The actual quote is
"If you were concerned about something going wrong in the world, Stanley would know about it first," said Chip Wall, who described her as "a fellow traveler. . . . We were liberals before we knew what liberals were."
It's not at all clear that classmate Chip was saying that fellow liberal SAD supported the Communist party line. What he did mean is anybody's guess, and some guesses will be better than "Spengler's."
What a careful reader will take away from Barack Obama’s memoir Dreams of My Father is not only that the president used to eat dog meat, but more importantly, that he identifies with dog-eaters.
That's not actually the title of the book (but it's not like anybody actually read it, so I'll let that go).
Romney's putting the dog in a carrier on the car's roof somehow gets translated by liberal bloggers and talking-heads as an act of deliberate cruelty. It wasn't and wouldn't have been seen as such at the time.
We travel at 55 mph in a metal box (a car) and it wouldn't have been obvious forty years ago that taking a dog in a metal box (an animal carrier) at the same speed would have been cruel or unusual.
It was right to bring up Obama's comment about eating dog when the Obama people and the media tried to portray Romney as gratuitously cruel to animals. But I'm not sure that one can hang all this ideological baggage on a "Hey, I once ate dog, or snake, or grasshopper" statement.
It really isn’t unfair at all to bring Obama’s canine consumption to public attention. The president isn’t really one of us. He’s a dog-eater. He tells the story in his memoir to emphasize that viscerally, Obama identifies with the Third World of his upbringing more than with the America of his adulthood. It is our great misfortune to have a president who dislikes our country at this juncture in our history.
Spengler goes from expressing a certain amount of pity for dog-eating populations to this "they're not like us and Obama identifies with them, so he's one of them not one of us." That doesn't really follow from the facts.
Maybe Obama feels something like the pity Spengler expressed earlier. Or maybe he's just saying "Hey, I ate dog once. How about that, guys?" The identification with the dog-eaters and the hatred for the rest of us may be something "Spengler" is reading into a more innocent and less ideological remark.
Well, x, that is the most obtuse response I’ve ever seen from you.
As a Viet Nam Veteran I have been in many parts of Indonesia and could address the dog and cat menu.
Also, having been around forty years ago I can tell you the speed limit wasn’t 55 it was 70 and at that speed it would have been cruel and unusual punishment to have a dog strapped in a carrier outside of the auto, even back then.
It is clear that SAD was closely involved with communism long before she left WA state.
Barack Obama: Red Diaper Baby...Obama's future mother, Stanley Ann Dunham could attend Mercer Island high school.
What was special about Mercer Island High School? The Chicago Tribune explains:
"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."After intense debate, Stenhouse decided not to resign from the school board according to an April 11, 1955 account in Time Magazine. While others demanded Stenhouse's resignation, the Dunhams gravitated towards his school.
As with Obama, his mother's generation of these pseudo-intellectual leftist high schoolers found a way to think of themselves as superior. How? By surrounding themselves with co-thinkers. The Seattle Times continues:
One respite was found in a wing of Mercer Island High called "anarchy alley." Jim Wichterman taught a wide-open philosophy course that included Karl Marx. Next door, Val Foubert taught a rigorous dose of literature, including Margaret Mead's writings on homosexuality.Those classes prompted what Wichterman, now 80 and retired in Ellensburg, called "mothers' marches" of parents outraged at the curriculum.
Dunham thrived in the environment, Wichterman said.
The Chicago Tribune mentions a description of the Dunham's chosen church as "The Little Red Church on the Hill". According to its own website, East Shore Unitarian Church got that name because of, "Well-publicized debates and forums on such controversial subjects as the admission of ‘Red China' to the United Nations...." The fact that John Stenhouse once served as church president might also have contributed to the "red" label.
I haven’t seen or heard any liberal bloggers portraying Romney’s treatment of Seamus as deliberate cruelty, but of callous and inhumane indifference. That’s a major difference, though neither is good.
It might not have been obvious to you 40 years ago that strapping a dog up in his carrier atop a station wagon for hours and hours of highway driving is cruel, but it sure would have been seen that way by many others.
And I think you and Spengler are both right—Obama was merely bragging about his exotic cultural experience, but he also does identify with the third world as morally superior to the US.