Barack Obama is lying about not being friends with Bill Ayers...

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

As an example, let us take a look at the two pages of Dreams (144-145 in the 2004 paperback) in which young Barry Soetoro first visits the mainland. The date of the visit is specific: "during the summer after my father's visit to Hawaii, before my eleventh birthday." This was 1972. Traveling around the country on Greyhound busses with his mother, grandmother and baby sister, the ten-year old Obama and his family "watched the Watergate hearings every night before going to bed."

Of course, Obama took this trip a year before the Watergate hearings, which actually began in the late spring of 1973. This is not an isolated misrepresentation. From the flow of these two pages, I suspect that Ayers took the raw data of Obama's life and improvised as he saw fit. He does this throughout the book to score ideological points and make the case for Obama as political prodigy.

According to Dreams, the little family with one year-old Maya in tow made a long distance detour from the obvious places they might visit -- Seattle, Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone -- to spend three days in Chicago.

As Obama tells it, the family rode some 1500 miles on Greyhound buses from the Grand Canyon and another 1000 miles back to Yellowstone to spend three dreary days in a motel in the South Loop of Chicago. Something does not make sense here.

In Chicago, Obama's most vivid memory is of seeing the shrunken heads on display at the Field Museum. Yes, the museum did have those heads on display. They were considered, according to one source, as a "crucial rite of passage for generations of Chicago kids." Ayers was one such kid. He grew up in suburban Chicago.

In Dreams, Obama remembers the heads to be of "European extraction." The man looked like a "conquistador" and the woman had "flowing red hair." This reversal of Euro-fortune struck the precocious Barry as "some sort of cosmic joke."

This memory too is thoroughly contrived. That some conquistador would wander into the Ecuadorian jungle with a woman in tow, let alone Lucille Ball, and end up as a shrunken head defies all probabilities. No source on the Field exhibit even hints that these were Europeans. In fact, one source suggests that the tribe in question vanished seven hundred years before the first European arrived.

Ayers, however, has something of a fascination with headhunting. In his 2001 memoir Fugitive Days, Ayers recounts a 1965 anti-war protest on the Michigan campus that proved formative in his own radicalization.

At the protest, Ayers saw a series of photos that moved him. One showed "four American boys kneeling in the sun, bare-chested, smiling broadly." Although these soldiers looked like the kind of guys Ayers grew up with, they "cradled in their hands now, the severed heads of human beings, their dull, unseeing eyes eternally open, their ears cut off, strung into a decorative collar worn around one smiling kid's neck." That this photo never made its way beyond this particular protest testifies to the malevolence of Ayers' imagination.

Another of the photos Ayers saw at this same protest showed water buffaloes and "small boys with bamboo sticks perched upon their backs." Curiously, in Dreams, Obama also remembers seeing a boy sitting "on the back of a dumb-faced water buffalo, whipping its haunch with a stick of bamboo." Note that these boys whip the beast not just with sticks but with bamboo sticks.

Jack Cashill
The American Thinker
__________________
Ayers wrote his book,
Harvard wrote his Review,
Apollo Alliance wrote his TARP,
Congress is writing his Health Care,
Nobel Committee awarded him extra credit...,

... and the Democrat Media is Wrighting his Legacy!

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Jack's back

In 1994, while Barack Obama's memoir Dreams From My Father was being polished off, Bill Ayers co-authored an essay whose title befits a former merchant seaman: "Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago."

In "Navigating," Ayers and his nominal co-author, former New Communist Movement leader Michael Klonsky, offer a detailed analysis of the Chicago school system and a discussion of potential reforms. Curiously, so too does Obama in Dreams.

What makes Obama's educational digression notable is that he had spent only two months working on education issues as a community organizer -- and that seven years earlier, while his mind was admittedly "elsewhere."

Unlike Obama, Bill Ayers has a genuine, career-long interest in education. In the mid-1990s he was sufficiently serious about reform to invest considerable time and energy in his protégé. As shall be seen, the likely reason Ayers did so was because Obama had the ability to address problems that he and Klonsky could not.

It will surprise no one who has followed my research that the analysis offered in Dreams echoes that of "Navigating." It stands to reason. Each was co-authored in the same year by the same person: Bill Ayers, a talented writer and editor, and surely the dominant partner in both efforts.

The clue to understanding the particular value Obama brought to the relationship, however, can be found not in the many points on which Ayers and the Obama of Dreams agree but rather on the one in which they differ.

First, the areas of agreement. Dreams tells us that Chicago's schools "remained in a state of perpetual crisis." "Navigating" describes the situation as a "perpetual state of conflict, paralysis, and stagnation."

Dreams describes a "bloated bureaucracy" as one source of the problem and "a teachers' union that went out on strike at least once every two years" as another. "Navigating" affirms that the "bureaucracy has grown steadily in the past decade" and confirms Dreams' math, citing a "ninth walkout in 18 years."

"Self-interest" is at the heart of the bureaucratic problem as described in Dreams. "Navigating" clarifies that "survivalist bureaucracies" struggle for power "to protect their narrow, self-interested positions against any common, public purpose."

In Dreams, educators "defend the status quo" and blame problems on "impossible" children and their "bad parents." In "Navigating," an educator serves as "apologist for the status quo" and "place the blame for school failure on children and families."

Another challenge cited in Dreams is "an indifferent state legislature." Ayers cites an "unwillingness on [the legislature's] part to adequately fund Chicago schools."

In Dreams, "school reform" is the only solution that Obama envisions. In "Navigating," "reforming Chicago's schools" is Ayers' passion. In fact, in that same year (1994), Ayers co-authored the proposal that would win for Chicago a $49.2 million Annenberg Challenge grant.

If Ayers allows Obama to cite the structural problems bedeviling the schools, in Dreams he channels his thoughts on educational reform through the soulful voices of two older African Americans.

One goes by the phonied-up name "Asante Moran," likely an homage to the Afro-centric educator, Molefi Kete Asante. In Dreams, Moran lectures Obama and his pal "Johnnie" on the nature of public education:

"The first thing you have to realize," he said, looking at Johnnie and me in turn, "is that the public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period."

"Social control" is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in his 2001 memoir, Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."

...

Lest Obama forget where he came from, Ayers' recent admissions of having written Dreams, however ironic their delivery, remind Obama who put him in the White House and who can take him out. To adopt a nautical metaphor: a shot across the bow.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_bill_ayers_saw_in_barack.html#at

 

[Powertone]

the NEA just proclaimed William Ayers to be the most powerful writer since Juilus Caesar...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2009/10/024805.php

 

[RobDownSouth]

Jack's back



http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/what_bill_ayers_saw_in_barack.html#at

Amurican Thinker magazine: when you're too stupid to think for yourself.

 

[Powertone]

Amurican Thinker magazine: when you're too stupid to think for yourself.

uh huh...here's the storied "The Nation" magazine's assessment of whom they've dubbed " Whiner In Chief "...
they'd better watch out...they too could end up on the enemy list if they don't begin brown-nosing post haste!
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/483551/whiner_in_chief

 

[Slowlane]

uh huh...here's the storied "The Nation" magazine's assessment of whom they've dubbed " Whiner In Chief "...
they'd better watch out...they too could end up on the enemy list if they don't begin brown-nosing post haste!
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/483551/whiner_in_chief

I hadn't seen that article. Not bad thanks.

But the bottom line is, I really don't need anybody to tell me how bad Obama is for this country. Listening to him speak, looking at the bills he has passed, and is trying to, and knowing how much time he spends at fundraisers, parties and golf is enough to set my teeth on edge. Then to find out how he is paying back to big contributors, and how much money he is giving away...Well, other things are interesting, but he already has been given enough rope. He's hung himself and everybody knows it except him. Even the top democrats know it, but it gives them power so they'll put up with it.

 

[Powertone]

I hadn't seen that article. Not bad thanks.

But the bottom line is, I really don't need anybody to tell me how bad Obama is for this country. Listening to him speak, looking at the bills he has passed, and is trying to, and knowing how much time he spends at fundraisers, parties and golf is enough to set my teeth on edge. Then to find out how he is paying back to big contributors, and how much money he is giving away...Well, other things are interesting, but he already has been given enough rope. He's hung himself and everybody knows it except him. Even the top democrats know it, but it gives them power so they'll put up with it.

hey...today's Wednesday...that means tonight it's "Barack Obama's Rock Concert " in da White House!
Every Wednesday night, Barack brings the biggest names in music to entertain him,his wife,family, and staff, to take their minds off all the high-level stress shit they've been dealing with since Monday.
RAWK-ON, Muthufuckazzzz!

 

[Wrong Element]

This thread is the GB equivalent of the Japanese soldier still holed up on a remote island, refusing to admit the war is over.

They aren't overturning the election, fellas.

 

[tinylittlegnat]

This thread is the GB equivalent of the Japanese soldier still holed up on a remote island, refusing to admit the war is over.

They aren't overturning the election, fellas.

Damn good analogy actually.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

This thread is the GB equivalent of the Japanese soldier still holed up on a remote island, refusing to admit the war is over.

They aren't overturning the election, fellas.

Who says they are?

This thread is here for when the voters wake up from their stupor...

If polls are any indication, people are beginning to say, hey, I have to pay for this? and

Where's MY Obama Bucks?
__________________

"Why are you here?"

"To get some money."

"What kind of money?"

"Obama money."

"Where's it coming from?

"Obama."

"And where did Obama get it?"

"I don't know... his stash, I don't know. I don't know where he got it from, but he's givin' it t'us to help us. We love him. That's why we voted for him... Obama! Obama!"

 

[Ishmael]

Who says they are?

This thread is here for when the voters wake up from their stupor...

If polls are any indication, people are beginning to say, hey, I have to pay for this? and

Where's MY Obama Bucks?
__________________

And to remind the dumbasses what they voted for.

Obama is in the process of being politically castrated. We'll survive the next three years.

Ishmael

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Yup.




So next time they'll think twice about the office "moderating" the man...

 

[Slowlane]

Knowing that Obama is a flash in the pan, a blink of the historical eye, so to speak, I didn't think he would be able to do any lasting damage to the country as a whole. I may have been wrong about that. He has already increased the dept far beyond anything I thought he would do and if his health care passes it will mean even more debt (regardless of what the democrats say)

I'm really disappointed in the health care fiasco. The US could use some sort of universal care, and it could be done for very little extra money, but this plan is too full of flaws to even be a starting place.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Once he gets the camel's nose under the health care tent, it's all over, from then on out, the only politics will be who will run it better.

Then you couple it with Cap'n Trade and that's the end of the union.

At that point it's "Back to 1984."




*Atlas Shrug*

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

It's a literary Donovan McNabb!

As evidence that Obama did not exactly write Dreams mounts, Landesman gives us a good indication of how America's cultural honchos will react. For a century, in fact, they have been heaping uncritical praise on undeserving artists of a certain political stripe, especially minority artists. And for a century, they have been pulling the curtain shut behind their pet wizards when anyone questions their wizardry.

There is no better case study of a literary cover-up than that surrounding the publishing phenomenon known as Roots: The Saga of an American Family. The book, first published in 1976, generated extraordinary reviews and spectacular sales. The mini-series based on the book captured more viewers than any series before it. 130 million Americans watched the final episode alone. And its author, Alex Haley, won a special Pulitzer Prize for telling the true story of a black family.

...

Despite the book's easy-going tone, Haley is quietly laying out an indictment against the United States that is always loaded and often gratuitous. In Haley's tale, it is the whites who enter the forest and enslave the blacks, not Arab slave traders, not other blacks. Since Kinte is unconscious through the period of transaction, the reader has no picture of African participation in the slave market, nor of any Portuguese or Hispanic involvement in the slave trade.

As a Muslim, Kinte does not sense any virtue in Christianity. Indeed, it strikes him as crude and hypocritical. Coming of age during the revolutionary period in Virginia, Kinte sees the revolution as inherently fraudulent: "‘Give me liberty or give me death,' Kunta liked that, but he couldn't understand how somebody white could say it; white folks looked pretty free to him."

Fraud is the means Haley used to indulge his bias, and this he did in an extraordinarily reckless fashion. Unfortunately for Haley, at least one person in the cultural establishment was not about to give him a pass because of race or agenda.

Approaching seventy when Roots debuted, Harold Courlander was shocked to read it. Courlander, who himself was white, had been well recognized in the field of cultural anthropology since 1947 when he coauthored The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories. In 1967, he wrote a more conventional novel titled The African. He had earned $14,000 dollars for it. Less than ten years later, Haley flagrantly rewrote large sections of his book and made $2.6 million in hardcover royalties alone. Courlander was not a happy camper.

In 1978, Courlander sued Haley in a U.S. District Court for copyright infringement. Throughout the six weeks of testimony, U.S District Court Judge Robert Ward listened in disbelief to denial after denial by Haley. On one occasion, he noted that Haley used "Yoo-hooo-ah-hoo" as a slave field call with exactly the same spelling as Courlander had and wondered how that could have happened by chance. It couldn't, and it didn't.

Haley's defense fell apart when, during discovery, the plaintiff's lawyers found three quotes from The African among typed notes that he had neglected to destroy. The last thing Judge Ward wanted to do was to undermine a newly ascendant black hero. Midway through the trial, he counseled Haley and his attorneys that he would have to contemplate a perjury charge unless they settled with Courlander. They did just that to the tune of $650,000, or more than $2 million by 2009 standards.

The settlement got precious little media attention. Only the Washington Post gave the case any ink of note, and even then it used a local hook -- "Bethesda Author Settles ‘Roots' Suit for $500,000" -- to justify its coverage. Like the other media who bothered to report on the settlement, the Post neglected to explore the real gist of the scandal: namely that the author of a "nonfiction" Pulitzer Prize-winning book plagiarized from a fictional one.

...


Not surprisingly, the Pulitzer people did not ask for their award back, and the book and video have remained a staple in history classes across America. Nobile blames Roots' seeming immunity on his progressive colleagues. "They were all too scared, or dishonest," he writes, "to admit to the public that the most famous black writer had lied about his ancestry."

Sound familiar?

Jack Cashill
American Thinker

Think about this when Obama is out calling ABC liars, FOX, Edmunds.com, SNL, the racists Republicans who want him defeated because of the color of his skin...,

His "book" is the content of his character.

__________________
Ayers wrote his book,
Harvard wrote his Review,
Apollo Alliance wrote his TARP,
Congress is writing his Health Care,
Nobel Committee awarded him extra credit...,

... and the Democrat Media is Wrighting his Legacy!

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Not a Marxist?

http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2009/ss_politics0855_11_02.asp

A new video of Jeremiah Wright has surfaced, showing Barack Obama’s pastor of 20 years discussing his ties to communists in El Salvador and Nicaragua and the Libyan government.

...

Wright was introduced in the video by Robert W. McChesney, co-founder of Free Press, an organization which has benefitted from George Soros financing and which has come under scrutiny for its links to the Obama Administration and dedication to the transformation and control of the private media in the U.S.

...

McChesney’s Free Press organization has received at least $1 million from the Open Society Institute of billionaire George Soros, a mega-capitalist who seems to have dedicated his life to overturning the very system that made him wealthy.

In an article in the Monthly Review, “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle,” McChesney declared, “Our job is to make media reform part of our broader struggle for democracy, social justice, and, dare we say it, socialism.”

In his remarks, Wright said: “You dispel all the negative images we have been programmed to conjure up with just the mention of that word socialism or Marxism.”

He called America “land of the greed and home of the slave.”

...

The Sept. 17 event provided more insight into the political network, based largely in Chicago, that launched Obama’s political career and still influences him.

A professor at the University of Illinois, where Bill Ayers is also employed, McChesney was an editor of Monthly Review but now serves as a contributor to the publication and a director of the Monthly Review Foundation.

Fox News’ Glenn Beck, who has focused critical public attention on McChesney’s influence in the “media reform” movement and on the Obama Administration, has noted that McChesney co-authored another piece for Monthly Review, “A New New Deal Under Obama?,” in which he said, “In the end, there is no real answer but to remove brick by brick the capitalist system itself, rebuilding the entire society on socialist principles.”

At the 2007 Free Press “National Conference for Media Reform,” Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) launched a vicious attack on conservative talk radio, saying that the survival of America was itself at stake because of “neo-fascist” and “neo-con” talk-show hosts led by Rush Limbaugh.

At the Monthly Review celebration, Wright went into more detail about his own personal and political philosophy. He said that “My work with liberation theology, with Latin American theologians, with the Black Theology Project and with the Cuban Council of Churches taught me 30 years ago the importance of Marx and the Marxist analysis of the social realities of the vulnerable and the oppressed who were trying desperately to break free of the political economics undergirded by this country that were choking them and cutting off any hope of a possible future where all of the people would benefit.”

He said that his “exposure to the FMLN in El Salvador, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and my presence at the 15th Jamahiriya in Libya taught me what I have read in the pages of the Monthly Review which is, as Joshua Stanton says, though we need not always agree with one another we must do the work necessary to at least understand one another.”

The FMLN was the armed wing of the communist movement in El Salvador, while the Sandinistas are the communist movement in Nicaragua. The Cuban Council of Churches is controlled by the Castro regime.

In a recap of the celebration, the Monthly Review editors declared, “We would like to thank all those who participated in this extraordinary event. Dr. Wright captured the tone of the evening, declaring that: ‘Militarism, capitalism and racism, domestic oppression, foreign military aggression, victims of neo-colonialism, victims of community and national racism, and the Cold War days in its infancy to the needless war in Vietnam in its [MR’s] second decade, through wars of greed in Afghanistan and Iraq in [its] sixth decade’ were all incisively covered by the magazine. He spoke of Monthly Review’s indefatigable insistence on the need to put ‘people before profits,’ and its unflinching criticisms of inequality, injustice, and the realities of capitalism.”

...

The contributors to Monthly Review include former Weather Underground terrorist Bernardine Dohrn; Marilyn Buck, another former Weather Underground member; convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal; Bill Fletcher, Jr., a founder of Progressives for Obama; and Chomsky.

In a piece titled, “Homeland Imperialism: Fear and Resistance,” Dohrn wrote of the “robust and unified resistance to imperialism” after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Obama's "people."

 

[Dixon Carter Lee]

Christ. I forgot to also put the Captain's post on Iggy.

I can't believe you got boring enough to make me do this AJ. We had such a good thing going. Off to the Fringe you go...

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Thank you.




With all my heart...

http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/11/obama_pal_edward_said_another.html

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

To be sure, no one has ever accused Sarah Palin, a defeated vice presidential candidate, of creating her reputation thusly. One has to wonder, then, why her book, Going Rogue, would merit a fact check by no fewer than eleven Associated Press reporters when neither the AP nor any other mainstream outlet has spent a moment vetting the books of the "author in chief," as President Barack Obama was anointed in a November GQ article, "Barack Obama's Work in Progress," by Tom Draper.

In an observant piece, the Road to Bali, blogger Tom Maguire addresses the implicit media balance. He does so by calling attention to just one relevant question that the media might have profitably asked our president: did you take new bride Michelle to Bali with you in 1993?

In the course of asking that question, not terribly significant in and of itself, Maguire sheds light on a more substantive question: why have the media paid so little attention to how Barack Obama came to write the book that would make his reputation, his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father.

As source, Maguire turns to Draper, who has spent time with Michelle and Barack and written the most detailed account to date of the genesis of Dreams. Blinded by Obama's light, however, Draper fails to see the gaping holes in how own story line.

As Draper tells the story, a February 1990 New York Times article telling how Harvard has elected Obama president of the Harvard Law Review attracted the attention of a young agent named Jane Dystel. Draper implies that Obama's "irresistible" writing skills netted him the position, which is not at all true.

In fact, the election was a popularity contest held in racially charged environment. The culturally ambiguous Obama won on his race-healing talents, not on his literary ones. He would contribute only one leaden, unsigned case note to the HLR and has not written another legal article since.

According to Draper, on November 28, 1990, Poseidon Press, a Simon & Schuster imprint, issued "a six-figure contract" to Obama for a book tentatively titled Journeys in Black and White. In his recent book, Barack and Michelle: Portrait of An American Marriage, Christopher Andersen specifies the amount at $150,000.

In the hope of recruiting Obama, the University of Chicago Law School offered him an office in the law school to use for finishing the book, and there he spent 1991 and 1992. Nearly two years passed, and Obama could not produce. "I just can't get it down on paper," Draper quotes an Obama confession to confidante Valerie Jarrett in 1992. "I'd much rather hang out with Michelle than focus on this."

Although Draper would never say so, this represented a failure of character as much it did a failure of talent. Obama had pocketed $75,000 of that advance and promised in return a manuscript by June 15, 1992. He had more than eighteen months to complete a memoir, the easiest of all genres. It required minimal research, no footnotes, and a narrative that needed not be factual as long as it was plausible.

...

In any case, the June 15, 1992 deadline came and went without a manuscript from Obama. As Draper blithely notes, Obama had other things on his mind, namely his impending October 3rd marriage to Michelle. On October 20, 1992, according to Draper, Poseidon terminated Obama's contract.

Andersen adds a detail that mythmaker Draper chooses to omit. Obama feared that Simon & Schuster would demand the $75,000 already advanced. Writes Andersen, "But when Barack informed them that he had spent the money -- and that he and his wife were still chipping away at their massive student loan debt -- the publisher agreed not to press the issue." In other words, Obama asked for and received an undeserved bailout. A pattern was developing here.

The tenacious agent Jane Dystel managed to find another publisher, Times Books, and secured a smaller advance, $40,000. Draper tells us that Obama used the advance "to fulfill his outstanding financial obligation to Poseidon." Andersen's take sounds more credible.

"Now he's got to produce," writes Draper. "But how?" Although the sanctuary at the University of Chicago and a previous retreat to a friend's Wisconsin farm had done no good, Obama hit upon the idea of going to Bali to unblock. (For Sucker Punch, I went to my cabin on Lake Erie).

As blogger Maguire notes, the pre-election myth, advanced by the New York Times and others, is that Michelle accompanied him. Wrote the Times on May 18, 2008, Obama "eventually retreated to Bali for several months with his wife, Michelle."

A more recent and less romantic version, advanced by Draper and by the Times as well, is that Obama went by himself. "For a month," writes Draper, "he is a lone figure pacing on the white sand and hammering on his laptop. . . . "

Andersen describes the Obamas as "drowning in debt" during this period. How either Barack or Michelle could have afforded to go to Bali during this period, for one month or three, remains something of a mystery. Mysterious too is how the media could leave unresolved such glaring contradictions in the biography of the world's most famous man.

Maguire highlights still another hole in the Draper narrative. Incredibly, in a 5,000-word article on Obama's development as a writer, Draper says nothing about what happened between early 1993 when Obama returned from Bali to June 1995 when Dreams was published. Draper leaves the impression that the month-long Bali high was just what Obama needed to fire his synapses.

Andersen is much more credible here. As he tells it, Bali proved no more helpful than any other retreat. At the urging of Michelle, the "hopelessly blocked" Obama finally turned to "friend and Hyde Park neighbor" Bill Ayers to help him.

Andersen's details are specific. The Obamas were convinced of "Ayers's proven abilities as a writer." Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach, a 1993 book by Ayers. The key sentence in Andersen's account is the one that follows: "[The Obama family] oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunkload of notes were given to Ayers."

Adds Andersen, "Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books." Based on my own research, I would argue that Ayers actually wrote the book's best sections. Obama's published efforts before Dreams show not a wisp of the skill on display in Dreams. Not surprisingly, Draper overlooks those early efforts.

With his man crush trumping his critical insights, Draper chooses not to relate the fate of plucky agent Dystel. That story was hard to miss. The proudly liberal but seriously disgusted publisher Peter Osnos went public three years ago. According to Osnos, Obama dumped his devoted long time agent after Dreams took off and then signed a seven-figure deal with Crown, using only a by-the-hour attorney.

Obama pulled off the deal after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate but before being sworn in as Senator, this way to avoid the disclosure and reporting requirements applicable to members of Congress. Osnos publicly scolded Obama for his "ruthlessness" and "his questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday."

But that was in 2006, when Obama was mere mortal. Today, Obama is a literary god, however false, and challenging the gods is apparently above the AP's pay grade.

Jack Cashhill
American Thinker

Doing the fact-checking the AP refuses to do.

__________________
"Pay attention to your enemies, for they are the first to discover your mistakes."
Antisthenes

 

[unregistered]

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Mythic Man...




He'll always have "First Black President" and a hard-core cadre of defenders and apologists willing to go on the "offensive..."




__________________
Contemporary leftists, on the other hand, view their opponents as people you send off to the Gulag, unworthy of any respect, deserving of any kind of low blow, no matter how foul. So you accuse Goldwater of insanity, slander Justice Thomas as a sexual monster, casually publish plays, books, and films calling for the assassination of President Bush, and assault the first serious Republican female candidate at her weakest point -- her family. And of course, you scream to high heaven if any form of turnabout occurs in your direction, as in the case of the Obama family, which was declared "off limits" early in the presidential campaign, at the same time that Palin's family was being stretched on the media rack.

This style of political loathing has become effectively innate. It has been systemized to such a degree as to become integral. Modern liberalism cannot do without it. An entire structure has been erected on the basis of political hatred, and from that structure a whole new strategy has arisen.
J.R. Dunn

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Raymond Luc Levasseur served 20 years in federal prison for leading the United Freedom Front, a radical anti-government group notorious for its violent acts as "protests" against U.S. foreign policy in the 70s and 80s. Its members were charged with the murder of a New Jersey state trooper, the attempted murder of a Massachusetts state trooper, several other assaults on law enforcement officers, eight Boston-area bombings, and a series of armed bank robberies.

In spite or even because of Levasseur's heinous acts, academics at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst recently saw fit to include him in its annual Colloquium on Social Change: Radical Democracy and the Moral Economy [whatever that means] on Social Change, an event designed to showcase radicals of 60s vintage. The purpose of this year's colloquium was to "examine how ideas about social justice have shaped American lives with speakers who represent distinctly different radical challenges to American society."

Never mind that Levasseur's notions of social justice cut short the life of state trooper Philip Lamonaco, caused many others great suffering, and visited destruction on various military reserve and recruiting centers. Paramount in the mind of historian Robert S. Cox, the colloquium's organizer who brought the terrorist to campus, was the golden opportunity presented by Levasseur to shed light on what leads a revolutionary to violence.

Although that talk was canceled due to public outcry, faculty members from six academic departments re-issued the invitation to Levasseur to speak. In the end the convicted terrorist was denied permission by his parole officer to travel from Maine, his home base, to the university; nevertheless, 200 people, including police officers and Lamonaco's widow, strongly protested the invitations to include him at the beginning of the forum on November 19.

The push on the part of academics at UMass to elevate Levasseur to the precincts of the ivory tower is by no means unique. The welcoming and, in particular, the hiring of former terrorists and ex-cons there have for some time been the rage. Examples, as catalogued by Marilyn Penn in an article on academe's twisted "privileging" of applicants who are proven malefactors rather than law-abiding citizens, include:

Bernadine Dohrn, the 60s radical who was in the vanguard of the terrorist Weathermen and a fugitive with her husband William Ayers, is the director of the Children and Family Justice Clinic (of all things) at Northwestern University's School of Law.

Ayers is a distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois. He haughtily described his terrorist activities in an autobiography published just after 9/11, which he deemed to be justified.

"Weatherwoman" Susan Rosenberg served 17 years for her terrorist acts. From President Clinton she received a pardon, after which she taught writing at Columbia, Brown, Yale, Hamilton and John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

Jamal Joseph, a former Black Panther who served time for crimes including robbery, murder and harboring a fugitive, has chaired the Film Division at Columbia's School of the Arts.

Tom Jones, the militant black student who was one of the leaders of an armed takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell in 1969, was awarded a different order of academic distinction. He has served as Trustee Emeritus on that campus.

There are also, in Phil Orenstein's words, "the terrorist cheerleaders" within the faculty union leadership and radical professorate at the City University of New York. In one instance of their alleged machinations at CUNY, Professor Sharad Karkhanis recounted the efforts of a faculty union leader, Professor Susan O'Malley, to find teaching posts for convicted terrorist Mohammed Yousry and others of his ilk. Karkhanis described her desire "to recruit terrorists in CUNY. Given the opportunity, she will bring in all her indicted, convicted, and freed-on-bail, terrorist-friends."

Another example is the response on the part of numerous professors to the case of Osama "Sami" al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who before his arrest was the North American leader of the murderous Palestinian Islamic Jihad and who used the campus as a base of operations. As David Horowitz and Ben Johnson described, throughout these infamous events an array of Al-Arian's professional colleagues publicly defended him with bountiful sympathy. Notably, just before his arrest, Duke University invited al-Arian to speak at a symposium on "National Security and Civil Liberties."

Radical attorney Lynne Stewart, who recently surrendered to begin serving her sentence for providing material aid to terrorism, has been yet another campus celebrity.

And as Horowitz and Johnson also note, Evergreen State College has long proven receptive to terrorists. Indeed, cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal has been a commencement speaker" (via audiotape from prison).

At root, professors who pay court to terrorists are indulging in a radical, degenerate, and socially debilitating form of moral discourse. They are purveyors of postmodernism, a view according to which the "grand narratives" of former times - narratives which privilege truth over falsehood, goodness over evil, freedom over tyranny, and normality over deviance - are deconstructed in favor of a conception according to which radical departures from traditional norms of civilization are valued for their own sake. The more brutal, the more extreme, the more perverted this "acting out," the better. What matters is the gory, ugly theater of it all, in order to deliver a tremendous slap in the face of normal citizens. A litany of reasons to blame America for the ills of the world provide the constant backdrop for these rabid, countercultural rituals.

Candace de Russy
American Thinker
__________________
"I am a radical, Leftist, small "c" Communist.... Maybe I am the last Communist willing to admit it.... The ethics of Communism still appeal to me."
William Ayers

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

Clinton and Holder also pardoned FALN, remember...?




Holder's law firm works defending the terrorists.



Holder wants them tried under the Constitution, a legal-style Cloward-Piven gambit...

Obama hates America.

 

[Frisco_Slug_Esq]

In the spring of 1964, Sarah Heath, then just three months old, flew into backwater Skagway, Alaska (population 650) aboard a 1930s-era Grunman Goose to start a new life with her parents, brother, and sister.

At that same time, in America's other new outlier state, Hawaii, two-year-old Barry Obama was just getting used to a fatherless existence in the otherwise-comfortable world his white grandparents and occasionally his mother would make for him.

At the time, not even Nostradamus could have foretold that the paths of Barry and Sarah would intersect in the "historic" 2008 election, Barry as the first major party presidential nominee of African descent and Sarah as the first woman with a real shot at the vice-presidency.

Each would change names before reaching the national stage. Barry Obama would become Barry Soetero, and then Barack Obama. Sarah Heath would become Sarah Palin after eloping with the formidable Todd Palin. Obama would chronicle his journey in the 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father and the 2006 sequel, The Audacity of Hope. Palin would chronicle hers in the 2009 memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life.

How the literary/media establishment would respond to the respective memoirs of these two political figures would reveal far less about the authenticity, honesty, and literary quality of the tales the authors told than it would about the collective mindset of that establishment.

From a classical perspective, Palin's is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and "Miss Congeniality." She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.

After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works "messy, obscure seafood jobs" until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state's best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, "its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer." Prophetically, she also plugs the state's "potential in drilling for oil," which, even then, "Outsiders don't understand."

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents' connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii's poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his "pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother's race."

In his recent book Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama's claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.

No, Barry, it's not because you're black. It's because you missed two shots in a row.

Obama admits to "marginal report cards" in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the "diversity" movement in full flower. Diversity's rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama's upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters couldn't care less. His skin color improves their "metrics." Obama will ride this pony far.

After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League -- Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea's nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.

After several years as a low-paid community organizer in Chicago, Obama decides to return to law school. Despite a lack of resources and a mediocre performance at Columbia -- he does not graduate with honors -- Obama limits his choices to "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." He had absorbed the diversity zeitgeist deeply enough to see success as an entitlement.

In the spring of 1989, during Obama's first year at Harvard Law, Palin's "life truly began" with the birth of her oldest son, Track. That summer, with Todd working a blue-collar job on the North Slope oil fields, Palin, her father, and their Eskimo partner work Todd's commercial fishing boat in Bristol Bay. Palin's mother, meanwhile, baby-sits the ten-week-old Track.

In 1992, while an anxious Obama dithers in an office that the University of Chicago has given him to write Dreams, half of his $150,000 advance already cashed, Palin is pulling her babies, Track and Bristol, along on a sled as she goes door-to-door seeking votes in her run for Wasilla city council.

Not yet thirty, Palin settles upon the philosophy that will guide her political career: reducing taxes "and redefining government's proper role." Like few Republicans this side of Ronald Reagan, Palin will adhere to these principles throughout her political ascent.

Not surprisingly, Palin's tenacity makes enemies among those who have cashed in their Republican heritage for the perks and power of office. Palin's perseverance in the face of this resistance makes for compelling political drama. That she is a woman challenging the good old boys of backroom Alaska heightens that drama.

Yet despite pushing the boundaries of female accomplishment throughout her career -- as sports reporter, as commercial fisherman, as councilwoman, as mayor, as oil and gas commissioner, as governor, as vice-presidential candidate -- Palin never loses her sense of the feminine. Having five children surely helps. So does living in an environment where manly virtues still matter.

An exchange with the larger-than-life Todd helps clarify Alaskan reality. Todd is a four-time winner of the Iron Dog competition, a 2,200 mile snowmobiling marathon. One night, Sarah expresses interest in competing. Says Todd:

Can you get the back end of a six-hundred-pound machine unstuck by yourself with open water up to your thighs, then change out an engine at forty below in the pitch black on a frozen river and replace thrashed shocks and jury rig a suspension using tree limbs along the trail?

When Sarah answers "Nope," Todd replies, "Then go back to sleep, Sarah." Todd lives his Eskimo heritage. He does not just dream about it, let alone exploit it.

While Palin is slugging through Alaska's political morass like a determined Iditarod musher, Obama is cruising through Illinois politics on skids greased by his Chicago cronies. In his 2004 run for U.S. Senate, both his chief primary opponent and his expected general election opponent are undone by damaging personal information leaked to the media. Obama wins both elections easily.

The combination of his black genes and white upbringing makes the famously "articulate and bright and clean" Obama an irresistible choice to keynote the race-conscious 2004 Democratic convention. "I mean, that's a storybook, man," alleges the inimitable Joe Biden.

The story told in Dreams will become a huge bestseller in the wake of the 2004 convention. The lofty, lyrical style of the book will seal the Ivy-educated Obama's reputation as a genius, and its much-celebrated narrative would serve as a foundational myth for Obama's ascent to the White House.

Said NEA chairman Rocco Landesman just last month, reiterating the accepted wisdom of the chattering classes, "This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln."

The establishment will not be so kind to Palin. In the week of Going Rogue's release, the New York Times house conservative David Brooks will call her "a joke." Dick Cavett, the Norma Desmond of TV talk, will dismiss her as a "know-nothing." Ex-con Dem fundraiser Martha Stewart will brand Palin "a dangerous person." And literally thousands of lesser liberal lights will deride her as "stupid," an "idiot," or a "moron" (8.5 million Google hits and counting for "Palin" "moron").

In that same week, Chris Matthews was worrying out loud that Obama was "too darned intellectual," and author Michael Eric Dyson was celebrating Obama's "sexy brilliance." But while the Associated Press was sending a platoon of reporters to fact-check Palin's book, neither the AP nor any other media outlet dared check either Dreams or Audacity of Hope.

They likely feared what they would find -- namely that Obama's genius depends solely on his willingness to lie about it. "I've written two books," Obama told a crowd of teachers in Virginia last year. "I actually wrote them myself." He did no such thing. He had massive help with both books.

Although the prose of Dreams is often lyrical, it is not Obama's. As I have argued in these pages, and as Christopher Andersen has confirmed, Obama's gifted friend Bill Ayers gussied up the rough outlines of Obama's life and imposed upon them the mythic dimensions of Homer's Odyssey. To accomplish this, the authors invented any number of incidents, many of which are easily disproved. For a serious seeker of facts, Dreams is Sutter Creek in 1848.

In Going Rogue, by contrast, Palin does not shy from crediting Lynn Vincent for "her indispensable help in getting the words on paper." And yet the story is told honestly and sincerely in Palin's voice. There is no artifice, no postmodern mumbo-jumbo, and not a sentence in the book that Palin could not have written herself. My personal favorite, "I love meat." I suspect that, unaided, journalism major and former reporter Palin is a better writer than Obama.

Left to their own devices, Palin is clearly the better speaker. In Going Rogue's climactic moment, the unknown Palin serves up the most dazzling convention speech in modern political history, and she does so in spite of a malfunctioning teleprompter. "I knew the speech well enough that I didn't need it," writes Palin.

Had Obama's teleprompter malfunctioned at the 2004 convention, he would not be president. He has always depended on the eloquence of others. So thoroughly hooked on the teleprompter is Obama that the irrepressible Biden jokes about it. "What am I going to tell the president?" Biden asked the crowd at the Air Force Academy after a teleprompter blew over. "Tell him his teleprompter is broken? What will he do then?"

In the final analysis, Going Rogue is a better book than Dreams. No Republican has ever held Palin up as a genius, literary or otherwise, but her narrative is as shrewd, sensitive, and straightforward as its author.

Dreams, on the other hand, is merely a well-crafted fraud.

Jack is back.

 

[Ulaven_Demorte]

Jack is back.

Sounds like old Jack's got a bit more than a crush on your girl there Cap'n.

Who was it that was obsessed again?