Obama can’t resist Trump’s authorship challenge
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie begins her New York Times review of “A Promised Land” with this sentence, “Barack Obama is as fine a writer as they come.”
This was, I am sure, music to Obama’s ears. As one commenter on the Washington Post review deadpanned, “Obama may have been the first president, who became president, so he would have material for a memoir.” Throughout his life, Obama has openly aspired to be a writer. He has crafted his persona as much around that identity as he has that of a politician, even of a president.
Indeed, it was the literary world’s enthusiasm for what the Times’ Jennifer Szalai’s called “Obama’s extraordinary first book” – “Dreams from My Father” – that fueled his political rise.In reading “A Promised Land” – I am taking one here for the team, guys – I was shocked to see him respond as he did to Donald Trump’s 2011 challenge to his literary reputation.
The election fraud challenge that made Obama’s career
The headline read, “Obama jokes that Navy SEALs could remove Trump from the White House.”
The headline referred to Barack Obama’s graceless comment on the Jimmy Kimmel show that if President Trump refused to leave the White House, “Well, I think we can always send the Navy SEALs in there to dig him out.”
As he did with Kimmel and has done in numerous venues to sell his latest memoir, “A Promised Land,” Obama has been ridiculing Trump for challenging election fraud. What Obama does not want America to know, however, is that he launched his own career doing just what Trump is doing now.
Obama is banking on the fact that his critics have not bothered to read his book. Even still, had Obama’s memoir gone to press after the election, I am confident that one story would never have made it into the final print run, but it did.
The Steele dossier, the birth certificate and Joe Biden
In 2011, when Trump started making noise about the birth certificate, Obama turned to the one man who knew his secrets. “Finally I decided I’d had enough,” Obama writes in his new memoir “A Promised Land.”
“I called in White House counsel Bob Bauer and told him to go ahead and obtain the long-form birth certificate from its home in a bound volume, somewhere deep in the bowels of the Hawaii Vital Records office.”
Bauer dispatched Obama’s personal attorney Judith Corley, also of Perkins Coie, to secure two copies of the long form birth certificate. If it was all so easy, one has to wonder why Bauer did not get a copy when Berg first brought suit.
In 2016 Perkins Coie again showed its creativity when it retained Fusion GPS to create the infamous Steele dossier. A cynic might suggest that a firm capable of commissioning the Steele dossier would have no trouble dummying up a birth certificate.
Community Dies in Darkness
Increasingly, the Kansas City “community” has morphed into a circle of the like-minded. The astute
African-American social commentator Shelby Steele refers to this circle as the “zone of decency.” Those within find redemption by decertifying those without. The decent are quick to call their preferred media outlet when the seemingly less-decent breach the zone with a rogue opinion, which is how Ruckus got cancelled, literally.
By the most generous of definitions, The Star is a for-profit enterprise. It makes no marketing sense to decertify half or more of the newspaper’s red-state market, but that is the publisher’s right. The taxpayer-funded KCUR and KCPT do not have that right. They exercise it nonetheless. These entities no longer even fake objectivity. Together, they exert substantial pressure on the corporate and nonprofit community to follow the party line. Those who march to the beat of their own drum or even question the orthodoxy du jour can quickly find themselves shamed, decertified, cancelled.
None of this portends well for any genuine sense of community. “I often admired the infinite art with which the inhabitants of the United States managed to fix a common goal to the efforts of many men and to get them to advance to it freely,” said Alexis de Tocqueville, explaining the unique genius of America. The critical word here is “freely.” In Kansas City, as in many such cities, freedom has yielded to intimidation. We have already cancelled J.C. Nichols and Andrew Jackson. Can Harry Truman be far behind?
PEN America Mocks 1st Amendment with Obama Gala
Over the years the CPJ board of directors has included any number of liberal luminaries, among them Christiane Amanpour, Gwen Ifill, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, Clarence Page, and even serious leftists like Victor Navasky, longtime editor of the Nation. The principal author of the report was Leonard Downie, Jr., former executive editor of the Washington Post. In the opening paragraph of the report, Downie sliced right to the heart of the issue:
“In the Obama administration’s Washington, government officials are increasingly afraid to talk to the press. Those suspected of discussing with reporters anything that the government has classified as secret are subject to investigation, including lie-detector tests and scrutiny of their telephone and e-mail records. An “Insider Threat Program” being implemented in every government department requires all federal employees to help prevent unauthorized disclosures of information by monitoring the behavior of their colleagues.”
It’s the Biden People You Don’t See Who Ought to Worry You
There is a power couple in Washington that has the moxie and the muscle that the Obamas lack, and no, it is not Bill and Hillary Clinton. In fact, few beyond the Beltway would recognize the names of Anita Dunn and her attorney husband, Bob Bauer. Although not well known, these primeval swamp dwellers know enough about the Obamas and the Clintons to keep both couples in line.
Dunn, a 62-year-old veteran “strategist,” is managing Biden’s transition just as she guided his campaign for most of the past year. That campaign may not have looked like much, but by hook and by crook it netted an “historic” 80 million votes at last count, an incredible 15 million more votes than Barack Obama secured in his 2012 reelection bid.
Stunning: Obama revises ‘fable’ that got him elected
In his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” Barack Obama attempts to do something the reviewers havechosen not to notice, namely to surgically excise his father from his fabled and apparently fabricated life story.
In brief, Obama has shored up his American roots by obliterating his international ones. This move took some thought. Obama wrote his first memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” about his Homeric quest for identity, a Telemachus searching for his own Odysseus, the Kenyan Barack Obama.
Stunningly, in “A Promised Land,” the Kenyan is an afterthought.
Obama Scolds Hispanic Trump Voters for Not Buying Liberal Lies
One ungainly paragraph delivered during a Wednesday interview on the “Breakfast Club” encapsulates just about all one needs to know about Barack Obama.
“People were surprised about a lot of Hispanic folks who voted for Trump,” Obama told a trio of black interviewers, “but there’s a lot of evangelical Hispanics who, you know, the fact that Trump says racist things about Mexicans, or puts detainees, undocumented workers [sic] in cages. They think that’s less important than the fact that he supports their views on gay marriage or abortion.”
Where to begin?
Details NOT included in Obama’s new memoir
Barack Obama’s long delayed new memoir, “A Promised Land,” debuted on Tuesday. Although I have not read all of it, I have read enough to know what Obama has chosen not to tell about his early years and his ascendancy to the Senate.
What Obama misses most is terrorist friend Bill Ayers. Without Ayers’ editorial input, the book reads as though Ward Cleaver had written it about winning a seat on the Mayfield City Council. The style is that flaccid. Ayers, however, lent Obama’s first memoir, the 1995 “Dreams from My Father,” more than a sense of style. He lent the book its sense of rage.
Inexplicable: The strange vote numbers in Wisconsin’s 8th District
What makes no obvious sense is that Republican Congressman Mike Gallagher received nearly 15% more votes in Brown County than Trump did, or 11,175 total. This pattern persisted throughout the district. In Outagamie County, the district’s second-most populous county, Gallagher outperformed Trump by 11%. In Marinette County, Gallagher received 8% more votes despite Trump’s triumphant visit in June to the county’s historic shipyard, Fincantieri Marinette Marine.
“And you now have a lot of contracts because of the United States government,” said Trump over the frequent applause. “You’re going to – you’re going to be so busy. You’re going to be so busy. I know you went through a little bit of a hard time; not anymore. Not anymore. Got you covered for years.”
District-wide Gallagher outpaced Trump by about 11%. That translates to 26,228 votes. If Trump and Gallagher had merely run even, Trump would have carried the state of Wisconsin by more than 5,000 votes.
