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Was Barack Obama A Foreign Exchange Student?
IBD Editorials ^ | August 9, 2012

Posted on 08/09/2012 5:38:57 PM PDT by raptor22

Transparency: A former classmate has added a tantalizing question to the mysteries surrounding Barack Obama's college years. Perhaps the GOP nominee, whose tax records are demanded, should call the president's bluff.

Not many students whose grades supposedly were good enough to get into Harvard Law School can say that 400 of their classmates taken randomly don't remember a single thing about him or his even being there. But Barack Obama, Columbia University class of '83, can.

Student Obama spent two years at Columbia after transferring there from Occidental College in Los Angeles. And for all the impression he made on his classmates, he might as well have been in the witness protection program.

The Wall Street Journal reported in 2008 that Fox News called that random group of 400 Columbia classmates and never found one who had ever met Obama.

Like most transfer students, Obama lived off-campus, a factoid defenders use to explain his apparent lack of human contact during his Columbia years. Obama himself does not speak much about his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, other than he attended both and was elected president of the Harvard Law Review.

Interestingly, Obama contributed not one signed word to the Harvard Law Review or any other legal publication. As Matthew Franck has pointed out in National Review Online, "A search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at anytime." A curious factoid for an alleged scholar.

In October 2007, the New York Times ran a piece titled "Obama's Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say," which would have won the Pulitzer Prize for understatements if there was one.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...


TOPICS: Editorial; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: barrysoetoro; columbia; foreignstudent; ibd; lyingtraitor; naturalborncitizen; obama; obamabio; pos
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To: immadashell
He may have “audited” some classes(read, sat in on large lecture classes where he wouldn't be known or recognized or remembered) and then had some of his commie professors write recommendations to Harvard .....

That's too much of a stretch, to think he could have impetrated recommendations to Harvard Law from professors whose classes he had ditched, and from whose university he had never taken a degree nor, in your telling of it, even matriculated in the first place.

Tall order, FRiend. You might want to take that one back to the shop for more work.

Independent of Obama's having been there or not, Occidental College did have, and still has, a special "conveyor belt" relationship for Lefty students who want careers in the public sphere to transfer to Columbia University so they can claim the more prestigious degree, n/w/s that Occidental is not exactly a slouch academically.

41 posted on 08/10/2012 12:54:00 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: Salvation
Lastly, why do his classmates at Columbia not remember Obama? Was he a ghost? Did he never show up at class? My educated guess is that he was too busy smoking pot, attending Marxist meetings, and plotting the destruction of the U.S. economy and the overthrow of capitalism

Good guess. Communist professors (who have abounded at Columbia since the 1930's) tend to set up "cell" classes that are somewhat sealed off from the "G-pop" (to lapse into wardenspeak), so that indoctrination can proceed with somewhat enhanced security and more candor in the classroom. This became part of the public record when Houston-area media looked into the granting of tenure to a bonafide Marxist-Leninist professor who had a "cell class" that he was leading in an atmosphere of cultic navel-gazing.

Remember, Columbia is where Barky met Bill Ayers. If their class entertained jolly stories of pipe-bombings and murder from the Good Old Days in candid exchanges of comradely gemuetlichkeit, then that group will not exactly have been meeting with open classroom doors. In short, whoever was running that part of the syllabus, whoever was on Obama's committee, was running a Communist student cell.

That's why Obama was so low-profile at Columbia, IMHO.

42 posted on 08/10/2012 1:05:22 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: lentulusgracchus
More to my last:

The episode with the dubious tenure grant occurred at a small college named College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas (an exurb of Houston and Galveston on Galveston Bay). Several Texas FReepers FReeped the tenure grant, sending e-mails to the dean of the college and to local media and political leaders (Republican congressmen and state legislators). The tenure grant went forward anyway.

43 posted on 08/10/2012 1:09:09 AM PDT by lentulusgracchus
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To: zeestephen

I would say this....if this company hired him straight out of college to write financial reports on Mexico and Brazil....then he was totally unqualified, and it makes one wonder if the reports were intended to be all fictional in the first place. It’d be like asking Chris Christie to write mechanical reports on John Deere tractors, or asking Harry Reid to write reports on tourism in Hong Kong.

It sounds like to me that these financial report institutions were all bogus. They could have hired the Octo-mom from California to write for them and gotten the same results.


44 posted on 08/10/2012 2:52:55 AM PDT by pepsionice
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To: RC2
If not, what gives these schools the authority to not release Obama’s?

If you're Baraq al-Husseini, you can have anything sealed/released that you want. Hide your school transcripts, but get the sealed divorce records of your political opponent published far and wide...anybody remember that?

45 posted on 08/10/2012 3:51:53 AM PDT by thulldud (Is it "alter or abolish" time yet?)
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To: lentulusgracchus

Madrassas are just Islamic schools, they are not all Saudi-funded or Salafist. Public schools in Indonesia are in fact madrassas.


46 posted on 08/10/2012 3:58:39 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: Ms Mable
"who needs proof these days?"

Dan Rather?

47 posted on 08/10/2012 6:09:20 AM PDT by Paladin2
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To: raptor22
Suggestion to Mitt Romney:

I have another suggestion that may have merit.

Romney agrees to release his tax returns if President Obama releases all of the subpeoned Fast and Furious records to Congress.

48 posted on 08/10/2012 6:42:30 AM PDT by MosesKnows (Love many, Trust few, and always paddle your own canoe)
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To: Elendur

I can honestly say, that I don’t remember ANY of my fellow students at Furman (I do remember some particularly impressive teachers...).
I didn’t live on campus, and didn’t really associate with them. Of course, I was 24, and, other than the girls, wasn’t much interested in them (and the girls weren’t interested me...).
My group was a bunch folks a game store, Hawk’s Keep.


49 posted on 08/10/2012 6:55:49 AM PDT by Little Ray (AGAINST Obama in the General.)
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To: RC2

Unfortunately, yes. When our son was in college, the college could not even inform us that he had been suspended for disciplinary reasons because he was over 18. The records belonged to him and there were privacy issues. Even though WE were paying his tuition.


50 posted on 08/10/2012 6:56:44 AM PDT by matchgirl (OMG! Obama Must Go !!!!)
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To: matchgirl

They should have returned the tuition you payed. I know......fat chance.


51 posted on 08/10/2012 7:03:49 AM PDT by RC2 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDMeDmV0ufU)
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To: Tallguy
Don't know why this is what it is, but Obama has CIA written all over him. Disinformation is how the CIA operates and there is a sh_t load of disinformation covering up Obama’s past.

OPERATION: BARACHBRIAR. He's off the reservation. We have to shut it down. Make it right. Clean it up.

52 posted on 08/10/2012 8:22:38 AM PDT by SgtSki
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To: lentulusgracchus
Tall order, FRiend. You might want to take that one back to the shop for more work.

You've seen a transcript? Anything is possible with the Chicago crowd.

53 posted on 08/10/2012 8:53:41 AM PDT by immadashell
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To: raptor22; Berlin_Freeper; Hotlanta Mike; Silentgypsy; repubmom; HANG THE EXPENSE; Nepeta; ...


Student Obama spent two years at Columbia after transferring there from Occidental College in Los Angeles. And for all the impression he made on his classmates, he might as well have been in the witness protection program.
54 posted on 08/13/2012 6:40:35 PM PDT by Brown Deer (Pray for 0bama. Psalm 109:8)
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To: fella

A classmate named John Drew (IIRC) remembered him quite well, and wrote about his memories - 0kaka looked, acted and dressed like a rich fag and hung out with a fag Pakistani, and lived in a dorm or other domocile with foreign students, and he was a communist.

If I had a link I’d post it. His article or articles about this have been on FR but I have no idea how to find them, I guess search on “John Drew” if that’s really the correct name.


55 posted on 08/13/2012 6:53:03 PM PDT by little jeremiah (Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. CSLewis)
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To: little jeremiah

“...When I first saw Obama, I remember I was standing on the porch of Boss’s parents’ impressive home as a sleek, expensive luxury car pulled up the driveway. Two young men emerged from the vehicle. They were well-dressed and looked like they were born to wealth and privilege. I was a little surprised to learn they were Boss’s friends from Occidental College until she articulated the underlying0 political connection. “They’re on our side,” she said...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/02/meeting_young_obama.html


56 posted on 08/13/2012 7:13:15 PM PDT by Fred Nerks (Fair Dinkum!)
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To: Fred Nerks; fella
Thank you - I did get his name right! Here's the last paragraph from that article and fella, you should read the whole thing:

Whatever impact our encounter might have had on him, I know something about what Barack Obama believed in 1980. At that time, the future president was a doctrinaire Marxist revolutionary, although perhaps -- for the first time -- considering conventional politics as a more practical road to socialism. Knowing this, I think I have a responsibility to place on the public record my account of this incident from our president's past.

57 posted on 08/13/2012 8:27:40 PM PDT by little jeremiah (Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point. CSLewis)
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