Washington Post Gets the Leads for a Bombshell Story

July 31, 2021 American Thinker

On July 16, Lori Aratani wrote a lengthy article for the Washington Post detailing the NTSB’s decision to destroy the remains of TWA Flight 800, “the Paris-bound jetliner that crashed shortly after takeoff from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport 25 years ago Saturday killing all 230 people onboard.”  This much Aratani got right, but that is about all.

On Monday, July 19, I started skimming the article with the expectation that Aratani was simply going to recirculate the party line of twenty or so years’ standing.  She did not disappoint.  “The crash made headlines for years, the tragedy of the loss compounded by suspicions the plane may have been the target of a terrorist attack,” Aratani wrote.  “Ultimately, after a four-year investigation, the National Transportation Safety Board concluded the cause was an explosion in the plane’s center fuel tank, the result of a flammable mix of fuel and air ignited by a spark.”

Standard nonsense.  There were, in fact, “suspicions” the plane may have been the target of a terrorist attack, but there was overwhelming evidence the 747 was the unfortunate victim of friendly missile fire. And almost no one in the aviation community, save those who were paid to say so, believed that a spontaneous explosion in the center fuel tank destroyed the aircraft.

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Did Obama Plagiarize the Kenya Section of Dreams?

American Spectator

In June, the memoir of veteran publisher and editor Peter Osnos, An Especially Good View: Watching History Happen, was released with minimal fanfare. Although he sanitizes his experience as the publisher of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, Osnos lets slip a detail that could transform Obama’s reputation from “the best writer to occupy the White House since Lincoln” to the best plagiarist to occupy the White House before Biden.

First, the sanitation. In a 2006 article, Osnos publicly scolded then-Sen. Obama for his “ruthlessness.” As Osnos recounted, hustling young agent Jane Dystel stuck by an unknown Obama even after he failed to honor a book contract with Simon & Schuster. Undaunted, Dystel landed Obama a new contract with Osnos, then the publisher of Times Books. The punch line of the 2006 article is that, after Dreams took off in 2004, Obama repaid Dystel by dumping her for a D.C. power attorney. Obama’s “questionable judgment about using public service as a personal payday” dismayed the openly liberal Osnos.

That was 2006. In his 2021 memoir, Osnos includes the details of the original book deal with Dystel, but he purges all traces of Obama’s venality. Off-handedly, however, he adds a potentially damning detail. In 1994 — note the date — Obama met with Osnos and Times Books editor Henry Ferris to set terms. Writes Osnos, “He was determined, he said, to finish the book, which would involve a trip to Kenya for research about his father, who had died there in a car accident.”

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My final phone call with the FBI’s Jim Kallstrom

WND

On July 3, the FBI’s Jim Kallstrom died at 78 of a rare cancer of the blood. This was just two weeks before the 25th anniversary of the destruction of TWA Flight 800. In its opening sentence, the Washington Post summed up Kallstrom’s public role.

Kallstrom, wrote Emily Langer, “became a familiar presence on the nightly news as chief of the criminal investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island in 1996, a confounding disaster first suspected to be an act of terrorism but ultimately attributed to a fuel tank explosion.”

For years, I thought Kallstrom would be the one person to finally come clean about the real cause of this “confounding disaster.”

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When the Woke Eat Each Other Alive: ESPN Edition

American Thinker

Back when ESPN was watchable, I confess to having a petite faiblesse for Rachel Nichols.  She was cute and congenial, and — unlike many females broadcasting male sports — she rarely pretended to know more than she did.  These past weeks, however, Nichols has found herself embroiled in a petite scandale.  Her transgression?  Objecting to the professional mugging she received at the hand of ESPN’s “diversity” goons.

I would have preferred to portray my beloved Rachel as pure victim, but the story’s not quite that simple.  A good place to begin is with the exchange that drove me away from ESPN for good.  It took place on the morning of July 17, 2015.  The night before, the former Bruce Jenner, now renamed “Caitlyn,” was awarded the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the ESPY Awards Ceremony, then presented by ESPN, now by ABC.

A video emerged of Jenner, “draped in a glamorous white dress,” walking down the aisle to receive the award.  On watching Jenner pass, a gape-jawed Brett Favre did a double-take.  For his inability to contain his shock, the legendary quarterback was denounced the next morning on ESPN as — you guessed it — a “hater.”

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TWA 800: 25 Years of Deep State Deception

American Thinker

On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Paris-bound 747 out of JFK, blew up off the coast of Long Island. It seemed somehow fitting that James Kallstrom, the public face of the FBI investigation into the plane’s destruction, would die two weeks before the 25th anniversary. As a patriot, a Vietnam vet, and an outspoken critic of all things Clinton, Kallstrom once held promise as the insider most likely to come clean. He never did.

As to my own involvement with this story, until the evening of February 23, 2000, I was as naïve as a CNN anchor. Before that evening, I would have dismissed out of hand anyone who dared suggest that elements of the FBI and CIA would conspire with the White House and the New York Times to cover up the cause of so public a disaster.

February 23, 2000, was the night my education began.

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Obama: ‘I make love to men daily, but in the imagination’

WND

In his 2020 memoir, “Promised Land,” Barack Obama avoids all mention of sex in any form or fashion. He has good reason to be discreet.

In 2018, in the paperback version of his Obama biography, “Rising Star,” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow revealed an element of Obama’s personality that had escaped media attention. Writing to sometimes girlfriend Alex McNear, the 20-something Obama told McNear that he viewed gay sex as “an attempt to remove oneself from the present, a refusal perhaps to perpetuate the endless farce of earthly life.”

Not yet through with this theme, Obama boldly went where no future president had ever gone before: “You see, I make love to men daily, but in the imagination. My mind is androgynous to a great extent and I hope to make it more so.”

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How Barack Obama Begot Gwen Berry

American Thinker

New book is now available.

“I never said that I hated the country,” said Gwen Berry, the world’s most famous hammer thrower — male, female or non-binary. “All I said was I respect my people enough to not stand or acknowledge something that disrespects them. I love my people point blank, period.”

Berry, who finished third in the female hammer throw at the U.S. track and field Olympic Trials, was attempting to explain why she turned her back on the National Anthem. If her subversive pout appalled half of America, it surprised no one. In the year 2021, sports fans have come to expect athletes, black and white, to disrespect symbols of national pride.

It didn’t use to be this way. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, race relations were better than they had ever been. As to athletic protests, it had been forty years since any Olympian grabbed the kind of attention Berry got.

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Historians: Trump 41st Best President, Obama 10th

July 5, 2021 American Spectator

A flock of over 100 historians, a handful of them conservative, most of them university-based, cast their votes in the 2021 Presidential Historians Survey. Not surprisingly, the results confirm what we feared, namely that fake news can quickly become fake history. This twist is especially obvious for the presidencies of Barack Obama, ranked 10th out of 44, and Donald Trump, picked 41st.

Prominent historian Douglas Brinkley has made my case for me. Among the most prolific of the historians participating, Brinkley has written books on Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and other historical figures.

Given Brinkley’s prestige and the many prizes he has won, he has no excuse for saying something quite so literally ignorant as what he said about Barack Obama in a CNN panel on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration:

He’s almost unimpeachable. He has governed with such honesty and integrity, and he’s not only leaving with that 60 percent [approval rating] we keep talking, but a growing reputation. And the legacy of having eight scandal-free years is going to look larger and larger in history.

The saying goes that a scandal is not a scandal until the New York Times calls it a “scandal” on the front page, and by that definition, yes, the Obama administration was scandal free. By any sane definition, however, the Obama administration was awash in scandal.

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Michelle Obama: Race Whisperer

WND

To understand how Barack Obama evolved from the guy who assured us there is “not a black America and a white America … there’s the United States of America” to the guy who mocked Republican concerns about Critical Race Theory, you have to look no further than his in-house race whisperer, wife Michelle.

The prescient and fearless Christopher Hitchens sensed Michelle’s subversive influence during the 2008 campaign and dared to say so out loud.

“All right, then, how is it that the loathsome [Jeremiah] Wright married him, baptized his children, and received donations from him?” he asked. “Could it possibly have anything, I wonder, to do with Mrs. Obama?”

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Out With Columbus Statues, In With George Floyd’s

American Spectator

The late Amiri Baraka, a Newark native and New Jersey poet laureate, acknowledged that he knew little about the fate of America’s ethnic working classes. In his 1984 memoir, The Autobiography of Leroi Jones, Baraka said of the white kids he lived among, “I often wonder what these guys and girls carried away from that experience with us and what they make of it.”

As he has made abundantly clear in these past few years, Baraka’s son, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, cares no more about those guys and girls than the media do. This past week, Mayor Baraka was busy unveiling a 700-pound statue of career felon George Floyd whose death in police custody made him an international sensation. The mayor said, “Hopefully when people walk by and they see it, and they participate, hopefully it inspires them to become active in the struggles that are happening right here in Newark and right here in New Jersey.”

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