Posted on 02/28/2008 4:55:05 PM PST by george76
Chip Wall can't help but zero in on the little stuff whenever he watches Barack Obama on TV.
It's his old pal Stanley.
For Wall and a few dozen others, Obama on the campaign trail often brings to mind Stanley Ann Dunham, Obama's mother and a strong-willed, unconventional member of the Mercer Island High School graduating class of 1960.
"She was not a standard-issue girl of her times...
"She touted herself as an atheist, and it was something she'd read about and could argue,"
the only child was a ... daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley -- after himself.
Stanley Ann Dunham's formative years, spent not on the Great Plains but more than 1,800 miles away on a small island in the Pacific Northwest.
Stanley Dunham died in 1992, and the Obama campaign declined to make Madelyn Dunham, 84, available.
In 1955, the chairman of the Mercer Island school board, John Stenhouse, testified before the House Un-American Activities Subcommittee that he had been a member of the Communist Party.
The marriage failed. Stanley Ann filed for divorce in 1964 and remarried two years later, when her son was 5. The senior Obama finished his work at Harvard and returned to Kenya, where he hoped to realize his big dreams of taking a place in the Kenyan government.
Years later, Abercrombie and another grad school friend looked up their old pal during a trip through Africa.
At that point, the senior Obama was a bitter man, according to the congressman, feeling that he had been denied due opportunities to influence the running of his country. "He was drinking too much; his frustration was apparent," .
To Abercrombie's surprise, Obama never asked about his ex-wife or his son.
(Excerpt) Read more at chicagotribune.com ...
Its funny how all the Obama apologizers are now claiming that she was Agnostic, or just a "White Bread Christian."
Q: How does the son of a Muslim and an Atheist become a Christian?
A: He doesn't. He becomes a Muslim, like his Dad.
Thank you for helping.
Six more pages !
I will be back...
1. He looks very happy.
2. In the way she is looking at and holding him she appears very devoted.
I’m sure you can find pictures of Madelaine Murray
O’Hare smiling devotedly with her sons and grandchildren
too. A picture is an “acting” moment and cannot reveal
whether someone is either good or bad let alone what
kind of parent they are.
Agreed. Clearly, there are children of radical liberals who grow up conservative, Alex P. Keaton style. We can hold Obama responsible for his radical beliefs, no matter where they came from or who inspired them.
Dragging his family into this is something even Hillary has not done (yet). Let it remain the tactic of the soulless.
BS
I don’t see the discussion here as posters “dragging his dead mother into it” for the purpose of using her to convince others not to vote for Obama.
I haven’t seen anyone post that and I cannot see people making a presidential choice on that basis.
Like it or not, Obama is certainly the the product of his environment to one degree or another.
His parents were far from being average americans and as a consequence he had a childhood that was outside the norm, even for a child of mixed race parentage. To understand the mother, the father, the grandparents that raised him is to better understand the man.
Of course Obama is responsible for his own radicalism, but I don’t see what is so off-putting to some about discussing his family’s radical background as well. If I were running for President, I would expect the media & the public to want to learn more about my family & heritage, at least to get to know where I’m coming from.
As interesting as that all is, how is it his fault, or his problem, and how is it relevant?
She was an anti-American hippie who wanted dark-skinned men (but didn’t stay married to them) and left her parents to raise her son.
Again, how is that relevant, since I presume he had no choice in the matter. Specifically, what difference does the color of the men she liked have on anything. Seriously. What difference at all?
No use attacking Obama for that - not in this PC age - but it certainly had an impact on him.
So it is legitimate (but not PC) to attack a man based on the color of the men his mother liked and on who raised him as a child? Interesting.
And just how often has he thanked his white grandparents for raising him as a teen?
I don't know, but since you seem to know that he did not, what are your sources?
If you really think that these are the issues that will put a conservative in the White House come the next election, I think you have another think coming.
One knows a tree by its fruit. To find if Obama
is a Christian requires an inspection of what he
does (fruit). We are what we do, not what we say.
Now DO, if you continue to neglect flagging your
sarc comments, I’ll have to sick the snark dogs on
you. Secular Progressive indeed. LOL!
I have a son who is only slightly older than Obama in that picture. He is also a very happy child and it is obvious that a primary source of his happiness is the good relationship he has with his mother.
Oops...
A jon cary seared in my mind moment ?
” Obama has told the story—one of the watershed moments of his racial awareness—time and again, in remarkable detail.
He is 9 years old, living in Indonesia, where he and his mother moved with her new husband, Lolo Soetoro, a few years earlier. One day while visiting his mother, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta, Obama passed time by looking through several issues of Life magazine. He came across an article that he later would describe as feeling like an “ambush attack.”
The article included photos of a black man who had destroyed his skin with powerful chemical lighteners that promised to make him white. Instead, the chemicals had peeled off much of his skin, leaving him sad and scarred, Obama recalled.
“I imagine other black children, then and now, undergoing similar moments of revelation,” Obama wrote of the magazine photos in “Dreams.”
Yet no such Life issue exists, according to historians at the magazine. No such photos, no such article. When asked about the discrepancy, Obama said in a recent interview, “It might have been an Ebony or it might have been ... who knows what it was?” (At the request of the Tribune, archivists at Ebony searched their catalogue of past articles, none of which matched what Obama recalled.)
In fact, it is surprising, based on interviews with more than two dozen people who knew Obama during his nearly four years in Indonesia, that it would take a photograph in a magazine to make him conscious of the fact that some people might treat him differently in part because of the color of his skin. “
[... Obviously you understand that Obama is a lowercase god for the godless...]
I find this to be true as well as weird. It is my
opinion that Obama is popular because he is
physically appealing. Period! That’s all he’s
got and that’s enough for the vapid masses to
qualify him to be POTUS. Go figure.
The Emperor truly has no clothes.
I don't either.
Is Obama to be declared untouchable or granted immunity from the same treatment as others because he is half black?
Or perhaps because his father's family is muslim?
Digging into a candidate's ancestry, their upbringing and the forces that shaped them is standard fare for presidential candidates.
There certainly was wide open discussion about Bill Clinton's parents and his upbringing.
As first lady Hillary's history was discussed in detail and there have been plenty of second looks since she embarked on the present campaign.
George Bush's parents, upbringing and early adulthood have been beaten to death by the media and his detractors.
I don't believe there should be a different standard for Obama or any one else.
Perhaps Obama is happy in those pictures because
of the relationship he has with his Mother. Or
perhaps Obama is just a happy child. Pictures are
posed and one dimensional. Yet I hope she was
a good Mother.
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