War of Ideas against Islam Chapter # 13 Obama without illusions Obama worship, the religion of the American Left, is based on a series of illusions. Shattering these illusions is necessary to restore political sanity. The story of how these illusions came to exist in the first place begins with the young Obama's return to Hawaii from Indonesia in 1970. Actually, except for biography addicts, there isn't much of interest to report about the young Obama in these years. From every indication he was a self absorbed teen with minimal talents who found a niche for himself thank to the assistance of Ann Dunham's parents. About the only notable now-public facts about Obama in these years is that he was a poor student, he smoked marijuana at various times, used cocaine on occasion, and played a lot of basketball. Also in the household was Obama's half-sister, Maya, at least during the time that Ann Dunham was in Hawaii, which was from 1972 until 1975. During that time Ann studied anthropology at the University of Hawaii, then returned to Indonesia with Maya. After that, Obama moved in with Ann's parents. Barack attended Punahou School, which is a combination of grammar school and high school. He enrolled in the 5th grade and finally graduated from the high school program in 1979. Whether Barack did much at all with Subud during his school years in Hawaii id anyone's guess. The only clue that has come to my attention consists of a short "to do" list written by Ann Dunham in 1985; a copy is included in Janny Scott's book. The original consists of a set of short notes mostly written with abbreviations. Here are the most relevant, but everything spelled out: (8) write memoirs of Indonesia (9) spiritual development (ilmu batin) (10) raise Maya well (11) continuing constructive dialogue with Barry Exactly what ilmu batin is all about is unclear; nearly everything on the Web about this subject appears in an Indonesian language. But just enough is in English to arrive at a rough conclusion. Which is- Ann Dunham was writing about spiritual practices related to Sufism and yoga. That is, ilmu batin is about what you would expect within Subud. In the context of a list of activities that included Barack (sometimes called "Barry") it can be surmised that Ann Dunham was still an active part of Subud and sometimes shared her spiritual views with her son. While 1985 is not 1975, looking back one can reasonably think that the intervening years also included ilmu batin, hence Subud, and hence something of this influence on the young Barack in the years 1972-1975. Obama did, in the 2000s, say that his mother was more of an Atheist than anything else, but Maya did not think so and said that "agnostic" would be a far better term to use. In any case, here is a note in which Dunham refers to a form of Sufi practice that presumably was borrowed by Subud, something that she regarded as important. ---------- What seems to be most important for Obama during these years was his friendship with Frank Marshall Davis, a black Communist with a chip on his shoulder as massive as a hippopotamus. Young Barack didn't see things that way, of course, and extolled Davis in Dreams from My Father, repeatedly, although just by the name "Frank." However, Communist he was and even the Washington Post, which ne'er ever said a discouraging word about the Lord and Savior of the political Left, St. Barack Hussein, was forced to admit that Davis, Obama's political sage for several years, was, in fact, a Communist. See the article entitled, "Frank Marshall Davis: Obama's Communist mentor?" in the March 23, 2015 edition of the Washington Post by Michelle Yee Hee Lee. Which I have read with interest and have been impressed by how much Miss Lee resorted to diversions each and every time it was necessary, as she wrote, to admit the painful fact that Barack was, in fact, influenced by someone every bit as much a Bolshevik as other "Negro" communists of the past, starting with Paul Robeson, the noted singer and Stalinist of the 1940s, and Benjamin Davis, Jr., a Communist who was elected to New York's City Council, all the way to Angela Davis, a Black Panther advocate and so-called scholar, lionized by the mainstream press in the 1960s, who still is active today and as anti-American as ever. The Lee article also provides sanitized versions of vignettes like how Obama's step-grandfather would spend a good deal of time talking with Frank Davis while young Barack listened, transfixed. But there is little point in further review of the Lee article even if, reluctantly or not, it admits that there was a Communist connection even though this fact is repeatedly given the soft soap treatment. You know, along the lines of "all the darkies were doing it back then and isn't it cute?" A far better source to turn to is an article by Paul Kengor for March 26, 2015 published at American Thinker entitled " The Washington Post Sugarcoats Obama's Communist Mentor." Kengor's book of that year, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis, The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor, led to the Washington Post story to begin with because of the plethora of evidence it provided to pretty much nail down the actual facts about Barack's Communist-inspired background, something that would remain with him from then on, even though the Subud factor always remained part of the picture. Kengor provided a brief overview of Obama's connections with Communism early in his life, his impressionable teen years, that would result in becoming buddies with Bill Ayers, another Communist or, anyway, a Cultural Marxist with few scruples when it came to breaking the law for "higher purpose." As a reminder, Ayers was the ghost writer who gave the world "Obama's" tour de lettres, Dreams from My Father. Kengor basically demolished the Post's attempted neutralization of The Communist, and once again set the record straight. And so much for the popular claim among many Democrats that the mass media provides them with all the important facts about all political issues and nobody needs any other sources of news to be informed. The truth, of course, is that the mass media habitually lies, mostly through sins of omission, and otherwise skews facts, trivializes vital facts if those facts may embarrass the heroes of the Left, and pulls the teeth on all strong criticisms of whomever is the Saviour du jour of the Democratic Party. To understand what a hatchet job the Lee article was, Kengor quoted from the Post story in some detail. Here is the key paragraph:
It has been seven years since this assertion surfaced, and it continues to be perpetuated. Davis was indeed associated with the Communist Party, and the FBI identified him as a member. He was affiliated with more than a dozen other groups that were open to his views on social and racial inequality. He repeatedly showed his bitterness toward Jim Crow laws and wanted African Americans to have constitutional rights. He was an activist, but there is no evidence that Davis was a hard-core Communist who spied for Soviet leaders. He was critical of American society, but not America as a country. As Kengor said, "this pretty much lets Davis off the hook." There is just enough admission of guilt to make things seems legitimate, yet not enough to be damning. However it is what the Post account leaves out or minimizes to insignificance that is telling. "This is demonstrated by his Party membership alone," noted Kengor. "No one who took the step of actually joining the Party -- which even most (small “c”) communists didn’t do -- was not hard-core......When you joined the Party, you swore this loyalty oath to Stalin’s Soviet Union: “I pledge myself to rally the masses to defend the Soviet Union, the land of victorious socialism. I pledge myself to remain at all times a vigilant and firm defender of the Leninist line of the Party, the only line that insures the triumph of Soviet Power in the United States.” The Post regarded this as a trivial detail not worth a second thought. Then there is a corpus of Davis' writings, of which there is a great deal because, among other things, he was the founder and editor of the Chicago Star newspaper, which was a front for the Communist Party and not simply a "labor paper" like some rag of the pipefitters union or a trade journal for woodworkers. As Kengor added: "Frank Marshall Davis’s vast volume of writings, which I quoted across hundreds of pages in my biography of Davis, The Communist, clearly show that he was hard-core. Anyone who reads his writings cannot conclude otherwise." Unless you are in Obama's pocket, as was the Washington Post, and intentionally falsify the record so that your readers don't get the 'wrong idea,' which in this case would be the ugly truth. Then there was the trivializing of the young Obama's friendship with Davis, since, after all, they only met 10 or 15 times. Except that number refers to known meetings. There may have been many others. Or at least some others. But in any case, there were at least a dozen or so. For a young man of 17, as was Obama in his last year of high school, any of those meetings could have been very important. Many people have been impressed by some older person whom they met in their youth who thereafter left a lifelong impression. I still remember Edith, a very thoughtful woman about 15 years my senior, whom I knew in may late teen years, the time I became a Baha'i. Edith, also new to the faith, became a good lady friend with whom to confide questions and doubts and hopes, whom I never have forgotten. Somewhat later, in my early twenties, it was Dr. Jacobson, a philosophy professor who sort of took me under his wing at the time I was a serious student of the subject, agonizing about Existentialism and trying to understand thinkers like Hegel. A little later it was Rev. Saito of the Chicagoland Buddhist Church (as it was called in those years), who spent time with me discussing the world of Asian religion and such topics as Zen and haiku poetry. You never forget such friendships, they are always in your memory. Unfortunately, in Obama's case, his dear friend was a Communist who hated American values. Yes, Davis had a case to make about racism in the pre-Civil Rights era, he had legitimate complaints about Jim Crow laws also, but Communism is a cure for the malady that is worse than the disease itself -which anyone alive after the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin should have know with total clarity. But, not, it seems, if your God is Lenin. As Kengor asked: "Why would it not be reasonable to assume that Davis, who lived and ate and breathed the ideology, would not have influenced Obama during their many one-on-one meetings together?" Here, at any rate, was the source of Obama's Leftist views, and these views were not those of moderate Socialists like Norman Thomas but the an outlook that reflected the totalitarian values of Stalinists of the Communist Party. It was this that was overlain on Obama's youthful identification to at least some extent with the Subud religion. ----- After graduating from high school, Obama headed for Occidental College in Los Angeles where he had new associations with Leftists although this period is sufficiently murky to gloss over most of it. Barack spent two years at Occidental, from 1979 until 1981, after which he transferred to Columbia University in New York City. His major at Columbia was political science. After graduating he worked at two different private sector jobs, possibly with help from his mother who, it seems, had connections with the banking industry and, through it, with business firms who specialized in international finance. Next it was on the Law School at Harvard University, in 1988. Here the story become dicey once more, due to Obama's stint as editor of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. Exactly what happened that allowed Obama to become editor remains under a cloud because of the circumstances at the time and because of one glaring falsehood in the official account of his rise to campus prominence. There may be another, related falsehood, as well. The big fib is that Obama was able to run for this office partly on the strength of a "writing competition" he took part in, no copy of which seems to have survived, possibly because he didn't actually write anything of the kind His grades at school were quite good, so we are told, but that story doesn't seem to add up because to get good grades in the first place at a school like Harvard -or Vanderbilt or Emory or Roosevelt University- you need to have writing skills, of which Obama has none, or hardly any. What then accounts for his _J.D._ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juris_Doctor) _magna cum laude_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_cum_laude) ? That is anyone's guess and Obama's academic record is sealed. So there would seem to be fraud involved, or favoritism. Or, as some writers have alleged, the explanation may be Obama's connections by that time -to foreign money, which, if true, would certainly explain many things. He was, after all, a rising star apparently being "groomed" for the high life. This is speculation, however, and it would be pointless to go further since that part of Obama's life story is shrouded in mystery. During his Harvard years Obama worked for the _Sidley & Austin_ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidley_Austin) law firm where he met Michelle, his future wife, and where he may have been some kind of protege to Newton Minow, a managing partner. Minow introduced Barack to various business executives in Chicago. Also at this time, Obama attended an 8-day training seminar in Los Angeles all about learning Saul Alinsky methods of community organizing. Which is to say, a training program for Left-wing political types. It isn't that Obama lack skills; he obviously cultivated a style of public speaking patterned on that of Martin Luther King, for instance. This was largely the result of Ann Dunham's method for instructing her young son in the fine points of spoken English, while still in Indonesia, by playing tapes of MLK speeches. And obviously Barack knows how to work with groups of people, either as an organizer or as a participant in an organization. If his grades were inflated the impression one gets is that some Cs became Bs and some Bs became As, not that he was flunking everything except for a couple of D minus grades; he isn't stupid. But he isn't well informed, he has no use for serious scholarship, he is careless about even the most basic of facts ("all 57 states"), and regards Subud claims about religion as factual rather than what they are, beliefs about religion. His knowledge of either the Bible or the Koran is in the "slim to none" category. In short his pretensions to knowledge are all, or mostly all, a collection of shams. How good a Constitutional Law expert is he? You would think that as a former professor of the subject at the University of Chicago and then at the Chicago Circle branch of the University of Illinois, he must be an expert -which all professors of the subject must be at such high prestige schools. Except that he isn't. Not that anyone should be surprised. Obama has never been much for 'intellectual stuff' like studying or even taking an interest in debating the law- as is traditional among faculty at prestige universities. But during all the time he was a professor or the Law (probably only an "Instructor," which is certainly something good, but not at the level of a professorship) none of the other teachers who knew him have memories of Obama involved in serious discussions of the subject. Ever. At any rate, there exists an online literature on the subject of Obama's flubs and blunders during times he needed to talk about the Law while he held public office or was campaigning for office. Here are three examples: * Larry Bell, "Professor Or Not, Obama Repeatedly Flunks Constitution Law Tests." Forbes, September 3, 2013. * Editorial in the Washington Times for April 3, 2012, "Obama flunks constitutional law," and * Ed Lasky, "Barack Obama, Legal Scholar," American Thinker. August 12 2008, Which is not to say that Obama never gets anything right but that again and again he has demonstrated abysmal ignorance of the Law and of provisions of the US Constitution. Among other things he is basically in the dark about much of the history of the Supreme Court, he confuses judicial activism with judicial review, and has (or at least had) the mistaken belief that the president can overturn laws. When caught in obvious mistakes Obama habitually blamed someone else for his errors. The fact is that Obama has little interest in the world of ideas. During his terms in the White House, Obama played 306 rounds of golf, almost all of those outings played with no-name cronies. The number of times Obama took part in intellectually stimulating activities during the same period of time? While there might have been a few occasions, maybe attending a concert featuring cellist Yo Yo Ma qualifies, but otherwise the tally seems to be: 000. Some of us -speaking of political Independents with no real sympathy for John McCain in 2008- said that Barack Hussein was a phoney from the start, and now we are getting documentation about just how much of a phoney he has always been. Democrats are free to repeat their criticisms of George W. Bush all they want. Their criticisms may well all be true. But nothing changes the fact that their plaudits for Barack Obama have all been built on illusions. Barack Hussein snookered the multitudes. Twice: While his political party is now in the worst shape it has ever been in since the era of the Civil War. There is a direct correlation between Obama's incompetence and the fortunes of the Democratic Party -a truth which Democrats still cannot bring themselves to admit for what it is. When Obama was elected as editor of the Harvard Law Review the novelty of a 'black' person in that office led to a book offer that became Dreams from My Father. Which -in terms of Obama's claims to authorship- was also phoney. . -- -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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