The female scribblers at the New York Times are not merely on board the Obama Love Boat, they are in bed with Barack – they have purchased a stateroom, slathered themselves with love butter and spread-eagled themselves on the satin sheets.
Exhibit A: Gail Collins is a “mood builder” for the New York Times; her job is to shape public opinion with stylish “mood pieces” that are shy of facts, but overflowing with the smug superiority that cements the liberal left. The October 23rd, ’08 edition of the Times included a 20-column-inch tone poem by Ms. Collins that oozed her trademark condescension. In her “Confessions of a Phone Solicitor,” Ms. Collins reveals her moral worth by recalling her prior chosen profession as a telemarketing piranha.
Ms. Collins admits: “I woke up people on the overnight shift who had just managed to fall asleep for the first time in six days. Sometimes, when there was clearly nobody home, I would just let the phone ring and ring in order to avoid having to call anybody else. Once after 30 rings, I heard the breathless voice of a man who had climbed down off the roof in hopes that this was the critical business call he had been waiting for all year, the one that was going to change his life forever. Imagine his joy when he discovered that it was, instead, an exciting opportunity to purchase an entire packet of portrait photographs of his loved ones at a special discount price.”
She admits that her behavior was vile, then lavishes sympathy on another self-elected telemarketer who balked at encouraging a Republican turnout with the words “You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans. . .” The prissy Ms. Collins opines: “So truly, if you can come up with something that would send a telemarketer over the edge, you have really overachieved on the offensiveness front.” Ms. Collins is incapable of refuting the Republican pitch which is historically factual; the best she can do is dismiss it as personally “offensive.”
To this day Bill Ayers is a hard pumping jihadist for global Marxism. Some years back, his crew was hard at work building improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to kill and maim American soldiers. One of his IEDs exploded during construction in Mr. Ayers’ basement bomb factory in Greenwich Village, which brought down the building. Mr. Ayers and his future wife, Bernardine Dorhn scrambled from the rubble and went on the lam.
The intended victims of the Ayers monster bomb were soldiers at a scheduled dance down at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Mr. Ayers did not know any of his intended victims; he was just intent on sacrificing them on the altar of some fuzzy Marxist philosophical abstraction. Bill Ayers was a True Believer; he had long ago reduced his intended victims to something less than human.
At this point I must confess that decades ago I was a teenage Army infantryman who went through Basic Training on the sandy ranges of Fort Dix. My comrades and I were a random mix of regular guys – draftees, short-timer guardsmen and “regular Army” volunteers like me with an “RA” prefix in front of their serial numbers. We shared a barracks for many reasons: some of us were conscripts, some of us had signed on for short stints to avoid conscription and some of us were looking to do something useful or entertaining. Some of us sought escape. We were just regular guys. We were not a vanguard of marauding Visigoths; we were not rapacious Vandals; we were not Attila’s shock troops – we were just citizen soldiers a few weeks removed from Main Street America.
That’s why, even after all these decades, it’s still so creepy that William Ayers would have slaughtered us all with one of his bombs just to make some obscure political point to himself and his fellow Weather Underground sociopaths.
On September 11th, 2001, the very day that jihadists for a global utopian Caliphate slaughtered thousands of our fellow citizens, William Ayers was crowing in the New York Times that he regretted not having exerted himself enough as a bomb detonating whacko for the cause of global utopian Marxism.
Speaking as one of those not-quite-human abstractions whom William Ayers would have murdered without blinking an eye, I would say to Gail Collins that even all these years later I consider William Ayers to be a menace to humanity. His proclamation that he “didn’t do enough” is shirtsleeve English for “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.” Please bear in mind that Barack Obama did not accidentally bump into William Ayers: Obama came to Chicago as a committed leftwing radical; he sought out William Ayers as a kindred spirit. From the moment they met, these two were comrades in arms.
But Gail Collins would distract us: “For a while, John McCain and Sarah Palin were so over-the-top about Barack Obama that people in the crowds started yelling death threats. . .” It’s amusing to hear this chatterbox for a trendy “lifestyles” newspaper like the Times gin up faux indignation about other people being over-the-top. The part about people shouting death threats is just a lie. Barack Obama repeated this lie before sixty million television viewers even though he had been informed by the U.S. Secret Service that there was no evidence of any spoken threat. No agent at any rally heard any threat; no rally attendee reported hearing any threat when interviewed by the Secret Service, said Secret Service spokesman Ed Donovan. An examination of a videotape from a Palin rally in Clearwater, Florida produced nothing definitive, said Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren. (Newsweek, 10/27/08)
Gail Collins observes that “Today, in the post-macaca era, you’d figure that politicians would be so sensitive to the perpetual presence of recording devices that they’d censor their comments even while muttering to themselves when taking a shower.” But she misses entirely the point that when these same perpetually present recording devices have not recorded anyone at a rally “yelling” death threats, a wise columnist doesn’t invent a slander just to smear those common folk who are troubled by her favorite candidate’s decades-long collaboration with an unrepentant power fetishist whose wrecking crew left people dead on both coasts.
For Gail Collins, any actual voting is a mere formality; in her mind the election is already over. “Right now, all the polls predict that in less than two weeks, Barack Obama is going to be elected president.” (All the polls say no such thing.) “The McCain campaign disputes this.” (Of course it does.)
She goes on: “Large numbers of Obama supporters are also in doubt, possibly because they keep getting e-mails from their relatives in Toledo revealing that Obama has gone to Hawaii, not to visit his ailing grandmother, but to destroy evidence that he is not actually an American citizen.”
And from whence would the relatives of Obama supporters get such an idea? Could Mister Obama himself have provoked suspicions about his American citizenship? Ms. Collins evinces no curiosity whatsoever on the matter, so I’ll fill in the blanks.
To be a legitimate and legal candidate for the presidency a candidate must be at least 35 years old and a citizen of the United States of America. Mr. Obama has left a convincingly long paper trail in his life; he’s old enough to be president.
After the stir made by Obama supporters who questioned John McCain’s citizenship you’d think Barack would just whip out his original birth certificate and flash us a big smile, but he stubbornly refused to produce his original birth certificate or give us a convincing reason why he couldn’t. The Obama campaign fed a facsimile copy made on a laser printer to the Daily KOS, a leftwing blog site, for publication.
The document refers to itself as a copy in small print along the bottom edge. The word LASER is printed in the lower left corner. It’s a copy. When Barack was born in 1961 all birth certificates were completed on typewriters. The first working laser lit up on May 16, 1960; the first public use of any laser was the supermarket barcode scanner that became available in 1974.
Computer enhancement of a bleed-through imprint in the lower center reveals that this copy dates from 2007 – it’s spanking new. Where’s the original? Did the dog eat it? How about a supporting affidavit from the state of Hawaii?
There have been assertions that the security border pattern on Barack’s “Certificate of Live Birth” does not match that of any Hawaiian birth certificate of any era; the race of Barack’s father is given as “African,” though African isn’t a race. Well past 1961, public records identified black people as Negroes, which was both scientifically correct and the preferred polite designation of its time.
The New York Times had been thrilled to discover in Barack Obama “that rare politician who can write. . . and write movingly and genuinely about himself.” Barack exploited the high stylishness of Dreams to establish his aura as a person of great intellect and insight and sensitivity. So it would be a blow to his carefully crafted political persona if it were revealed that Barack did not write Dreams from My Father, but merely fed lots of raw biographical material to a close collaborator who had already demonstrated a gift for writing tightly-wound, introspective, left-leaning political odyssey books. And who might that experienced ghostwriter be?
Well, it just might be, and very likely is, Barack’s decades-long collaborator William Ayers, the former wing commander of the bomb-happy Weather Underground. Barack was working closely with Ayers when Dreams was written and a literary analysis of both Dreams and Bill Ayers’ Fugitive Days demonstrates an eerie echo-chamber resemblance between the two texts.
For example, using Flesch Reading Ease Score numbers to compare the two texts, Dreams scored a 54.8 on reading ease at a 12th-grad reading level. The Ayers book came in at 54 on reading ease at the same 12th-grade level. Flesch scores go from zero to 121, so the nearly identical scores are telling. Ayers’ book averages 23.13 words per sentence; Dreams averages 23.36 words per sentence. A selected “control” biography averaged 15 words per sentence.
The two texts share dozens of adjectives and literary flourishes, many of which allude to ships, turbulent waters and stormy skies. Ayers’ experiences as a merchant seaman colored all his later writing, which is very stylish. Barack Obama, by contrast, has produced nothing of note, absent Audacity and Dreams; his only known literary efforts were two little poems, which Barack himself has damned as “very bad poetry.”
Here’s the real Barack:
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
After winning a popularity contest to become president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama contributed nothing whatsoever to the Harvard Law Review or any other law review – ever. So Obama would have us believe that he wrote two trashy poems, then nothing for over ten years, then a dazzling memoir, then a plodding 9th-grade-level political tract and then nothing more. That’s beyond suspicious. I’m a writer. Writers write; they can’t stop themselves from writing. They write with a consistent voice; they speak to the blank paper in front of them. Both Fugitive Days and Dreams from My Father sound like the speaking William Ayers. The only time Barack Obama has sounded like Dreams was on his audio-taped readings from the text.
Obama was never a writer seeking publication. A literary agent named Jane Dystel had read a 1990 New York Times article about Obama’s election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. Ms. Dystel persuaded Poseidon, a splinter imprint of Simon & Schuster, to front Obama an advance of about $125,000 for a memoir. Obama grabbed the money, but when it came to actually putting words on paper, he was clueless. His previous literary contribution had been a poem about apes stomping fruit in a cave. With time running out, he and Michelle left Chicago for Bali in his more-familiar Indonesia. Still nothing. For a whole year nothing. Simon & Schuster dumped him. Ms. Dystel then saved the clueless Obama by running to a division of Random House and convincing them to throw Obama another $40,000 advance.
It was soon after Barack Obama began his close collaboration with William Ayers that Obama suddenly became a geyser of literary brilliance. Obama’s memoir was finally published the same year that William Ayers helped to install Obama, until then a junior lawyer in a minor law firm, as the chairman of the mega-bucks Chicago Annenberg Challenge fund. At the end of that year, 1995, William Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, herself a former Weatherman bomb-planting terrorist, launched Barack Obama’s political career with a big warm fundraiser at their upscale Hyde Park home.
After publication of Dreams from My Father, the book had modest sales then slid into the bargain bins because Obama was an obscure Illinois congressman. Two years later, in 1997, A Kind and Just Parent by Bill Ayers introduced readers to Mr. Ayers’ fellow Hyde Park residents, among them Muhammad Ali, his beloved Louis Farrakhan, two poets and a former mayor. Curiously, Mr. Ayers includes Barack Obama, whom he does not identify as a senator; he calls Obama a “writer.” Ayers had made Obama his alter ego; through the showman Barack Obama, Ayers would woo a gullible electorate the way Cyrano wooed Roxanne by feeding her sweet words through a witless suitor.
The truth is that the Left has been grooming Obama for stardom from the time he arrived in Chicago and sought their political companionship. Both Obama memoirs were intended as political props and propaganda. Bill Ayers groomed Obama for a rise to power. Later, Emil Jones, the president of the Illinois senate, would groom Obama for the United States Senate by allowing him to sponsor hundreds of pieces of proposed legislation that had been snatched away from Obama’s fellow legislators: Obama got all the glory; the true authors of the legislation who had done all the difficult prep work, got dirt. They called Obama a “billjacker.”
So the Obama that millions of people admire doesn’t really exist. His memoirs were written by other people; his legislative portfolio was written by other people. We do know that he’s a leftwing extremist. Of the hundreds of congressmen in the U.S. Congress, the liberals have ranked Barack Obama as the most consistently liberal congressman. Just so you know, the guy who is ranked fourth is a self-identified socialist. Obama frightens the folks who understand what makes America prosperous – and what doesn’t.
Barack Obama has been a master self-promoter for decades. He captured the presidency of the Harvard Law Review by convincing disparate contending factions that he was “one of them” and shared “their values.” A current satire of the Obama Method of winning hearts has an Obama enthusiast cheerily proclaiming that “I believe in Obama because Obama believes in everything that I believe in!” This line from The Audacity of Hope captures the essence of Obama’s popularity perfectly: “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.”
Exactly! What he does not reveal to us is how hard he worked to keep himself a political “blank screen.” Obama avoided any public debate of his extreme political positions by sending his operatives behind the scenes and getting all of his political opposition removed from the Illinois senate-race ballot by nitpicking their petitions. In both his primary and general-election races for the U.S. Senate, the former employer of Obama’s political puppet master, David Axelrod, the Chicago Tribune, dug up embarrassing divorce-court dirt on Obama’s opponents, after which they just melted away in the polls. No sooner had he arrived in the U.S. Senate than he began laying plans to run for president. The current joke is that as soon as Barack is elected president he will begin running for higher office. The run for the presidency has been the first time Obama has had to answer any tough questions, and there have been precious few of those. The mainstream media are cheering him onward; Oprah adores him; Chris Matthews is feeling the tingle; and the 35% of Americans who pay no income taxes whatsoever are ready to crown him Emperor of America. It’s still too soon to mothball those telltale Roman columns that adorned his big victory rally.
Through it all, Obama was careful to remain as vague and “soft focus” as he possibly could. He is, after all, an adept of the Alinsky Method of “community organizing.” Saul Alinsky authored Rules for Radicals; he believed that gradualism was the true path to global Marxism. Alinsky taught his acolytes to blend into the communities they were trying to radicalize, to remain vague about their intentions, to adopt the mannerisms and speech patterns of the people around them, to affirm their biases and to slowly bring them around to the Marxist critique of America by a series of not-to-confrontational challenges and political re-orientations. All this could be done without ever mentioning Karl Marx. Marxists like Mr. Obama no longer go about spouting about how the gears of capitalism are oiled with the blood of the workers; they keep their dogmatism under cover.
To Saul Alinsky, the whole world was a political theater; telling lies and political cross-dressing were acceptable behaviors; every political enemy got what he deserved. That’s why the unrepentant William Ayers – the Ted Kazinsky of the Democrat Party – seems like acceptable company to liberals: his psycho-bomber command was fighting for The Dictatorship of the Righteous; his heart was in the politically correct place. Had Mr. Ayers spent all those years blasting abortion clinics to rubble and trying to kill journalists like Gail Collins, instead of people in uniform, like me, then the liberal press would have squashed him flatter than a cockroach at a flamenco festival.
It’s all power politics and situational ethics with them. To hear them tell it, their beloved Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia only went to all those Ku Klux Klan meetings because he savored the box lunches. Let’s just forget that Byrd was a ranking kleagle who single-handedly recruited 150 new Klan members. Once the lifetime-Democrat Byrd tilted to the left, all was forgiven. The historical fact that Bill Ayers spent years trying to kill Americans in uniform, people like me, doesn’t faze Barack Obama in the least. He offers us the lame excuse that he was only a boy when Ayers was issuing homicidal Marxist fatwas. Left unmentioned is Obama’s Harvard education and his leftist proclivities – Obama knew exactly what Bill Ayers had done; he sought Bill Ayers’ company, guidance and writing skills. Ayers had rescued Obama from public embarrassment by ghostwriting Obama’s memoir. Obama must defend Ayers now or risk exposure and mockery. Not only is Obama beholding to Bill Ayers, Mr. Ayers has got Obama by the balls. If Obama strays too far from the Marxist game plan, Ayers can pull his chain with threats of exposure. Obama can be blackmailed.
The same Team Obama that will only release odd-looking laser-printed facsimiles to bolster his claim to American citizenship are now stonewalling every request to glimpse anything Obama has written that might offer a foreshadowing of his later, sudden, one-time-only, flash of literary brilliance. What else are they keeping from us?
The October 20th, ’08 New York Times featured a front page article titled “Many Holes in Disclosure of Nominees’ Health.” The first paragraph laments that this campaign “is a striking departure from recent campaigns, in which many candidates and their doctors were more forthcoming.” The Times admits that “Mr. McCain has released more details about his health than the other three nominees,” which would include Joe Biden who had emergency surgery for a brain aneurysm in 1988 and a later brain surgery for another aneurysm.
The article goes on for whole pages, most of it devoted to John McCain’s bout with a melanoma eight years ago. Buried at the deep end of this witheringly detailed article, where only the most persistent readers would find it, are the few paragraphs about Barack Obama.
Here we are informed by the Times that Team Obama released an undated, one-page letter from Barack’s personal doctor stating that Barack is in “excellent” health. That would be 48 fewer pages than the McCain campaign gave the newspaper. Mr. McCain had also invited reporters to review his health records during his presidential bid in 2000. Until the release of Obama’s single page he had never made any health information available.
Finally, way near the end, the New York Times lets on that “Mr. Obama has had a notable medical problem: a difficulty in stopping smoking.” Obama is a tobacco addict. “Dr. Scheiner wrote that Mr. Obama began smoking at least two decades ago and had made several efforts to stop.” The Times added that “Mr. Obama said he quit smoking in 2007 when he began his presidential campaign. But he has ‘bummed’ cigarettes since then, he has said.”
Let’s unpack all that: Obama quit smoking in public because it made him look like a Chicago poll who is careless about his health and blows smoke on his daughters. After endangering the moral health of his daughters by exposing them to the weekly racist rants of his screwball pastor, inhaling a few hundred toxic combustion byproducts is the least of his daughters’ worries.
Obama continues to smoke cigarettes. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, is riddled with lines such as: “When the weather was good, my roommate and I might sit out on the fire escape to smoke cigarettes. . .” This is from the first page of Chapter One. The first line on this first page pegs his age at 21. So at age 21 Obama was already habituated to cigarettes. If he’s 47 years old now, then he has been smoking for more then 26 years, probably closer to three decades – fifty percent longer than the two decades alluded to by Dr. Scheiner. Maybe no one at the New York Times actually read Obama’s books.
Obama’s personal doctor is also silent about Obama’s standard measurement of risk – known as “pack years” – the number of packs smoked every day multiplied by the number of years a person has smoked. Obama’s pack-year number would offer us a better indication of his risk for lung cancer, heart disease and lots of other ailments. The doctor, like Obama, prefers to keep things vague. While McCain’s health portrait comes from many doctors over many years, Obama’s tiny health snapshot comes from one person whom Obama employs. Of course, doctors never fib. That’s why the number of handicapped parking permits has never exceeded the number of handicapped motorists. Obama’s risk would decline once he stopped smoking, but he continues to smoke cigarettes.
As the Times reminds us:
The health of the four nominees is a matter of concern because in the past a number of candidates, and in some cases their doctors and aides, have distorted, kept secret or spoken about the facts only at the last minute when medical events forced the issue. Examples include Senator Thomas F. Eagleton (depression), Senator Paul Tsongas (cancer), Senator Bill Bradley (heart rhythm abnormality) and, as vice-presidential nominee, Dick Cheney (heart disease).”
It’s no secret that the Obamas have been shameless Kennedy imitators. Michelle’s Jackie O replica outfits made her the butt of jokes among knowing insiders. Jack Kennedy had a host of medical problems, including Addison’s disease, which he concealed from the electorate behind brief public displays of vigor while a fawning press corps kept silent. Is Obama imitating JFK in this manner also? Of course he is! He’s a secret smoker who makes a big show of going to the gym twice in one day. His fawning press corps dutifully reports that he must have his special protein snacks every day. We are reminded constantly of Obama’s athletic grace, of how he doesn’t lurch about like that beat-up old torture victim, John McCain. It’s all political theater.
There’s no doubt that Barack is a master showman; he’s been marketing himself since he left Occidental College. As a student of the Alinsky Method he has reinvented his political persona several times. After his crushing defeat in a head-to-head political contest with a Black Panther Party original named Bobby Rush, Obama learned that he was not a genuine black man in the eyes of Chicago’s South Side black voters. Having learned that lesson, the adaptable Mr. Obama went to work studying American black people in exactly the manner used by his anthropologist mother Anne Dunham. Obama was determined to “blend in,” as the Alinsky Method instructed. When his Harvard-perfect diction put black folks to sleep, he studied black folks and did his best to be less of a stiff. He dropped the g’s from the ends of his words – hooting became hootin’ and hollering became hollerin.’ Michelle Obama imitated her husband; her perfect diction vanished; she began jivin’ and talkin’ trash at political rallies. The daring Mr. Obama even went so far as to remove his suit jacket in the Kennedy fashion to expose his ever flawlessly wrinkle-free, blindingly white, dress shirts.
When the black pastors of Chicago could not make an emotional connection with Barack Obama because of his total detachment from everything Christian, Mr. Obama adapted himself as the Alinsky Method instructed him to adapt. Obama went in search of the most radical, the most left-wing, the most over-the-top pastor in Chicago, and then he had a miraculous “conversion” in that pastor’s presence. Obama craved blackness by association and he got it from the ranting, prancing, flailing racist nutball Jeremiah Wright. It was a political marriage of convenience: the crazy Reverend Wright got bragging rights to a senator in the pews and Obama got the “genuinely black” street cred that he desperately yearned for.
Mr. Obama’s stagecraft is perfect, but nagging questions linger: Is the highly adaptive Mr. Obama also a Great Impostor? Is he a closet utopian with a Big Plan? He has harvested more money than any other politician in American history. With that mountain of cash he can purchase his way into the White House – big-bucks advertising and buckets of bribe money will carry any candidate a long way.
Bribe money purchased John Kennedy’s undeserved presidency in 1960, when the graveyard skeletons of Chicago voted the straight Democrat ticket. Obama can outspend his opponent 4 to 1. So why not just buy, bribe and manipulate his way into the Oval Office? Obama’s fellow “community organizers” in ACORN have already begun the big electoral swindle, gathering hundreds of thousands of fraudulent voter registrations to ensure that Barack Obama will be the next JFK in every sleazy sense.
After two years of campaigning, millions of Americans are captivated by an illusion. The Barack Obama they desperately want to believe will save them from their problems does not exist. Obama is a poseur with a head full of formulaic Marxist solutions to economic puzzles that Marxism has never been able to solve. But, hey, he’s a glamorous guy and he’s glib and his wife does the best Jackie O impersonation ever. The glamour-obsessed media love Mister O; they can totally identify with glibness.
What the video talking heads and the snarky print-media scribblers like Gail Collins can’t grasp is how mysterious Mr. Obama continues to be after two years of campaigning. Millions of voters are still waiting for answers to three simple questions, but two years into his campaign Mr. Obama is still stonewalling on those three simple questions. Now that Barack is totally down with the struggle, I will turn the interrogation over to my close associate Mr. Malik Zulu Kenyatta Muhammad Shabbazz:
1. Yo, homey! Show us the first and only birth certificate, not some chump decades-later laser-printer scrap of crap.
2. Yo, home boy! Your nasty little poem about apes stompin’ figs is lame. How come your bio-book is brilliant but you always need that teleprompter thing to keep you from spillin’ like some lame brain. Give up some proof that you can really talk the talk fantastic.
3. Yo, Big O! Your bio say you blow smoke like a chimney – been blowin’ smoke for thirty years! What’s with the cover-up? Tell the people you a smoke suckin’ fool. Tell ‘em you blow smoke on yo babies. Stop with the “no date,” one-page, “you OK” sheet from yo totally-in-yo-pocket MD.”
This concludes the English as another language portion.
Mr. Obama could have cleared up all the mystery at any time in thirty seconds, but after two years he is still stonewalling the average American voter. We may not have gleaned anything conclusive about Barack Obama’s health or his citizenship or his literary ability, but we have learned for certain that he is a stonewaller. If he makes it to the Oval Office, we can expect an administration that is tougher on leakers than the Bush administration, which is legendary for its tight grip on inside information.
It’s lucky for Mr. Obama that he’s so rich. The rest of us must give up truthful information about ourselves every time we rent a movie from Blockbuster. Big Bucks Obama can remain a mystery while buying his way to the presidency. He can rise to the pinnacle of power without ever lowering his mask.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2008
October 28, 2008