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[Order Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]
I can’t improve on an article by Mark Hemingway that appeared in The Federalist, which considers the “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire” and salon-Bolshevik, Marxist determinist, who believes that it’s important to get “on the right side of history” (anyone who opposes him is, of course, “on the wrong side of history”), our former President Barack Hussein Obama. Obama liked to use, as if it were his own, a line he took from Martin Luther King, and that MLK himself had lifted, without attribution, from the celebrated abolitionist Rev. Theodore Parker: “The moral arc of the universe bends toward justice.” No, it doesn’t. There was probably more injustice, with more than 150 million victims of war, genocide, and deliberate starvation across the globe, in the twentieth century than at any time before. And while he likes to prate about history, Obama is not himself a student of history. Consider his speech in Cairo, in 2009, in which, to flatter his Muslim audience, he ascribed so many achievements to Islamic civilization, almost all of them originating, in fact, with non-Muslims. More of Mark Hemingway’s examination of “Obama’s Fraudulent Legacy” can be found here: “Obama’s Fraudulent Legacy Is Being Exposed, And It’s On The Wrong Side Of History,” by Mark Hemingway, The Federalist, August 9, 2023:
Barack Obama’s crumbling public image is more Louis Farrakhan, less MLK.
Barack Obama is often hailed as one of the greatest orators in modern politics. While he had undeniable gifts in that department, as someone who attended a number of his speeches in person, I never quite understood all the praise. Setting aside his career-making “red states, blue states” speech at the 2004 Democratic convention — a plea for political moderation he spent his time in office repudiating — the only memorable things Obama said were either campaign pablum such as “hope and change,” or remarks that were unintentionally revealing.
In the latter category, my personal favorite remark was this comment about congressional Republicans from 2013: “We’re going to try to do everything we can to create a permission structure for them to be able to do what’s going to be best for the country,” he said.
“Permission structure” is a phrase that’s been used by marketing executives for many years, and was apparently in common usage at the Obama White House. The idea is “based on an understanding that radically changing a deeply held belief and/or entrenched behavior will often challenge a person’s self-identity and perhaps even leave them feeling humiliated about being wrong. … Permission Structures serve as scaffolding for someone to embrace change that they might otherwise reject.”
While there’s more overlap between politics and marketing than anyone would like to admit, the naked use of jargon that comes from the world of consumer manipulation betrays a remarkably egotistical approach to politics. There was no need to address honorable disagreement to Obama’s policies, which were politically extreme and consistently opposed by voters. The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.
Ironically enough, I thought of the “permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way….
In Obama’s ballyhooed first memoir, Dreams of My Father, Samuels summarizes his description of the breakup between Obama and Sheila Miyoshi Jager, one of his serious girlfriends before he married Michelle Obama: “In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.”
But Garrow, who started writing his Obama biography well into Obama’s second term as president, tracked down Jager — now a professor at Oberlin with a formidable academic reputation — and asked her about her relationship with Obama. (That the credulous journalistic establishment was totally incurious about digging into Obama’s inconsistent and self-serving life story is a thread running throughout the interview.) According to her, what really happened was this:
In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.
At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.
In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.
While it’s hard to land firmly on one side of a he said/she said account of a romantic break-up, Jager has an outstanding reputation; she’s a professor at Oberlin college. She hasn’t been outspoken about Obama on much of anything, much less publicly critical of him. She doesn’t seem bitter about a relationship that ended decades ago, where Obama asked her to marry him twice and she rejected him.
If Jager is to be believed — and I think she is, as the rest of the Samuels-Garrow interview is full of criticism of episodes where Obama has obviously fictionalized aspects of his memoirs and life story — then this just really puts an exclamation point on the narrative established by this landmark interview. Americans thought they were electing a guy who had tacitly, if not explicitly, said he would fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, a man who, in Garrow’s considered words, “did not buy into identity politics.” Instead, they got a guy invested in defending Louis Farrakhan’s vision of race in America.
Being a president in the mold of King would entail evaluating leadership failures as a matter of the content of your character and judgment. Following Farrakhan would entail blaming… well, it seems hard to believe Obama would embrace antisemitic conspiracies, but certainly there’s ample evidence that Obama and his defenders do dodge accountability by blaming a more socially acceptable villain of shadowy cabals of racists and Republicans. (On the other hand, if Obama is hoping for favorable assessments of his famously antagonistic relationship with Israel, he’s not helped by Jager’s anecdote or the fact that he had his kids baptized at a church run by a guy who even Ta-Nehisi Coates admits spews “crude conspiratorial antisemitism.”)
That “guy” is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose church Obama attended for twenty years, where sermons were full of Farrakhan-inflected anti-white sentiments, and Wright himself, after Obama’s election, let loose with a volley of antisemitic sentiments that likely were variations on what Obama had been hearing, intermittently, over two decades.
For those of you who may think this is a little too harsh and/or a Manichean take on Obama’s nuanced worldview, I have good news. The interview is also a springboard to debate Obama’s sexuality. And large portions of the interview are also consumed with discussions of whether Obama is a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or … a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society.”…
But it’s been seven years since the guy was in the White House, and the judgment of history is starting to come in. I think we at least have permission to say he was a bad president.
Not just a “bad president.” One of the very worst.
Bland, Spencer, and Young.
“the right side of history”
That’s such an egregious concept it comes close to making my blood boil 🙂
Packs so many fallacies in such a short phrase.
As if history was some kind of metaphysical being, for one thing.
As if the leftist narrative counted, when compared to the zillions of evolutionary changes happening in the real world, for another.
As if the concept of truth in writing history, as advocated by Thucydides, didn’t count.
Obama used Ersatz sincerity as the operational catalyst of a grand deception.
His great fortune, and our catastrophe, lay in our great store of naivety.
It allowed Obama the opportunity to open a political/legal pharmacy dispensing poison pills.
America swallowed them wholesale.
Americans were determined to prove we had moved into the “post-racial” era envisioned by Obama in his 2004 speech. To do so we, using theatrical jargon, engaged in “willing suspension of disbelief” to overlook Obama’s deep relationships with Wright, Ayers and others. Now we are paying the price for that and Obama is enjoying his many homes.
As to the issue of whether Obama is a “celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or … a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society,” I would suggest the healing power of “and.”
Having been one of America’s worst presidents is not a demerit in “woke” circles, it’s a recommendation. Nothing plus nothing– the Kenyan and Big Mike–equals something in “woke” world. The demented Joe Bite-Me is counting on that Democ-rat math for a second term.
Barring an election miracle, Obama’s two terms may well be looked upon as the true beginning of the end of America as a constitutional republic (if such books are even allowed to be published).
I think it was the Clinton presidency. Obama just hammered in the nails.
Yes, I was just thinking the same thing just last night and discussed it with my husband this morning. Our children, sheltered as they were from any outside influences such as television and other media (we live in a fairly closed religious community), somehow picked up a lot of the nastier aspects of the Clinton presidency, including his seduction of the twenty-one-year-old Monica Lewinski. Perhaps one or two of their classmates had televisions in their homes and their parents let them watch the news, or the parents discussed these things in front of their kids and those kids told all of the others. I have no idea. But our two younger sons were born either right before or in the first years of the Clinton presidency, and some of the ideas that they picked up were highly unseemly, things that I hadn’t even heard about until I was, well, rather long in the tooth (and already missing teeth).
As to my husband and me, our small but highly respected defense-related software business suddenly lost a lot of revenue in the quarters after Clinton took office. When I would call some of our customers, who had become friends as well over the years, they shared truly sad stories of massive layoffs at their very large defense-related aviation and other companies. One woman, one of the most intelligent people I have ever met, said bitterly, “Yes, this is our peace dividend.”
So the bastard corrupted my children and wrecked my business, but the final blow came on 9/11/01. If I might be crude here, if he hadn’t had his pants down during most of his presidency, our military and civilian intelligence agencies wouldn’t have had theirs down in the events immediately leading to the worst attack on US soil, with the heartbreaking loss of almost three thousand American lives.
I credit Clinton with the debasement of American morals, the destruction of Ronald Reagan’s robust economy, and the deaths of many innocent Americans who should have died of old age. He will someday stand at the bar of divine justice, as we all will. He will have a lot more to answer for than most of us will.
Obama is a closeted queer who is married to a transvestite….
Have you seen this?
Belief Watch: Is Obama the Antichrist?
I recall a clairvoyent on TV (Maurice Woodruff) that we used to watch for entertainment purposes only, saying (in 1969) that the antichrist is on earth and is a young boy living somewhere in Malaysia or Indonesia.
I’m not a believer in clairvoyants but maybe there’s something to this?
I dislike Obama intensely. I believe the damage he has caused to this country is incalculable and may very well lead to the fall of the Republic.
That said, idiotic comments such as this just dumb down the argument.
I’m still waiting. What happened between obama, big mike, and the chef. Whatever it was…it sure as hell wasn’t an accident.
OBOMB SHOULD BE TRIED AND DEPORTED TO GITMO FOR PERPETRATING JOE BIDEN ON AMERICA ALONE!
Domestic Enemies of the Constitution and the American People
By Allan J. Feifer
That all changed though with Barack Obama in 2009. Obama was able to capitalize; the country was at once, both fearful and hopeful. We were coming off of one of the worst recessions since the Great Depression, and Obama rode in on promises of “change.”
Even though the U.S. was technically on the economic upswing before Obama’s inauguration, he initiated massive spending on a scale not seen outside of wartime; he truly put the entitlement state on steroids. The national debt is $33 billion today. At the start of the Clinton administration, it was $12 Billion. With assistance from his political acolytes, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, eight years of Obama fundamentally altered our country’s checks and balances by evil intent. Recall that Obama was a card-carrying socialist at one time and an unabashed Alinskyite community organizer who articulated a “fundamentally transform[ed]” America.
The national debt is now $33 TRILLION, not billion. The present administration is clearly our enemy, as was/is Obama, whom David Horowitz has justifiably called “an American traitor.”
Trillion, not billion 🙂
When he promised to “fundamentally transform” the United States my blood ran cold, despite all of his rhetorical flair. Anyone with ears to hear can understand exactly what he meant.
Obama likely learned about the Treaty of Hudaibiyya when he attended an Islamic school in Indonesia. This treaty, which Muhammed entered into with the pagan Meccans, serves as the paradigm for all treaties Muslims enter into with infidel states. Muhammed broke this treaty – a nonagression pact – when he knew his army of believers was strong enough to defeat his Meccan enemies. His resultant victory allowed the Muslims to overrun all of the Arabian peninsula, and marked the beginning of Muslim global conquests. Its importance cannot be underestimated. How is this relevant? Because Obama sought to broker a deal with Iran, a country hellbent on building nuclear weapons. If Obama, as I suspect, had indeed learned about Hudaibiyya at the madrassa he attended (or from other sources), then he consciously sold us out, recklessly disregarding the near-certainty of Iranian duplicity regarding any promises they may make about abandoning their efforts to build a bomb. Treason on his part, without question.
Hussein was a bad white house resident
but he was a good moslem
Obammy, was and is an evil narcistic all about me hater. A true racist and wanna be, never succeeded at anything other than being able to con weak minded people to vote for him. He and Adolph Hitler were in fact great orators of the weak minded, those with any common sense knew better.
I found it strange that Obama was labeled a muslim while in School in Indonesia as his Mother obviously converted to islam while in Indonesia, is it the Law there, and if not before when she married his African Father, a born muslim, so therefore Obama was a muslim by Family association so when he spoke in Cairo to all those islamic Leaders he told of his upbringing and yet they all knew he had converted to being a Born Again Christian so my question has often been… Why did these islamic Leaders not bring a Fatwa against him as he is OPENLY an Apostle from islam even though he change his obviously Christian name, Barry, to an obviously islamic name, Barack Hussien Obama, after he embraced Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
Yet those islamic Leaders in Cairo applauded him like the second coming as Obama said the most beautiful sound in the morning is the islamic call to prayer, NOT the Church Bells on a Sunday morning but the screaming of my God has a bigger Penis than your God…. Fives times a day, every day of the Week.
Obummer was the biggest scam ever played on the people of America, both black and White.
Americans helped him perpetuate his scam, as most had been taught since childhood by their schools, churches, and synagogues to “be nice to Negroes”. They felt obligated to give the “poor Negro” a chance by voting for him, to show what nice, enlightened people they were. He had a lot of help with that scam, with brainwashing going back a generation or two.
They were taught to adopt a racist attitude. That should have been a clue to anyone using their brain.
obama was nothing but a race baiting grifter , i knew that even before listening to larry elder , thomas sowell and v d hanson . confirmed by all three and many others . and i don’t even live in the u.s.
The long era of Jim Crow segregation politics was double edged. The demographic of whites who wanted complete separation from black was politically repudiated with the defeat of aGeorge Wallace,, but the mirror tendency in blacks was politicized by Obama and his Black Liberation Theology model of Marxism..
Like Muslims about Jews, there are vast swaths of American blacks whose world view is steeped in conspiracy theories about Demonic Whites, with Jews being the ultimate expression of demonic whiteness.
Obama was a powerful president, but more in the lineage of a Charles Manson that a Martin Luther King . Without him, the Ferguson effect, followed bt the George Floyd effect of making thugs into heroic figures, would not have been possible.
America is in a full on race war now, just like Charles Manson wanted. That is what Obama delivered.
Barack Obama is currently his third term as POTUS, operating in the shadows, carrying out his vow to fundamentally transform the United States of America via Joseph R. Biden. He basically said so in a interview with Stephen Colbert December, 2020.
“. . .Asked if he missed his old job when he looked at the headlines from the Trump administration, Obama mentioned that there were plenty of people who wanted him to have a third term. Alas, there was that pesky 22nd Amendment in the way, limiting him to two terms. . . “If I could make an arrangement where I had a stand-in, a front man or frontwoman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats, looking through the stuff, then deliver the lines, but somebody else was doing all the talking — I’d be fine with that,” Obama said.
Clinton was Bad Obama was Badder Biden is Worse then any of them all just a Dictator/Tyrant
He was a slick organizer. When he announced his candidacy, I attended one of his Tea Parties (Obama’s words) which were organized in the homes of respected, elderly black ladies. We mingled and drank tea whilst waiting for some special ring on our hostess’s phone, which was propped on the mantel, on speaker. Presently the candidate’s mellifluous voice rang out, and he chatted with us. Well, not really. His remarks were prepared and broadcasting from 100 miles away, but that Tea Party was intimate. HIs audience was breathless. He was warm and persuasive, and hearts were melting. I took notes. He was winning.
Thanks for the great article. One point of clarification: it was “Dreams From My Father” (not “…Of My Father”). As Dinesh D’Souza pointed out in his book “Roots of Obama’s Rage,” a major driver in Obama’s life at the time he ran for president, was to promote the dreams his father was unable to achieve. As has been widely reported, Obama senior was a womanizer, a Marxist, an alcoholic and a wife beater who died in a one-car accident while driving drunk and wearing artificial legs, having lost his natural legs in a previous car accident in which he was also driving drunk. Working for the Kenyan government, he never achieved his dream of reaching its highest levels, but remained a lower=level civil servant. In terms of character, not an admirable individual. Abandonment can have a deep and long-lasting effect on the psyche of a child. Obama was abandoned first by his natural father and then by his mother, who shuttled him off to his white, card-carrying communist grandparents. Obama was not a traditional American. Many of his formative years were spent outside the US and in a very different cultural environment. Add the communist indoctrination he received in Hawaii from his grandparents’ good friend Frank Marshall Davis. Easy to see how Obama faced an identity crisis. Always something of an outsider? Muslim or not? Black or not? Communist or not? American or not? Quite frankly, anyone put into this position would likely have a lengthy list of deep personal issues and Obama himself laid his bare in his books. That so many people could not see how problematic he would be as president reflects H. L. Mencken’s quote “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” I believe Obama’s speech and actions belie the fact that, in the deepest depths of his soul, he resents and hates traditional America and the people who created it, as well as Western civilization in general, although he certainly enjoys reaping its benefits.