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-   -   Has anyone read Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father"? (https://www.askmehelpdesk.com/showthread.php?t=201867)

  • Apr 3, 2008, 06:01 AM
    George_1950
    Has anyone read Obama's autobiography, "Dreams From My Father"?
    Ann Coulter has. She calls it, "Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf": "Nearly every page -- save the ones dedicated to cataloguing the mundane details of his life -- is bristling with anger at some imputed racist incident. The last time I heard this much race-baiting invective I was ... in my usual front-row pew, as I am every Sunday morning, at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago."
    Obama's Dimestore 'Mein Kampf' - HUMAN EVENTS
  • Apr 3, 2008, 06:05 AM
    tomder55
    This is what I wrote in an email to someone else :

    Only Malcom X's autobiography seemed to offer something different. His repeated acts of self-creation spoke to me. The blunt poetry of his words, his unadorned insistence on respect, promised a new and uncompromising order, martial in its discipline, forged through sheer force of will. All the other stuff, the talk of blue-eyed devils and apocalypse, was incidental to that program, I decided. Religious baggage that Malcolm himself seemed to have safely abandoned toward the end of his life. And yet, even as I imagine myself following Malcolm's call, one line in the book stayed with me. He spoke of a wish he'd once had, the wish that the white blood that ran through him, there by an act of violence, might somehow be expunged. I knew that for Malcolm, that wish would never be incidental. I knew as well that traveling down the road to self-respect, my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction. I was left to wonder what else I would be severing, if and when I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border.

    Well we know he thinks his grandma at least is but a "typical white person" .I think he may have already crossed that uncharted border .Those speed bumps were his grandma under the bus.

    Later on we learn that he crossed that border a long time ago .

    To avoid being mistaken for such a sellout, I chose my friends carefully: the more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist professors and structural feminists, and punk rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism,Frantz Fanon, Euro-centrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet, or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting Bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.

    This is the guy who is winning the Democrat contest and would be President ? Marxism, structural feminism, black political activism ,alienation?? POTUS??

    I spent the last two years of high school in a daze, blocking away the questions that life seemed insistent on posing. I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically. I discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room with some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school, and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. Nobody asked you whether your father was a fat cat executive who cheated on his wife, or some laid-off Joe who slapped you around whenever he bothered to come home. You might just be bored or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly, and see through all the hypocrisy and bull and cheap moralism.

    I got to tell you ;it is quite a contrast between Obama's 'Dreams from my Father ' and McCain's 'Faith of my Fathers ' . One tells the story of self indulgence and the other of a life time dedicated to service .
  • Apr 3, 2008, 06:20 AM
    George_1950
    Shazam! I believe the Dems are suffering grievously from intense white guilt.
  • Apr 4, 2008, 04:31 PM
    speechlesstx
    I haven't read the book but the media is obviously shielding Obama from criticism. Charles Krauthammer notes that after Obama's post-Wright fallout speech on racism that "it became an article of faith that even referring to Wright's comments was somehow illegitimate, the new "Swift-boating."

    Quote:

    It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to "work the low road." You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary's commenting on Wright "a new low." You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.

    But from the mainstream media? As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is "legitimate" for her to have remarked "that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost" or the kind of "generic comments [Wright] made about white America," Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since "we all know what the [Wright] comments were," he found it "amazing" and "funny" that Davis should "feel the need to repeat them over and over again."

    Davis protested, "It's appropriate." Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with "Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now," and then suggested that an "honorable person" would "stay away from this stuff."

    Amazing. We've gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright's bigotry and ask how any man -- let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency -- could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.
    How dare anyone try to "Swift-boat" Obama with his own disturbing words? "Moral inversion," that my friends has a lot to do with why this country has "seriously gotten off on the wrong track."

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