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Barack Obama is lying might be the most frequently used phrase of this clown's Presidency.
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Jack CashillA New Yorker article by editor David Remnick gives away the game in the headline, "Trump, Birtherism, And Race-Baiting."
According to Remnick, the "irrepressible jackass" Trump has inspired idiot America to believe a series of fantasies about Barack Obama: "There is the birther fantasy; the fantasy that Bill Ayers wrote "Dreams from My Father"; the fantasy that the President has some other father, and not Barack Obama, Sr.; the fantasy that Obama got into Harvard Law School with the help of a Saudi prince and the Nation of Islam." Remnick adds as a Harvard subset the fantasy that Obama is "intellectually incapable."
"The cynicism of the purveyors of these fantasies," Remnick continues, "is that they know very well what they are playing at, the prejudices they are fanning." Bottom line, concludes Remnick, these fantasies "are designed to arouse a fear of the Other, of an African-American man with a white American mother and a black Kenyan father."
Forgive me for taking this personally, but Remnick considers me one of the purveyors. Trump is at least worthy of his public scorn. I am apparently not. From the perspective of our Ivy-educated, Pulitizer Prize-winner, I and others like me are "the Other," unmentioned and unmentionable. To set the record straight, let us tackle these "fantasies" in reverse order.
The intellectually incapable fantasy
Curiously, it is Remnick himself in his Obama biography, The Bridge, who has best substantiated the charge that Obama did not deserve to get into Harvard. He tells us that Obama was an "unspectacular" student in his final two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school. He quotes a Northwestern University prof who says of Obama, "I don't think he did too well in college." Remnick admits that Obama has inexplicably not contributed a single signed word of legal scholarship ever, anywhere, despite being president of the Harvard law Review.
How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants' LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.8 and 4.0 is a subject Remnick chooses not to explore. In another context, however, an unwitting Remnick quotes Obama who, when at Harvard, described himself as "someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career." Undoubtedly, yes.
We'll get outraged when Oprah's Book of the Month fools us with fiction, but not when Opera's Presidential Pick does it...
Why is that?
Bruce BawerOver the last few years, a Montana nurse named Greg Mortenson has been building an international reputation as a world-class hero and future Nobel Peace Prize winner for having built scores of schools, mostly for girls, in war-torn Afghanistan. At this writing, his 2006 book Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time has been on the New York Times’s paperback nonfiction bestseller list for 220 weeks. But everything changed on April 17, when 60 Minutes broadcast an exposé of Mortenson. The next day, Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air and a former supporter of Mortenson, published online a detailed takedown of Mortenson entitled Three Cups of Deceit. Among the richly substantiated charges was that Mortenson had invented key episodes in his book (and in its 2009 sequel, Stones into Schools), that many of the schools he claimed to have built did not exist and that some of those that did exist had not received help from him or his charity, the Central Asia Institute, since their construction, and that he was guilty of serious financial irregularities. (One former colleague accused Mortenson of using the CAI “as an ATM.”) The fallout from the takedown made it clear that zillions of Mortenson’s fans around the world were shocked by the allegations.
I wasn’t. When I first heard Mortenson speak at a conference two years ago, I was unaware what a big deal he was. Indeed, as far as I can remember it was the first time I’d ever heard of him. I was immediately appalled. He was swaggering, slick, self-satisfied. These attributes especially stood out in contrast with the other speakers at the conference. For the occasion was the first annual Oslo Freedom Forum, at which many if not most of Mortenson’s fellow speakers were genuine heroes — men and women who’d stood up for freedom in autocratic countries and been punished for it with years of imprisonment and torture.
Those heroes had a right to swagger. Only they didn’t. On the contrary, most of them seemed embarrassed by the attention they were receiving. They weren’t comfortable in the limelight. They recounted their experiences in halting voices, their sincerity shining through. Plainly, they were telling their stories not to sell books or build a brand but because they knew that, for the sake of human justice, their stories desperately needed to be told. The focus of their testimony wasn’t on their own courageous endurance but on the cruelty of the tyrants who’d made them suffer — and on the need to free others who still chafed under the same yoke. Such was their humility that, to my shame, I came away not being able to remember most of their names.
But it was impossible to forget Greg Mortenson’s name. For he was the star of his own story. The whole point of his talk was how much one brave, selfless individual can accomplish in this world even against the most formidable of odds. And that individual was him. The premise of his spiel was that he’s a miracle worker, pacifying belligerent jihadist types by sitting down with them over three cups of tea and listening to their concerns. Yet the egomaniac I saw that day was somebody you couldn’t picture listening to anybody else for more than thirty seconds.
...
Some might suggest that the elevation to the presidency of Barack Obama, an empty sales pitch in a snappy suit, answered these questions definitively. Others might point to cases like that of Al Gore, who despite his Mortenson-like fondness for private jets and his humongous carbon footprint (he’s used “more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year”) is still somehow getting away with his absurd environmental-hero act. One thing that has particularly stunned me in the wake of the Kroft and Krakauer revelations is the readiness of many of Mortenson’s longtime fans to react with a “Yes, but….” Yes, they say, Mortenson may have lied, cheated, stolen, leveled false accusations, and so forth — but he’s also done some good. Right — and Mussolini made the trains run on time. One can only hope that the shock of so many of these fans over the exposure of Dr. Greg’s perfidies will in time translate, in at least some cases, into a somewhat diminished credulity, a hesitation to embrace personal narratives that seem just too good to be true, and an increased willingness to approach every truth claim in a spirit of (dare one say it?) critical judgment. Admittedly, it’s a slim hope — but then Easter is the season of hope, isn’t it?
Are you outraged by ann rand's fiction?
Jack CashillIn her new biography of Ann Dunham, A Singular Woman, New York Times reporter Janny Scott corrupts Barack Obama's nativity story even more than a cynic might have thought possible. In so doing, Scott follows an ignoble media tradition that deserves exposure as does the story that it corrupts.
At the very first moment of his national acclaim, the 2004 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama established the foundational myth of his political ascendancy.
Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., had grown up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother, Ann Dunham, Obama traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," Obama continued, "they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."
In the frequent retelling of this tale, Obama Sr. left the family for Harvard well after the family had cohered. "I get it," Obama told America's schoolchildren in 2009. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother."
For the first five years of his national celebrity, the major media accepted the story as told. This included the four book-length biographies I consulted when researching my book Deconstructing Obama and any number of long-form articles.
Even before the 2008 election, however, the alternative conservative media began catching on that the story was false. How false would become increasingly clear.
In his self-published book, What Does Barack Obama Believe, conservative activist Michael Patrick Leahy established that Obama's mother, Ann Dunham, had left Hawaii without her presumed husband long before her baby's first birthday.
By 2009, WorldNetDaily had confirmed the specifics of Dunham's departure. WND posted Dunham's transcripts from the University of Washington in Seattle, which showed that she had begun taking two night classes on September 25, 1961, about seven weeks after the baby's birth. WND placed her arrival in Seattle about a month earlier.
This meant, of course, that the story Obama had been telling about his origins -- what Obama-friendly biographer David Remnick calls Obama's "signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal" -- was profoundly false. There was no Obama family, no shared "faith in the possibilities of this nation," no "improbable love."
While writing his definitive Obama biography, The Bridge, New Yorker editor Remnick had access to all this information, which was also posted on apolitical history sites in Washington State. He could not ignore it, but he could not embrace it either. So he tried to finesse it.
In Remnick's butchered version, when the baby was born, "Ann dropped out of school to care for her infant son." In the months following, Remnick suggests that Ann grew restive at home "while Barack Sr. was in classes, studying at the library, and out drinking with his friends."
As far as I know, Remnick is the first mainstream reporter to place Dunham in Washington State, but he tells us that Dunham "registered for an extension course in the winter of 1961 and enrolled as a regular student in the spring of 1962." In the sentence that follows immediately, Remnick adds, "She moved to Seattle with Barack Jr ... and reconnected with old friends."
Remnick here creates the deliberate impression that Dunham lived with Obama Sr. after the baby's birth, took "an extension course" in the winter of 1962, and then moved to Seattle with the baby in the spring. He had to know this was false. According to the university's official transcript, Dunham had received 20 hours of academic credit through four evening classes at the Seattle campus by the time the spring semester began. Moreover, she had dropped out of the University of Hawaii not after the baby was born but seven months beforehand.
To further resuscitate the "improbable love" myth, Remnick tells the reader that in fall 1962 "Ann went with the baby to Cambridge briefly to visit her husband, but that trip was a failure and she returned to Hawaii." No remotely credible evidence supports this version of events, and all logic and logistics argue against it.
Janny Scott further muddies the water. Although she spent more than two years researching Dunham's life, the defining event of which was the birth of her son, Scott contributes nothing but misinformation to the public understanding of Obama's early years.
Scott seems almost reluctant to raise the subject of those years. On page 84 of the book, the reader learns that "Obama was twenty-four years old and Ann was seventeen when they met in the fall of 1960." On page 86 of the book, we are told that baby Obama is born in Honolulu, and, "Eleven months later, the elder Obama was gone." Improbably, this two-page account follows thirty well-documented pages on Dunham's high school years in Seattle.
According to INS documents, Obama was 26 at the time the couple met, but that is not the real problem here. The problem is that Scott obfuscates everything. About the wedding itself, Scott can tell us no more than that the couple married "reportedly on the island of Maui." As the authoritative source on Dunham's life, she should be embarrassed to use the word "reportedly."
Scott adds nary a detail to an otherwise undocumented ceremony. Critically, too, she fails to comment on Ann Dunham's whereabouts from the alleged wedding in February 1961 to Obama's birth in August 1961. In so doing, Scott does not quiet the skepticism about Obama's origins. She aggravates it.
To her credit, unlike Remnick, Scott does not cite the comically unreliable Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie as a source on the storied relationship. To her discredit, Scott cites no credible real time witnesses at all. The only person who bears witness on this subject is a woman who learned about it from Ann several years after the fact.
As to the birth, Scott provides no details other than what was available on the short form certification of live birth. She does not tell us where the happy newlyweds lived or even if they lived together, let alone if they were happy.
Recently posted INS documents note that the newborn baby Obama was "living with mother" and she in turn was living "with her parents." Obama Sr. meanwhile was living at a totally separate address. These documents were requested through the Freedom of Information Act by Heather Smathers, a young reporter for the Arizona Independent, a community weekly. No one at the Times apparently bothered.
Although sent by the INS, let me add a word of caution about these documents. In the 55-page release, only one page is fully hand written by an INS official. That is the page I cite above, confirming my argument that the Obama birth narrative was manufactured. That page also confirms, however, that "Barack Obama II" was born in Honolulu on "8/4/1961."
Smathers requested these documents in September 2010. They arrived conveniently on April 18, 2011. She posted them on April 26. Obama released his long-form birth certificate on April 27 with the unusual designation "II" after his name, not "Jr." as one might expect. The INS documents offer official backup to the date on Obama's birth certificate, but the official's repetition of the unusual locution "II" leaves me a tad suspicious as does the timing of the documents' release. A hand-written document copied to a CD cannot be hard to falsify.
There are more holes still. In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama observes that a newspaper story announcing his father's departure for Harvard in June 1962 failed to mention him or his mother, and he wonders if "the omission caused a fight between my parents." Scott comments, "Whatever fight there was may have happened earlier." Of course, it happened earlier. The two had not seen each other for nine months. Based on the available evidence, the two had surely broken up long before the baby was born, if indeed there was a real relationship at all.
Scott concedes Dunham did go to Seattle but, like Remnick, she plays games with the timeline. "In the spring quarter of 1962, as Obama was embarking on his final semester in Hawaii, Ann was enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle," Scott writes.
As in Remnick's case, this is borderline fraud. Scott credits her information about the spring semester to a university official, and although true, it conceals the larger fact that Ann had already been at the university for months. The maladroit Scott even cites a Dunham friend who places Dunham and the baby in Seattle in "late in the summer of 1961."
After reading Remnick and Scott, the public has absolutely no idea whether Dunham married Obama Sr. and where Dunham spent the next seven months. The story the two reporters tell us about the first year of Obama's life is conspicuously and consciously false.
And yet they and their pals get to mock us for the very act of asking questions about Obama's birth! Someone please wake me and reassure me I am dreaming.
Jack Cashill
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This is your idea of cogent rebuttal?
Jack Cashill excerpts
Obama's father, Barack Obama Sr., had grown up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother, Ann Dunham, Obama traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," Obama continued, "they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."
Have you read any of Obama's books?
__________________
Quit hitting me with your Christian "hate!"
http://forum.literotica.com/showthread.php?t=759907
A_J, the Minority
It's easy to ask nonsensical questions and cry coward when you're unread...
Too scared to answer this question too, huh?
It must be hard being such a coward.
It was an idiotic question that deserved no response.
Why don't you comment on the details of the post?
What do you think about the documented lies mentioned?
No?
• fault the source
• point finger elsewhere
• namecalling
• insult integrity and intelligence
• answer a question with another question
• refuses to read info stating already knows what's in it
It's a pattern easily recognizable, used in varying degrees, simultaneously and/or one jab at a time
...
Other than "blame bush", you do realize that you just did everything that you are accusing me of.... don't you?
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Which work of fiction do you base your life off of?
Not at all ...not a single one.
Jack CashillOn November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.
Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.
Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.
The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.
"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."
If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.
Although the letter is less than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "
Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:
"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?
The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.
I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.
Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.
Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.
Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.
Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."
Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.
In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."
To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."
On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.
Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."
To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?
What else could it be?