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Alex was interested in postmodern literary criticism, and her arguments brimmed with the deconstructionist ideas of Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher. In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals. Here’s a passage from another section of that same letter:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Obama was the central character in his letters, in a self-conscious way, with variations on the theme of his search for purpose and self-identity. In one letter, he told Alex that it seemed as if many of his Pakistani friends were headed toward the business world, and his old high-school buddies were “moving toward the mainstream.” Where did that leave him? “I must admit large dollops of envy for both groups,” he wrote. “Caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me, in a sense the choice to take a different path is made for me The only way to assuage my feelings of isolation are to absorb all the traditions [and] classes; make them mine, me theirs.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/06/young-barack-obama-in-love-david-maraniss

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I read a good portion of the Vanity Fair article and it just sounds fake. The girlfriend kept a diary that sounds like she’s writing a novel.

One thing true does come out of the article and I don’t know if the author or editors knew how incredibly telling this was. The girlfriend describes Obama as relentlessly calculating, particularly about constructing his own identity. On a superficial level, this tells us that nothing about him is based on core beliefs, but is a calculated decision about what he wants. On a more conspiratory level, this description, hand in hand with his own description that he was a loner, paints a vivid picture of someone who could truly be a Manchurian Candidate.

The secrecy of his records adds yet more texture to this theory. Someone living the way he and the girlfriend describe with such an intense penchant for secrecy fits in with someone who has controllers or handlers, people who are sponsoring his education and progress in life. If he leads an open, active social life, too many people get to see him and know him and the truth of the identity becomes harder and harder to hide.

Last, but not least, when he starts dating this white chick, his social circle (in the article) is like all Pakistanis with Islamic names. She describes how he was consciously pulling away from that group to develop a more American identity to achieve his goals. She also mentions that he abstained from alcohol and drugs (”mostly” or something like that).

Although the article is definitely a boot-kisser’s view, it actually sheds some pretty negative and suspicious light on O.

Obama and the case of the missing 'thesis'
By Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer
July 24, 2008

excerpt:

The hunt for Obama’s senior “thesis” began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obama’s 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 University’s 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
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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.'"

[snip]

"he [Obama] declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

'He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,' said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman."

Obama’s 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
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From David Horowitz's FrontPageMag.com/DiscoverTheNetworks.org:
Profile: Institute For Policy Studies (IPS)

IPS’s [Institute For Policy Studies] Washington, DC headquarters quickly became a resource center for national reporters and a place for KGB agents from the nearby Soviet embassy to convene and strategize. Cora Weiss headed one of the IPS's most successful forays -- into Riverside Church in Manhattan. She was invited there in 1978 by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin to run the church's Disarmament Program, which sought to consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe -- in the name of "peace." In 1982 Weiss helped organize the largest pro-disarmament demonstration ever held. Staged in New York City, the rally was attended by a coalition of communist organizations. During her decade-long tenure at Riverside, which became home to the National Council of Churches, Weiss regularly received Russian KGB agents, Sandinista friends, and Cuban intelligence agents. Weiss became infamous for her role in the psychological warfare conducted against U.S. prisoners of war held in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton" during the Vietnam War.

The Liberation News Service, which is a news source for hundreds of "alternative" publications nationwide (with antiwar, Marxist-oriented perspectives), was founded in 1967 with IPS assistance."

[lots more at link...]

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6991
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From the website of Riverside Church...

The Riverside Church
490 Riverside Drive
New York, New York 10027
212-870-6700

The Riverside Church is located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side near Columbia University.

http://www.theriversidechurchny.org/about/?directions
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"She was invited there in 1978 by the Reverend William Sloane Coffin to run the church's Disarmament Program, which sought to consolidate Soviet nuclear superiority in Europe -- in the name of 'peace.'

In 1982 Weiss helped organize the largest pro-disarmament demonstration ever held. Staged in New York City, the rally was attended by a coalition of communist organizations."
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=6991
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From the Columbia University website...

"Obama attended Columbia College from 1981 to 1983"
Source:
http://news.columbia.edu/home/1260
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Bill Ayers' education:
1987 - Ed.D, Columbia University, Curriculum & Instruction
1987 - M.Ed, Teachers College, Columbia University, Early Childhood Education
1984 [he completed his degree in '84] - M.Ed, Bank Street College, Early Childhood Education
1968 - B.A., University of Michigan, American Studies
http://education.uic.edu/directory/faculty_info.cfm?netid=bayers
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Bank Street College
Where We Are and How to Get Here:

Bank Street College is located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at 610 West 112th Street, between Broadway and Riverside Drive.

Bank Street College is located in a bustling family and university neighborhood four blocks from Columbia University
http://www.bankstreet.edu/aboutbsc/visiting.html
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Why Won’t Obama Talk About Columbia?
The years he won’t discuss may explain the Ayers tie he keeps lying about:
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjY4YzdhMDBkZGQ3ZmU2MTUzYjdkMzc5ZjUzYmViZWM=

Obama Espoused Radical [Communist] Views in College
Steve Malzberg - WOR News Talk Radio 710 ^ | February 12, 2010 | Ronald Kessler

Dr. John C. Drew, a grant writing consultant in Laguna Niguel, Calif., tells Newsmax he met Obama in 1980 when Obama was a sophomore at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Drew had just graduated from Occidental and was attending graduate school at Cornell University.

During Christmas break, Drew says he was at Grauman-Boss’ home in Palo Alto when Obama came over with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, his roommate from Pakistan.

“Barack [Obama] and Hasan showed up at the house in a BMW, and then we went to a restaurant together,” Drew says. “We had a nice meal, and then we came back to the house and smoked cigarettes and drank and argued politics.”

For the next several hours, they discussed Marxism.

“He [Obama] was arguing a straightforward Marxist-Leninist class-struggle point of view, which anticipated that there would be a revolution of the working class, led by revolutionaries, who would overthrow the capitalist system and institute a new socialist government that would redistribute the wealth,” says Drew, who says he himself was then a Marxist.

“The idea was basically that wealthy people were exploiting others,” Drew says. “That this was the secret of their wealth, that they weren’t paying others enough for their work, and they were using and taking advantage of other people. He was convinced that a revolution would take place, and it would be a good thing.”

Drew concluded that Obama thought of himself as “part of an intelligent, radical vanguard that was leading the way towards this revolution and towards this new society.” ..."

Referring to Obama’s quote from “Dreams of My Father” that he associated with Marxist professors, Drew says, “What he’s not saying is that he was in 100 percent total agreement with those Marxist professors. When you understand that, Obama’s later associations and policies make more sense, including why he was taken in by Rev. Wright’s ideology.”