Back to Basics

When I write that President Obama has “made history,” I’m not referring to this obvious historic first or even the that that Obama is the first president to ever to run up the debt over $5 trillion on his watch. Those things are indeed historic, but the history that’s being made here is in the very literal sense:

The Heritage Foundation’s Rory Cooper tweeted that Obama had casually dropped his own name into Ronald Reagan’s official biography on www.whitehouse.gov, claiming credit for taking up the mantle of Reagan’s tax reform advocacy with his “Buffett Rule” gimmick. My first thought was, he must be joking. But he wasn’t — it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford).

Check it out for yourself on the “learn more about each president” page at WhiteHouse.gov. Here’s one example from the Calvin Coolidge page:

On Feb. 22, 1924 Calvin Coolidge became the first president to make a public radio address to the American people. President Coolidge later helped create the Federal Radio Commission, which has now evolved to become the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). President Obama became the first president to hold virtual gatherings and town halls using Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

The Twitterverse finds this extremely mock-worthy, and rightly so.

In the Truman bio, the administration’s historians forgot to mention Obama’s role in the liberation of the Philippines during World War II, but I’m sure they’ll get around to it:

Newly released, declassified files from the United Kingdom reveal U.S.officials’ concerns that Kenyans studying in America, including President Obama’s father, may have had ties to Kenyan terrorist groups that were supported by communist nations in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The name of Barack Obama's father at the top of a list compiled by British colonial officials of Kenyans studying in the US. Photo credit: British National Archives

As yet the documents exist only in physical form at the National Archives in Kew, Southwest London – but they are open to the public, a British police source told the Law Enforcement Examiner on Sunday.

Documents released in April by the British government – but ignored until the left-leaning, London-based newspaper The Guardian printed a story –  reveal that the President’s father, Barack Hussein Obama, Senior, was the target of an international investigation due to his ties to Kenyan terrorist groups in the 1950s such as the group responsible for the so-called Mao-Mao Uprising in Kenya.

The declassified documents, which had been kept secret for decades, “were privately condemned by Obama administration officials,” a British source told the Law Enforcement Examiner.

Obama’s White House and re-election campaign teams feared the documents could hurt the struggling president, especially with independent voters, as polls showed Obama trailing Republican contender Mitt Romney in several key states by a few points, according to a Gallup Poll also released in April.

Sadly, except for the blogosphere and European news organizations, the story regarding the British intelligence documents is being conspicuously ignored, said political strategist Mile Baker.

The documents on Obama, Sr., were released as a result of a case in the British High Court brought by a team of professors from Oxford University. The documents describe events when Kenya was still a British colony and Obama Sr. was a Kenyan national who traveled to Hawaii for a college education, despite his political radicalism and poor academic record, according to Britain’s Daily Mail, hardly a right-wing publication.

On September 1, 1959, one British ambassador penned a highly classified communiqué that stated, “I have discussed with the State Department. They are as disturbed about these developments as we are. They point out that Kenya students have a bad reputation over here for falling into the wrong hands and for becoming both anti-American and anti-white,” according to the Daily Mail report.

The British documents revealed that Barack, Sr., and Ann Dunham, a 17-year-old white American from Kansas, traveled to Hawaii and to Indonesia where the President was allegedly raised with a traditional Muslim education, complete with Imans and Madrasas.

The Mau Mau Uprising was an insurgency by Kenyan rebels – who used terrorist tactics against the British citizens – that lasted from 1952 to 1960. The core of the resistance was formed by members of the Kikuyu ethnic group, along with smaller numbers of Embu and Meru, according to the New World Encyclopedia.

The uprising failed militarily, though it may have hastened Kenyan independence. It created a rift between the white colonial community in Kenya and the Home Office in London that set the stage for Kenyan independence in 1963.

The veterans of the independence movement referred to themselves as the “Land and Freedom Army” in English. Economic disparity between Africans and settlers in Kenya and aspiration for independence provoked the rebellion, which the British always represented as a series of lawless acts by dangerous criminal, anti-social elements, according to a Rutgers University African Studies report.

Barack Obama is being presented as America’s first gay president by Newsweek, which glorifies his decision to recognize same-sex marriage. The Newsweek cover story will serve a purpose other than generating interest in a magazine that has been losing circulation and advertising revenue if it is viewed as an opportunity to finally discuss the taboo subject of Obama’s communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. This controversial figure, who drank heavily and smoked dope, wrote a pornographic novel in which the author declared, “under certain circumstances I am bisexual,” and discussed having sex with a young girl named “Anne.”

Despite Obama’s ABC News interview, where he claimed coming around on the issue in part because of conversations about homosexuals with his young daughters, Davis is the key to understanding Obama. Davis influenced Obama from ages 10 to 18, his critical growing-up years in Hawaii. Obama admits getting “hard-earned knowledge” from Davis.

The opportunity to finally discuss Davis is also at hand because Washington Post columnist and ombudsman Patrick Pexton, in an effort to justify the paper’s story about Mitt Romney allegedly bullying a kid in high school, notes that the paper’s associate editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, David Maraniss, wrote “a lengthy piece on Obama’s formative years in Hawaii, including his high school years at the prestigious Punahou School.”

He is clearly suggesting that Obama’s early years have been sufficiently covered by the Post. But note Pexton’s use of the word “lengthy” rather than “accurate” or “complete.” A journalist can write a lot of words without touching on the most relevant facts.

Once again, Pexton has failed in his role as the “ombudsman,” or consumer advocate, for the readers of the Post. He should have taken Maraniss to task for his cover-up of Obama’s communist mentor, Frank Marshall Davis. But Pexton didn’t want to take on one of the paper’s prize-winning journalists for what is clearly one of the most dishonest pieces of journalism ever published about a presidential candidate.

Pexton referred to the 10,000-word Maraniss piece, “Though Obama Had to Leave to Find Himself, It Is Hawaii That Made His Rise Possible,” which was published on August 22, 2008.

Maraniss could have broken the story of Frank Marshall Davis wide open for a public eager to learn everything about Obama. Instead, Maraniss completely ignored the role of Davis, a member of the Soviet-funded Communist Party who was under surveillance by the FBI for 19 years.

The treatment of Davis is important because Maraniss has written a new biography, Barack Obama: The Story, which is being released on June 19. It will undoubtedly be seen by the mainstream media as the definitive word on Obama.

But considering how Maraniss completely omitted Davis’s influence over Obama in that 2008 article, it can be anticipated that the new book will also be a whitewash. One of the early “revelations” from the book is said to be that an Obama girlfriend was actually a “composite” of different people. But Frank Marshall Davis was real, not a composite character.

Remember that Obama had referred to Davis as just “Frank” in his book, Dreams from My Father. We confirmed the story about the identity of “Frank” on February 18, 2008.

In early March, our nation’s First Gay President™ graciously invited himself to deliver the commencement address to Barnard College, the all-women’s college in New York. The school accepted the President’s invitation to himself to speak there. The commencement is today.

If you’re in Manhattan and thinking about driving today, don’t:

President Barack Obama arrives in Manhattan on Monday for his first visit to the area since he voiced his support for same-sex marriage.

Obama will affirm his stance on the issue during his trip; first, at a commencement speech at Barnard College and then at a fundraiser in Chelsea sponsored by the LGBT Leadership Council. The event will be hosted by singer Ricky Martin.

New Yorkers can expect traffic-tie ups this afternoon during the president’s visit.

Obama will no doubt speak about the GOP’s “war on women.”

Fighting back against the Republican Party’s unfairness to women is such an important topic that Obama had to displace the woman who was originally scheduled to deliver the commencement.

To paraphrase a comment I read regarding this interview with Obama’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright, “Whatever… let’s get back to talking about what Mitt Romney did in high school.”

Here’s Wright’s version of the events leading up to the 2008 election:

“Man, the media ate me alive,” Wright told me when we met in his office at Chicago’s Kwame Nkrumah Academy. “After the media went ballistic on me, I received an e-mail offering me money not to preach at all until the November presidential election.”

“Who sent the e-mail?” I asked Wright.

“It was from one of Barack’s closest friends.”

“He offered you money?”

“Not directly,” Wright said. “He sent the offer to one of the members of the church, who sent it to me.”

“How much money did he offer you?”

“One hundred and fifty thousand dollars,” Wright said.

“Did Obama himself ever make an effort to see you?”

“Yes,” Wright said. “Barack said he wanted to meet me in secret, in a secure place. And I said, ‘You’re used to coming to my home, you’ve been here countless times, so what’s wrong with coming to my home?’ So we met in the living room of the parsonage of Trinity United Church of Christ, at South Pleasant Avenue right off 95th Street, just Barack and me. I don’t know if he had a wire on him. His security was outside somewhere.

“And one of the first things Barack said was, ‘I really wish you wouldn’t do any more public speaking until after the November election.’ He knew I had some speaking engagements lined up, and he said, ‘I wish you wouldn’t speak. It’s gonna hurt the campaign if you do that.”

Sure, in parts of the world this is known as “bribery,” but in Chicago politics it’s called a “silence stimulus.”

Gee, it seems as if people connected to politicians offering people money to stay quiet could be against campaign finance laws (if the money would have come from campaign coffers) — not that the MSM will care to dig any deeper on this.

But this was around the time that Jeremiah Wright’s church reportedly built him a $1.6 million retirement home with a $10 million line of credit. It’s possible Wright considered $150,000 to be chump change, so he kept on talking. Besides, the sycophantic mainstream media Obama lapdogs weren’t about to make a big deal out of anything in his past anyway.

President Obama, in Nevada on an official and definitely not campaign-related trip, stopped at the Reno home of Paul and Valerie Keller to promote a program to lower mortgage interest rates. While there, Obama delivered a speech in front of the couple’s garage.

A brief setup:

As leader of the free world President Obama will be used to making speeches to millions of people around the globe.

So he might have felt the occasion was a little beneath him yesterday when he stopped off in Reno, Nevada, to deliver an address outside a couple’s garage.

In what could be a disastrous photo opportunity for the President’s campaign, Mr Obama spoke to a handful of people in the crucial swing state.

This visit gave us our presidential photo op of the week. Click the picture for full size:

Notice something? No teleprompters. The Prez was working without a net last week. Gutsy Call!™ And I can’t believe somebody didn’t think to put a Volt in the garage before the cameras rolled.

In spite of the personal visit, Valerie Keller remains uncertain if she’ll vote for Obama in November due to the economy.

The crowd from the neighborhood appeared to be roughly the same size as the one that showed up for Obama’s first official campaign rally on Tuesday.

In front of the couple’s garage, Obama once again ran down his “to do” list for Congress, and it still doesn’t include “pass a budget”:

“For the money” is the only reason for Obama’s recent flip on gay marriage. In a financial sense, apparently it’s paying off:

A Democratic source told CNN Friday the Obama campaign raised $2 million dollars in donations in the 24 hours following the president’s announcement he personally supports same-sex marriage.

And of course Obama’s haul from the usual band of Hollywood hypocrites went through the roof as a result too.

However, file this under “fools and their money are soon parted,” because the White House has no intention of including gay marriage in the party platform.

Notice how it’s usually reported that Obama “personally” supports same sex marriage — as if he’s separating himself privately from the office he holds publicly (i.e. “the President isn’t officially in favor of SSM, but Barack Obama is”). There’s his weak “out” (if you’ll pardon the expression) for not demanding SSM be included in the party’s official platform.

That financial windfall comes at a price for Team Obama though, because 23% of independents are now less likely to vote for him in November. Regardless of any of this news, I remain 100% less likely to vote for him in November.

President Obama can try all he wants, but barring unforeseen catastrophic national security issues, the economy is going to decide his fate.

Endorsing gay marriage (again) doesn’t lower the deficit; or affect jobless claims; or provide cover for all the “clean energy” ripoffs; or undo Obamacare; or halt the labor force exodus; or get rid of Obama’s $5 trillion in new debt. The distraction will be short-lived. Besides, gays buy gas and groceries too.

It’s like the Titanic is preparing to take its fatal plunge and in order to placate those who are demanding that he do something about it the Captain comes out and says “Okay, dudes can marry dudes now!”

In closing, Obama knows why the troops — specifically gay troops — are out there fighting. The reason? For him:

“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I talked to friends and family and neighbors, when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together; when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.”

I don’t exactly think the battle cry in the US military is “Now let’s go get Obama re-elected!”

Gee, I wonder why?

With the approach of summer many are wondering whether the Obama’s would return to the Island for another vacation. Well, today the Boston Herald reported that, “President Obama will not return to Martha’s Vineyard.”

The fact that it’s an election year is certainly a factor in the decision not to vacation. Plus, since Blue Heron Farm, the Chilmark estate that the Obama’s rented for the past two years, was sold last fall to Lord Norman and Lady Elena Foster, an architect and arts publisher from Great Britain, it’s no real surprise that we won’t see Malia and Sasha playing Whack-a-Mole at the Ag Fair.

There are many who will call this good news. No motorcades, no mobs outside of Sweet Life. Others will find this bad news. Business owners especially will miss those same crowds and the potential for a presidential photo op to hang on their establishment’s wall for eternity.

“Island ice cream shops and burger joints hardest hit.”

Downside for the Obama campaign: No Vineyard backdrop for more “gutsy call” photo ops.

Hopefully Obama will get to return to Martha’s Vineyard next summer… as a private citizen.