of them was a show following the election. It was on November 6th, and it was actually Charlie Rose talking to Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham, more about the circumstances of the new president and so forth.
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: I remember it was Evan Thomas who was talking about an interview Obama gave, and they were talking about how creepy he was, but one of the things that Evan Thomas said was that Barack Obama is quoted as saying that this creature that he’s designed isn’t necessarily a real person, and if you really want to be informed, you should watch that whole interview ‘cause it’s amazing.
RUSH: Well, we have the sound bites. We went back to the sound bite archive, and we have the two sound bites that you are talking about. I’m glad that you reminded me. I have never forgotten the Charlie Rose-Tom Brokaw stuff, but these two are just as bad.
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Or instructive. They’re just as profound. So you can listen Aaron while we play it for everybody else. This is November 5th. This is the day after the election, literally the day after the election. And they are talking about Obama’s victory speech in Grant Park in Chicago on election night. And if you remember that, the people that showed up that had voted for, supported Obama, literally looked like zombies. It looked like the village of the walking dead. Their minds were totally gone they were just enthralled. It was indescribable, the looks of vacancy on their faces, and yet they were as euphoric and happy as they could be. But you get the impression they didn’t know why. They just were.
And so on Charlie Rose, this is a week after he and Brokaw are telling each other they don’t know anything about Obama. The week before the election. “I don’t know what books he reads. I don’t know what his foreign policy is, I don’t know. It’s a good question, what his advisers are telling him, I don’t know.” So you’re right, Charlie Rose talking to Newsweek’s Evan Thomas and Jon Meacham. Neither of those two guys are there now. Charlie Rose, this is after he’s elected that they conceded, you’re right, that there’s something “creepy” about Obama.
MEACHAM: He’s very elusive, Obama, which is fascinating for a man who’s written two memoirs. At Grant Park he walks out with the family, and then they go away.
ROSE: Mmm. Mmm-hmm.
MEACHAM: Biden’s back, you know, locked in the bar or something.
ROSE: (haughty chuckle)
MEACHAM: You know, they don’t let him out. And have you ever seen a victory speech where there was no one else on stage?
ROSE: Mmm.
MEACHAM: No adoring wife, no cute kid. He is the messenger.
THOMAS: There is a slightly creepy cult of personality about all this. I mean, he’s such an admirable —
ROSE: Slightly. Creepy. Cult of personality.
THOMAS: Yes.
ROSE: What’s “slightly creepy” about it?
THOMAS: It — it — it just makes me a little uneasy that he’s so singular. He’s clearly managing his own spectacle. He’s a deeply manipulative guy.
RUSH: And they couldn’t wait to vote for him. These are the guys running interference for him all during the campaign, Meacham, Evan Thomas. Evan Thomas, by the way, to remind you, back in 2004 admitted that the mainstream media’s support was gonna be worth 15 points to John Kerry. He’s one of the voices you heard here. These guys are both top executives and writers at Newsweek and they’re talking about how manipulative and how creepy and how egomaniacal Obama is. “I’ve never seen a victory speech, a presidential victory speech with nobody else on stage. No cute kid, no wife, just Obama. Manipulative, creepy, cult of personality.” And these guys voted for him. Here’s the next bite.
ROSE: Watching him last night in that speech, he finishes —
MEACHAM: Yeah.
ROSE: — and he sort of — it’s almost like he then ascends to look at the circumstance.
MEACHAM: He watches us watching him.
THOMAS: Watching him!
ROSE: Exactly!
THOMAS: He does —
MEACHAM: It’s amazing.
ROSE: It is amazing.
THOMAS: He writes about this metaphor being a screen upon which Americans will project. He said they want Barack Obama; I’m not sure I am Barack Obama.
ROSE: Mmm.
THOMAS: He has the self-awareness to know that this “creature” he’s designed isn’t necessarily a real person, and he’s self-aware enough —
ROSE: Ahhhhhh.
RUSH: Unbelievable! He’s not a real person, and he knows it. This creature he’s designed isn’t necessarily a real person, he’s self-aware enough to know that. Charlie Rose is the one who said, “Watching him last night in that speech, he finishes and it’s almost like he then ascends to the circumstances.” He meant heavens. He ascends, and he is above us, and he’s watching us watch him. And they’re fascinated. Obama ascends on the third day. He rose from the stage. And he’s up there after ascending, and he’s watching us watch him. That was Meacham who said he watches us watching him. And Charlie Rose said, “Exactly.” Not exactly. But “ex-actly.” He’s watching us watch him. He does, too. This metaphor, screen upon which Americans will project. So creepy, singular, cult of personality, managing his own spectacle, deeply manipulative guy, watches us watch him. He knows that he’s not necessarily a real person. This is the day after Obama is elected on the Charlie Rose Show. Aaron, thanks for the reminder.
Another way of saying he's not quite human? Now a days it seems a lot of democrats are 'creepy'...
The above reeks of Bill Ayers.
Only one answer to that- he is HUMAN GARBAGE and should be thrown out with the rest of the trash.
Thanks and yes Obama is just Al Sharpton with a more congenial veneer...
After having listened to various of Obama’s speeches during the 2008 campaign and a few since, and after having read the above article, not only do I think that Obama did not write ‘his’ book, but sincerely doubt that he ever read it. Were this whole mess not so serious for our country, it would be laughable.
What I find so deliciously ironic is that not only didn’t The One read his own hagiography, but apparently none of his liberal fawning idolators did either. Now the bamster is being hoist on his own petard by his own words, and even the media cannot spin that. Well, he could have lied to his diary.
I don’t know why the story of Obama making his Mexican maids cry is not getting more media circulation. This guy was and still is a punk without an ounce of empathy. Might make his latino supporters reconsider.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/17/obama-in-college-made-his-latino-maids-cry
“Obama is just Al Sharpton with a more congenial veneer.”
At least you know what you are getting with Sharpton. Nor am I sure that a duplicitous, two-faced, congenital racist has a more congenial veneer.
Both are also accessories to murder in the Brawley and Zimmerman cases. Obama could care less about Zimmerman and his fate in jail if it comes to that.
Another historic first.
baraq is the first president to be vetted AFTER being in office for 3.5 years.
A Jeopardy “question” from the future with the “answer” being “This horrible one-term President was described by many as a living turd, no it’s not Jimmy Carter”.
Post racial my @ss, he’s obseesed with black racism, even if Bill Ayers was the main author. BHO was OK with it.
Okay. But a lot of this stuff is intended to reflect how he or other people thought in the past. It's hard to tell what's going on here without the context.
Even with the context it's not easy. He sees a movie about Blacks in Brazil, talks to an Englishman about a tribe in the Sudan and thinks about how different the Englishman and the Africans or his mother is from the Brazilians. It's not primarily intended as a comment about race relations in the US.
Whether it reflects Obama's thinking about race then or now is hard to say, or at least it's hard to know just how it reflects his current opinions. Hard to say whether he actually even wrote it.
Even if he didn't, he recited it in an audiobook -- thereby taking ownership of William Ayers' words.
Thanks SJackson.
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