Mark Steyn eviscerates Obama the memoirist
In an inspired line of argument, Ben Smith of the website BuzzFeed suggests that the controversy over “Dreams From My Father” is the fault of conservatives who have “taken the self-portrait at face value.” We are so unlettered and hicky that we think a memoir is about stuff that actually happened rather than a literary jeu d’esprit playing with nuances of notions of assumptions of preconceptions of concoctions of invented baloney. And so we regard the first member of the Invented-American community to make it to the White House as a kinda weird development rather than an encouraging sign of how a new post-racial, post-gender, post-modern America is moving beyond the old straitjackets of black and white, male and female, gay and straight, real and hallucinatory.
Read the whole thing.
Steyn is brilliant. His regular appearances on Hugh Hewitt had become such a habit that I bought a transistor radio when I knew I’d be on a train at the time of his next scheduled appearance.
I don’t schedule appointments for 4 PM (Pacific time) Thursdays.
I’m not too obsessive about much, but I do like hearing this guy. James Taranto’s daily column in Opinionjournal is another can’t miss.
oh… its our bad…
he cant even be blamed for being elected
Mark Steyn is our Mel Brooks. Styen is satire.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZtQofXRSSw&feature=fvwrel
The One’s legacy will surely be that he had codified misrepresentation and fundamentally transformed reality. That’s hardly healing the planet but… wait… that is healing the planet. Every day in every way things are getting better and better.
“Dreams from My Father” was definitely not written by Obama. An aquaintance of mine is a professional ghost writer who has done books for some very very famous people. In the early nineties Obama’s literary agent approached him with a two book deal, one of which was supposed to be about race relations in America. He turned it down because they wouldn’t meet his price. Obama is a 100% fraud, even his life story is fiction.
As his commie father and uncle no doubt taught young Barry: There is no truth but socialist truth.
The number of “birthers” is a manifestation of the perception of many people that the real Obama is not precisely as presented.
The more investigation that is done of Dreams from My Father, the more evident it is that there is a fair amount of divergence between the real Obama and the Obama as presented in Dreams from My Father.
Perhaps the title should be changed to Dreams of Constructing a Narrative That Would Best Help Biracial Barry Climb the Political Ladder.
What convinced me by early 2008 that Obama was a phony was the divergence between his being schooled in the hardball league of Chicago politics -hello Alice Palmer- and his “bring us together.. neither red nor blue” schtick on the campaign trail. I was reminded of Julius Wintergreen, who was elected POTUS on a campaign platform of LOVE in Gershwin’s musical Of Thee I Sing.
He’s still the Great Gatsby, but bootlegging was a far more honest profession than community organizing.
Or the Great Barry…http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/300468/great-barry-mark-steyn
Not sure what happened there.
The anti-hero, the bad guy as new guy, the dreams that aren’t as empty as the conscience: these misunderstood as cause of a new age rather than result of a bad age, these things fooled and beguiled those who were unable to disciple themselves against prosperity and advancement. The answer was to give up prosperity and advancement and seek relief from responsibility in the brotherhood of sorrows. Leave science and leadership and find peace in the mistaken world of crybaby sympathies and personally caused troubles.
“The number of “birthers” is a manifestation of the perception of many people that the real Obama is not precisely as presented.”
Another fine NRO writer, Andrew McCarthy, made this exact point in a column a couple of years ago. He made no claims that BO was not born here, just that there was *so* much about him that we did not know. The refusal of the MSM to investigate him thoroughly was all the more outrageous after the “vetting” of Sarah Palin which consisted largely of dishonest character assassination. And yes, Gringo, a key gap was the reluictance to examine his Chicago political background. That alone would have put an entirely different cast on his pious shtick, regardless of the details of his foreign upbringing.
Almost forgot to mention that yes, of course Steyn is BRILLIANT! A devastating combination of penetrating political insight and slash-to-the-bone humor.
“a manifestation of the perception of many people that the real Obama is not precisely as presented.”
There is no ‘real Obama’. He is a mismatched collection of his own wishful thinking and self-created myths; plus the desire of the MSM and the lazy ones seeking a ‘savior’. BHO is a cliche wrapped tight in the image he has created. There is no there there. The suit is empty, the emperor has no clothes, and pay no attention to my man behind the curtain.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyCCJ6B2WE
…The suit is empty, the emperor has no clothes, and pay no attention to my man behind the curtain.
Which is exactly what many of us on this blog have been saying since, oh, around the primaries in 2008. If there’s a prize beyond personal satisfaction for having been proven correct, I haven’t found it yet.
Obama wouldn’t exist as a problem if there weren’t so many stupid Americans to fall for such a schmuck. Now there’s something to lose sleep over. Because as Ron White says, you can’t fix stupid.
He is a mismatched collection of his own wishful thinking and self-created myths; plus the desire of the MSM and the lazy ones seeking a ‘savior’.
Hanlon’s Razor generally applies to these kinds of malice/stupidity deliberations, but on this one I come down on the malice side, and suspect that “Barry’s” myths were not self-created, but rather the product of a hard-left marketing campaign. In this view the MSM covered for him through an unholy mix of stupidity, wide-eyed liberal do-gooderism, and straight-up fellow traveling.
The first two of those factors largely account for the electorate buying the campaign.
Yesterday I saw a faded (symbolic!) sticker of Obama gazing off in the middle distance above the single word “Hope,” and I thought for the thousandth time, “How could anyone – anyone – fall for such vapid pap?” But 52% of us did.
I wonder if anyone will be able to accurately write a biography of Obama without years of training and experience in psychopathology? I also wonder what it will take to convince 48% of the electorate that Obama is a genuine nutcase?
It took Eli Wiesel loading his own wife into a death camp car to “get it”.
A-7713 – Stolen Identity
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33182028/STOLEN-IDENTITY-Elie-Wiesel
on another note…
REPORT: Hillary tied to Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president…
Saleha Mahmood Abedin, the mother of Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, reportedly served in the women’s division of the Muslim Brotherhood alongside the wife of Egypt’s new president, the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Mursi.
and
American Muslims Stone Christians in Dearborn, MI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnJBW49afzg
SHOA II
(and looks like the next world war will happen, as turkey is being dragged in to start it)
did i mention
Saleha Abedin is also the mother-in-law of disgraced former Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y.
Saleha Abedin served alongside Najla Ali Mahmoud, the wife of Mursi. Both were members of the Sisterhood’s Guidance Bureau, found Shoebat.
An Anti-Defamation League profile of the MWL accuses the group of promulgating a “fundamentalist interpretation of Islam around the world through a large network of charities and affiliated organizations.”
“Its ideological backbone is based on an extremist interpretation of Islam,” the profile states, “and several of its affiliated groups and individuals have been linked to terror-related activity.”
In 2003, U.S. News and World Report documented that accompanying the MWL’s donations, invariably, are “a blizzard of Wahhabist literature.”
hey Carney, do you really want to get into the discussion as to the constitution? me thinks not
and
see? its as i said.
they know they can bribe women to vote another hitler as they did before…
look below.
the politicians know that women are THAT STUPID… you just have to tell them they are not stupid, and foment their bad choices. they will then vote in despotism as the future, and will off their own children.
and if that isnt stupid, then lets call them
hegelian geniuses…
they were used to destroy the culture, and now the congresscritters want them to finish the job…
Congresswoman Says State a Better Mate for Women
yes and if they get the best jobs, us men can sit home and play nintendo on welfare as they give up their families, children and lives for the state!
go women!
go genocide!!
go euthanasia!!
go communism!!!!
what? you think i can say something against them and be a human? no no.. us men cant say anything, and the few who are not so stupid wont either.
Funny, but i bet someone who is not a elected official will tell me that, that is not what elected officials and leaders believe. despite 140 years of such stuff.
SEE?
they are relying on women being stupid enough to do it a second and third time!!!!
their men and families sure arent going to sotp them. they dont have any. and are mostly barren…
how people with no children can be the future of anything, is beyond me!!!
but i am just a man, lowly, and should be exterminatd, especially since i am white.
Shoa II
if only hitler realized he could have bribed the jewish women and then wait a generation or two…
progressive patience will do the same thing, but wont raise the ire. dead people and never borns are not much of a noisy lot
Obama Biographer Says Book Is Being Misused by the Right
Barack Obama biographer David Maraniss says right-wing political opportunists are misusing his book. The book in question is Barack Obama: The Story. In this book, Maraniss cited dozens of instances in which Obama’s autobiography–Dreams from My Father–presented a false picture of the President’s early life.
“First of all, the idea that these people would bother to read my book is a bit of a stunner for me,” Maraniss admitted. “I mean, I’m for Obama all the way. I can’t fathom why anybody on the right would read me.”
“Second, they’re being completely unfair to the President,” Maraniss complained. “He wrote Dreams from My Father long before he decided to run for president. He had no way of knowing that he would become so famous that people might want to look more closely at his life story. He was just trying to spice up an otherwise dull narrative by adding a few tall tales–all of which would’ve been forgotten if he hadn’t been elected president.”
Maraniss contended that those harping on Obama’s propensity for lying were “missing the bigger picture. What some are calling lies could just as easily be seen as evidence of a fertile, creative mind. Take those bits about his grandfather being tortured by the British. That was pure dramatic genius. What other American politician could credibly claim to have had a relative that was tortured? This and other fictitious incidents added zest to a book that desperately needed it. Who’s to say that this kind of creativity isn’t what this country needs?”
Artfldgr, re your 2:45 PM comment:
A construction such as “the politicians know that woman are THAT STUPID” is an odd one to place on the blog of a woman whom I assume you do not think is stupid. It is a generalization that is wrong on the face of it, since you don’t qualify it and say “many women” or “a significant number of women” or “most liberal women” or whatever it is you are actually meaning to say (which I assume is not that all women are “that stupid.”
Not only that, but the sentence “they know they can bribe women to vote another hitler as they did before… ” does not conform to the facts of Hitler’s support. See this [emphasis mine] on where the Nazis garnered their support:
Men supported Hitler in greater percentages than women during the years leading up to and including the Nazi takeover in Germany, and men also supported the left in greater percentages.
And your suggestion that any significant number of German Jewish women could have been “bribed” to support Hitler in the way you imply is unsupported as well.
Russian strategic nuclear bombers threatened U.S. airspace near Alaska earlier this month and F-15 jets responded by intercepting the aircraft taking part in large-scale arctic war games, according to defense officials. The Russian war games began the same day President Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin held a frosty summit meeting in Mexico June 18. U.S. officials said the arctic exercises over the Russian Far East and Pacific appeared to be a further sign of Russia’s hardening posture toward the United States.
You can’t make this stuff up, folks.
Apparently all of those dumb, ordinary schmucks who are donating their $3 bucks for a lottery chance, the winners to have dinner in D.C. with Obama, Moochelle, and some Hollywood “star,” or other, have been informed that the Obama Campaign values this dinner, air fare, and hotel package at $4,800 (in income), and that winners might well have to pay more than $500 dollars in taxes on that extra income.
And now, just today, to add insult to injury, those who have entered into the lottery have been emailed a warning that any winners are not to use the minibar in their hotel, because the Obama campaign won’t pick up the tab.
So, for Obama and Moochelle and friends its the 24/7, all you can eat buffet, with the American taxpayer picking up the tab, but for ordinary people, its “pay for it yourself.”
Men supported Hitler in greater percentages than women during the years leading up to and including the Nazi takeover in Germany, and men also supported the left in greater percentages.
yes they did, by the percentages.
but what are the numbers behind the percentages, without them, you are making assumptions as to what they are. but if your assumptions are not correct, then the percentages will mislead you.
however, take a look at the populations of each
there were a lot fewer men. so even if the men voted in greater percentages, there werent enough of them.
they been trying to scrub this one and shifting to percentages rather than give absolute numbers is how.
I pointed that out a while back. the men died in WWI.
the young men had not reached voting age (but they were fighting age by the time hitler started years later).
tell me which era? at the time. herman Rauschning, american Mary Beard… the oldest largest being from Gabrielle Bremme,…
but more modern findings are from herbert Tingsten, who had found foting stats on more cities. Thomas Childers also used them.
Falter found equal support between women and men for the nazis, in protestant cities in 1932
female historians, specifically Claudia Koons
Annemarie Troger, a feminist historian stresses that such are stories that conservatives and left wingers make to use women as scapegoats (paraphrased)
no party with rare exceptions gained much from female suffrage before 1933…
in 1930 elections everything changed.
in berlin 1928, 9000 men voted for the nsdap and 7,448 women…
but in berline 1930, 77,433 men voted for the nsdap, and 80,824 women…
thuringia is th next place that had large numbers
1928 men for nsdap 17,429 women 12,836
1930 men for nsdap 87,132 women 78,947
Cologn Aachen
1928 men for nsdap 3,405 women 42,852
1930 men for nsdap 1,883 women 32,756
in madeburg it goes from 1600 to 18,494 for men
1300 to 19, 595 for women / liepzig 32,250 for men, 33,070 for women
in 1928 85.7% of men turned out and 2.6% voted for nsdap… 77.4 percent of women turned out, and 1.9 voted for nsdap
more people turned out in 1930, and the percentages went to 19.3 for men, and 16.7 for women
accross the board, the biggest gains were from women who changed their vote from 1928
between 1930, and 1932 the nsdap became even MORE popular. though trusting numbers after 1930 is not good.
until 1932, the nazis did not blitz women with propaganda until that years presidential elections
jill Stephenson belives it wa Gregor strasser who realized women would be most important, and H rauschning claims it was hitler that did
Gregor strasser was in charge of coordinating the womens groups… the groups were tasked to get the vote basically. and and as early as 1931 the Reich Womens Leader had a prominent position on the platform with the men… (hint hint)
ie. like feminists in the US today, they stand close to politicians, and work for the politicians, but they bring the female vote for them… i wonder who they copied off of?
when esser called an end to womens employment that was not good… but it was Strasser that promised women the right to work and protecting it.
in this case, they promised women that if a husband and wife worked in the same public sector, and the wife didn’t want to quit,the husband would lose his job.
one has to remember that a lot of the history stuff written is leftists writing about a group from which few can refute them. one being that the nazi were anti feminists… they weren’t… they were opportunists, but Marxists.. for the most part, they didnt care as to the womens question. however most of what is written from the party is from the nazi party women.
what people today would get, but the historians dont get with their feminists lenses, is that what was being offered was what women wanted. jobs protection and social autonomy… the point was so they had babies
the party was not anti woman, but unlike modern feminists didnt see the role of woman as mother, grandmother, carer, and such as being null and void. (and neither do the women supporting feminism monolithically)
the women were bribed by the state once the state realized that they would change the voting outcome. without that, the percentages in outcomes would have been different, and hitler would not have had the power to launch from.
interesting book to read by richard evans is the feminist movement in germany 1894 to 1933 (london 1976)
herbert tingsten, political behavior, studies in election statistics, london 1937, new york 1975
on the frequency of female sufferage being granted as a revolutionary measure see. maurice duverger, the political role of women, pariss 1955
on the idea of sufferage to stave off communist revolution, read evans, the feminists (1977)
what a interesting world, eh?