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Doug Ross:
Holy crap! PrestoPundit has the scoop of the week... and maybe of the entire yearMich-again at LGF:
Obama Sr. must have been an inspiration for Robert Mugabe. Zimbabwe under Mugabe is exactly what the old man proposed. So hows that working out?Curt Howland at Mises Blog:
"Who cares what Obama's Father was?" and "I can't fathom why anyone would care about any of this."
Well, just look at the title of the book. That's the who.
PrestoPundit, it's not your job to inform the public. That's what The New York Times and The New Yorker are for. How dare you think you can do the job of a real journalist!
Why is this not a surprise?baldilocks:
Most Africans of a certain age are/were communists? Say it ain't so!
For Heaven's sake, my father [a Barack Obama, Sr. era Kenyan educated in America] named his political column "The Fifth Column." Being a commie was all the rage for young Africans in the sixties. Why do you think most African countries are in the state they're in right now?
This isn't the real issue with Obama's father. The real question is why he's so hung up about a man who abandoned him as a toddler and who he barely knew. It's indicative of psychological problems and identity issues out the wazoo.
Ace:
Allah Pundit finds the fact that Obama's father was a communist to be irrelevant and furthermore an unfair rap.
I disagree.
The man has surrounded himself with radicals and stews in the same bubbling soup of crazy as Louis Farrakhan. He hangs out with terrorist like Bill Ayers. He courts black liberation "theology" firebrands, bigots, and conspiracy theorists as political (and not really spiritual) mentors.
Every politician is examined not just as to what he claims to believe but as to what he actually does believe but does not say so in an effort to appear more moderate and acceptable to the greatest number of voters.
If Obama were truly a moderate, it would indeed be irrelevant as to his dad's hardcore socialism/communism. But given that Obama seems by all available evidence to be a fairly hardcore lefty/radical himself, it seems reasonable to inquire as to the nature of his political education and real political beliefs.
Given the cast of characters surrounding Obama, his dad's communism is not merely an irrelevant biographical trivium. It seems that he's devoted to many of, perhaps most of, his father's egregiously bad ideas and intends to smuggle them into the White House in a Trojan Horse, or rather a Trojan Change Hope and Healing.
Bear in mind he's never been asked about any of this, and even confronted with Rev. Wright's vile anti-Americanism and apparent anti-semitism still the press gives Obama a pass.
If Obama never shared his father's ideology, or did once but abandoned it, I'd like to hear when, how, and why on that. And I'd like to know why, if it is the case he's not a radical like Pops Obama, he seems to prefer the company of political radicals.
|What does it prove?
It proves that he lied about his father.
It proves that he misrepresents pretty much everything.
Buy Danish at Hot Air:Kenya was a Cold War ally of the U.S. .. The international prestige of Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta and Kenya's relatively successful evolution, meant that Kenya's "pro-capitalist" (in truth, crony capitalist) policies were a valuable counterexample during the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds of Third World countries.
No thanks, however, to Harvard-trained economist Barack Obama Sr., who consistently argued within Kenya's elite for socialism and ditching the pro-American orientation. In an important piece of original research, Greg Ransom of PrestoPundit shows that leftism was the Dream from My Father ..
In Obama's memoirs, he plays up his father's failure to achieve the brilliant career seemingly open to him in the mid-1960s as due to ethnic politics (he was a Luo, Kenyatta a Kikuyu), and, later, due to his father's drinking. But the Presidential candidate skips over the more politically relevant ideological clash between his father and Kenyatta. As Mona Charen noted, leftism is more assumed than articulated in Obama's slippery autobiography.
Although, Barack Obama Jr. spent only one [month] of his life with his father, when he came to visit Hawaii when his son was a schoolboy at Punahou prep, the young man heard plenty about his father's brilliance and high ideals from his leftist mother, who remained a lifelong defender of her ex-husband, and [from his] leftist paternal grandfather.
|A person is not his/her parents-especially when the person wasn't raised by them.
|baldilocks on April 8, 2008 at 12:49 PM
That's true, and I agree that there are plenty of stronger links to Obama's far-Left leanings, but it does raise more questions, particularly about his credibility.
Do you think Obama knew about his father's convictions, or chose to ignore them? I find it hard to believe that as the author of Dreams From My Father he did not know.
The NYT mentioned Obama's father in a story back in January. Here are all the details that were "fit to print" about him..
Senator Obama's father, a goat-herder-turned economist, grew up in Nyangoma-Kogelo and was buried there in 1982 following a fatal car crash.goat-herder-turned economist. Thats pretty much all you, the reader, need to know about him. He herded goats. Then he turned into an economist.
Nyongesa at Marginal Revolution:
I too am born of African socialist parents who were the cusp generation of the colonial transition era. Baracks' father, who was an Aide de camp of my father's in the early eighties was a well known intellectual, and prized for the flexibility of his thinking. It would have been remiss given the context of the independence movement, for any thinking African in the sixties, to not give socialism serious consideration. My parent's generation was village born, and transitioned through the colonial education system into capitalism, then socialism and back out. Due the practicality of governance, whereby real world failure had a direct impact on idealism, they maintained a pragmatic approach to new ideas.
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