Barack Watch
Every morning finds a new batch of Barack Obama stories. These are some of the ones I found interesting today:
1. The Chicago Tribune finds that Obama committed what could be called “acts of artistic license” when he wrote his best-selling autobiography (h/t LGF). Interviews with people who knew him then challenge a lot of the personal mythology he included in his book:
More than 40 interviews with former classmates, teachers, friends and neighbors in his childhood homes of Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as a review of public records, show the arc of Obama’s personal journey took him to places and situations far removed from the experience of most Americans.
At the same time, several of his oft-recited stories may not have happened in the way he has recounted them. Some seem to make Obama look better in the retelling, others appear to exaggerate his outward struggles over issues of race, or simply skim over some of the most painful, private moments of his life.
The handful of black students who attended Punahou School in Hawaii, for instance, say they struggled mightily with issues of race and racism there. But absent from those discussions, they say, was another student then known as Barry Obama.
Whoops. I do wonder if Obama, who was raised in multiracial Hawaiim was fairly unconcerned with more serious racial issues, and whether his racial attennae went up only when he started attending PC institutions such as Harvard. That is, it’s entirely possible that race was not an issue for him until the liberal educational societies made it an issue, at which time he went back and retrofitted his biography to accord with liberal expectations.
2. A nice companion piece to Obama’s politically self-serving confabulations is Nick Kristoff’s op-ed piece, which manages neatly to ignore Obama’s actual political positions and accuse everyone who opposes him of being an Islamophobe. For the record, let me state that I couldn’t care less about Obama’s elementary school aged Islamic education. I believe that he is, as he says he is, a Christian. My problems are actually substantive: I dislike the church with which he’s associated, considering it a black-supremacist, antisemitic, anti-American institution; I dislike his rise through Chicago politics, which is appearing more sleazy and corrupt by the day; I dislike the way he’s buying into the Messiah mythology touted by his followers; and I truly and deeply dislike his political agenda, which I find to be pretty much a template of the knee-jerk liberalism I slowly and painfully abandoned in the early 1990s. To the extent his view of the world is that all things military are evil, regardless of the side the represent; that government is the only answer; and that the Palestinians and Jews are morally equivalent, I disagree with him too profoundly at substantive levels ever to vote for him. Everything else about him — his sex, color, religion, etc. — is completely irrelevant. With his political record, I wouldn’t vote for him if he was the last white, Jewish male on earth.
3. On the subject of Obama and his lies, and the subject of Obama and his corrupt political background, Rick Moran reports on some more lies and corruption that the Rezko trial is revealing.
