Thursday, October 09, 2008
Barack Obama's leftist background: The thundering incuriousity of the press
There’s nothing wrong with being a socialist. I called myself one for the better part of twenty years. Millions of people have and many still do. But there is something very wrong with hiding who you are or who you were from the electorate—especially if you want to be President of the United States. Yet that seems to be a habit of Mr. Obama’s, with the collusion of the press. To my knowledge, no one in the mainstream media has begun to inquire into the details of Obama’s curiously unreported years at Columbia and Harvard, although much could be relatively easily ascertained. Obama himself has not been remotely forthcoming about them.
There is a lot more where that came from.
If Obama is as left as his history suggests, at least the part that has emerged in dribs and drabs and legalist denials over the last six months, we -- meaning just about everybody but attack-oriented right-wing bloggers and the beneficiaries of lefty largesse -- will be in a world of hurt.
6 Comments:
By 
, at
Thu Oct 09, 05:28:00 PM:
McCain's advisors need to force his attention to this stuff, as well as to improving the McCain stump speech on the economy. Does he want to get elected or doesn't he? Did he spend all those years in a tiger cage to lose so weakly?
American voters are still hanging in there with him, and Obama has not built an unsurmountable lead. Voters know instinctively that we need some protection against the unchecked Democrat Congress. The destruction of Fannie and Freddie causing the problems we have now should be evidence enough of that, but for the future there is the very real Obama/Pelosi/Reid threat of higher taxes and increased tariffs that should scare the living hell out of everyone.
McCain needs to pull up his socks, and start fighting. It's his duty for chrissakes.
I feel like the Duty Officer in the movie "Top Gun", standing and chewing on my cigar while Maverick dawdles around the fight wondering whether or not to re-engage and fight. "Come on Maverick!" he says with increasing worry for the life of his ship should Mav choose not to fight, "Come on, damn you".
Come on Maverick- fight!!
By , at
Thu Oct 09, 05:32:00 PM:
I saw Gingrich on TV explain ever so cogently and in about thirty seconds much of the economic argument McCain struggled and failed to produce with any coherence in the debate. McCain might consideer putting Gingrich on a stage every night for the next month, to explain the McCain economic plan.
By 
sleeper, at
Thu Oct 09, 05:36:00 PM:
When I read Dreams from My Father it struck me how vague Obama is about his intellectual influences. There are the black authors he devoured in his adolescence - Malcolm X's autobiography making the biggest impression. Then there is this old sage Frank, now revealed to be a Communist. Then he goes to California to study:
"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The
foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy."
(He also mentions reading The Heart of Darkness, because it was on the list.) Granted, he recalls it with some ironic distance. But that's it - if there were some new intellectual encounters later in his life, he keeps silent about them. Just hints that he has read a lot about Africa.
That's all.
By , at
Thu Oct 09, 11:41:00 PM:
... and I find the press curiously silent about McCain's distinct lack of religion, and Palin's seemingly faked pregnancy.
By , at
Fri Oct 10, 03:11:00 PM:
Jawa posts an image of a document saying that Obama's first mentor in organized politics, the woman for who he served as Chief of Staff and succeeded as a state senator, is a self-avowed Marxist.
By , at
Sat Oct 11, 09:22:00 AM:
