Posted on 01/15/2009 3:10:06 PM PST by Sioux-san
"The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAMs energies alive.,,,"
The highly indicative sentence above comes from an 1800-word article that Barack Obama wrote for Columbias weekly news magazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze in March 1983. Obama was twenty-one at the time.
The sentence nicely captures Obamas skill as a writer. The noun, belief, and the verb, keep, dont agreeone of an appalling five such noun-verb mismatches in the essay--and the punctuation is fully random.
More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.
In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are moribundthat is nearly dead. How their debilitated state keeps the energies of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) alive is apparently left to the readers imagination.
(Excerpt) Read more at cashill.com ...
It he were writing in Latin or Greek, this phenomenon would be explained as ‘attraction’,
“More problematically, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama had warned his readers about the ‘the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.’
In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are ‘moribund’ that is ‘nearly dead.’ How their debilitated state keeps the ‘energies’ of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) ‘alive’ is apparently left to the readers imagination.”
To be fair, he refers to the spread of “militarism,” which is not necessarily the same thing as the military institutions. Of course, I haven’t read the whole paper. I’m sure it’s confused.
Every sentence has its own graceful cadence. He could just as easily have been a novelist as a politician.
Yeah. Just like Henry Adams and Disraeli. Such a genius.
By the way, when I saw the acronym SAM, I thought he was talking about surface to air missles. Then I wished I was reading about missles.
In fact, most such folks complain about others' overuse of commas!
I suspect Obama understands the commas in the speeches Axelrod writes for him. At the same time I'm pretty sure he has no idea where to put them.
I've developed a little litany of Obama-isms ~ "unh, mmmm, nghnm, nork, dork" ~ that he goes into when asked to say something for which he does not have an already prepared text ready to go. Add in elbows flopping up and down, tongue pushing lips in front of teeth ~ you've seen someone do this before.
Then there's the perfect diction that he draws from Axelrod's word processor.
What Obama and Axelrod forgot to do is work the "unh, mmm,...." stuff into his regular litany as delivered with the assistance of a teleprompter. That way something he says would appear natural.
Now, comment on the Democrats ~ they are too uneducated and erudite to even begin to comprehend how inartful Obama's speach appears to someone who can use commas.
What is worse, IMO, is that the passage from the Dreams book presented as an example of how “great” a writer B.O. might be, is also atrocious (just in a different way). It reads like a 19 year old in their first creative writing class presenting an unintentional parody of “great writing”.
To be fair, I have not read his book, only passages here and there. Maybe the chosen passage is a bad example.
Now Obama supposedly grew up in Kansas, Hawaii, and Indonesia. The probability that he never saw a dark night sky, and the Milky Way is virtually nil. But maybe someone who spent his whole life in or near Chicago might never have seen it and thought of it as an exotic thing.
ML/NJ
excerpt:
The hunt for Obamas senior thesis began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obamas early New York years, mentioned in passing that the presidential contender had majored in political science at Columbia and had spent his time writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.
Journalists began hounding Columbia University for copies of the musty document. Conservative bloggers began wondering if the young Obama had written a no-nukes screed that he might come to regret. And David Bossie, the former congressional investigator and right-wing hit man, as one newspaper described him, took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia Universitys newspaper and the Chicago Tribune in March searching for the term paper.
Bossie came up dry, but said the effort was well worth it:
A thesis entitled Soviet Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations), he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News.
http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/07/24/1219454.aspx
__________________________________________________________________________
Here is the passage from the New York Times that the above article refers to:
"He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job work he went on to do in Chicago though a former supervisor remembers him as 'a star performer.'"
Obamas Account of New York Years Often Differs From What Others Say
By JANNY SCOTT, October 30, 2007:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/30/us/politics/30obama.html?ex=1351396800&en=631bf83f428647f9&ei=5089&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss
__________________________________________________________________________
From "45 Communist Goals":
Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963:
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
'Goals' 4-45 can be found here or at many other sites through a web search for "45 goals":
http://www.uhuh.com/nwo/communism/comgoals.htm
___________________________________________________________
From Accuracy In Media | AIM.ORG
Obamas Red Mentor Praised Red Army
AIM Report | By Cliff Kincaid | April 30, 2008
Barack Obamas childhood mentor, Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA, wrote a poem dedicated to the Soviet Red Army. Smash on, victory-eating Red Army, he declared. He also wrote poems attacking traditional Christianity and the work of Christian missionaries.
The Red Army poem goes beyond hoping for the communists to beat the Nazis in World War II and hails the Soviet revolution. It says:
Show the marveling multitudes
Americans, British, all your allied brothers
How strong you are
How great you are
How your young tree of new unity
Planted twenty-five years ago
Bears today the golden fruit of victory!
http://www.aim.org/aim-report/obamas-red-mentor-praised-red-army/
____________________________________
Frank Marshall Davis
Obamas Communist Mentor
AIM Column | By Cliff Kincaid | February 18, 2008
excerpt...
"through Frank Marshall Davis, Obama had an admitted relationship with someone who was publicly identified as a member of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). The record shows that Obama was in Hawaii from 1971-1979, where, at some point in time, he developed a close relationship, almost like a son, with Davis, listening to his 'poetry' and getting advice on his career path. But Obama, in his book, Dreams From My Father, refers to him repeatedly as just 'Frank.'
The reason is apparent: Davis was a known communist who belonged to a party subservient to the Soviet Union. In fact, the 1951 report of the Commission on Subversive Activities to the Legislature of the Territory of Hawaii identified him as a CPUSA member. What's more, anti-communist congressional committees, including the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), accused Davis of involvement in several communist-front organizations."
Frank Chapman, a CPUSA supporter, has written a letter to the party newspaper hailing the Illinois senator's victory in the Iowa caucuses:
"Obamas victory was more than a progressive move; it was a dialectical leap ushering in a qualitatively new era of struggle. Marx once compared revolutionary struggle with the work of the mole, who sometimes burrows so far beneath the ground that he leaves no trace of his movement on the surface. This is the old revolutionary 'mole,' not only showing his traces on the surface but also breaking through."
-People's Weekly World (PWW), official newspaper of the Communist Party, USA
http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/12302/1/405
AIM article: Obamas Communist Mentor
http://www.aim.org/aim-column/obamas-communist-mentor/
Barack Obama, Frank Marshall Davis, Vernon Jarrett - One Degree of Seperation
New Zeal blog ^ | Oct 17, 2008 | Trevor Loudon
"Why did Barack Obama move to Chicago? Why did he choose a city famous for its corruption and distrust of outsiders as a launching pad for his political career? Did Obama's boyhood mentor, life long communist Frank Marshall Davis influence that choice?"
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-file-38-barack-obama-frank.html
When it, comes to grammar, and punctuation obama am an master.
The scary thing is most of those goals have been achieved
But it's quite common in urban sprawl for clouds and smoke to reflect the street lights.
I suppose if you were Obama's ghostwriter, and you thought of him as purely a city kid, you might write about his surprise at seeing the milky way. But it would be a strange and poorly educated and extremely incurious young adult who could have lived in Hawaii and Indonesia and Kansas and never looked up on a dark night.
(Did I get the comma's right?)
Did you notice that Vernon Jarrett is the father of Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s chief advisor, and fiercely loyal friend?
For the record, there’s no evidence Obama ever set foot in Kansas until he began his run for President.
His mother couldn’t get out of there fast enough as a teenager, and there’s no evidence she ever went back; it is extremely unlikely she regaled her son with tales of the majestic amber waves of grain to make him want to visit.
This would have been written back when he was inhaling, correct?
bHo deception ping
No, I didn't. Thanks.
According to Wikipedia, he was her ex-father-in-law. Interesting. I'll have to read the New Zealand article again with this in mind.
Barack Obama, Frank Marshall Davis, Vernon Jarrett - One Degree of Seperation
New Zeal blog ^ | Oct 17, 2008 | Trevor Loudon
"Why did Barack Obama move to Chicago? Why did he choose a city famous for its corruption and distrust of outsiders as a launching pad for his political career? Did Obama's boyhood mentor, life long communist Frank Marshall Davis influence that choice?"
http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/10/obama-file-38-barack-obama-frank.html
Jack Cashill is very good and was kind enough to exchange a few e-mails with me on 0’s Columbia years
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