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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Extra special guest post

Hello American Airspace readers!  This is Stanley Kurtz of the National Review.* I suppose you’re all wondering why I haven’t written anything on the Internet since early November of last year, when I posted “What We Know About Obama” and “Senator Stealth,” a pair of groundbreaking essays that culminated my months of painstaking research into Obama’s decades of training for ACORNist jihad, his time in the “New Party,” a radical-left splinter group dedicated to the violent overthrow of American democracy, his indoctrination into the Gamaliel Foundation’s separatist, anti-American theology of liberation, and his missing senior thesis at Columbia—all of which explains the so-called “financial crisis” he and his cronies have engineered in order to catapult him to power.  As my original research showed, “the Gamaliel Foundation was founded in Chicago in 1968 to assist the Contract Buyers League, which worked to assist African-American home buyers in the city’s West Side.” It’s all there in plain sight: the plot to destroy the American financial industry by channeling funds to losers and deadbeats—hatched, appropriately, in 1968, the year Obama met Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn, and Malcolm X in a sleeper cell in Hyde Park, the very place to which Obama mysteriously returned years later as a so-called “law professor.”

So why the silence?  Some people say I was too depressed by the election of this fringe-radical figure to the Presidency; others fear, with good reason, that Obama had me targeted for elimination, just as he’s now targeting the beleaguered (but unfathomably brave) Rick Santelli.  The truth, however, is that I have been engaged in further intensive study of Dreams from My Father, and that some of my efforts have been necessitated by the regrettable fact that a few of my conservative colleagues have been saying some very questionable things about this most revealing book.  Why, even my friends here at the National Review have entertained Jack Cashill’s preposterous claim that Obama’s first book was actually ghost-written by Bill Ayers.  That’s just crazy talk.  We absolutely have to be more rigorous and discriminating in dealing with this elusive, shape-shifting trickster figure who now occupies—however unjustly—the Oval Office.

Take, for example, the oft-cited passage from the introduction:

When people who don’t know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it usually is a discovery, as I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife’s six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it’s on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down . . . well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I’m trying to hide from myself.

Here’s how some of my colleagues have dealt with this passage: they take the line “I ceased to advertise my mother’s race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites,” and they follow it with “I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother’s race.” That’s not right.  The second line is taken largely from Steve Sailer’s judicious and perceptive review of the book, not from the book itself.  Last year, that fabricated quote made its way around the world as part of our ambitious under-the-radar e-mail smear campaigns.  Clearly, it was intended to inflame racial animosities by attributing those animosities to Obama himself; and with millions of voters—though not quite enough voters—it seems to have done the trick.  Now, don’t get me wrong:  I have nothing against fanning racial animosities by way of e-mail smear campaigns, which is why I didn’t criticize this fabrication at the time.  But now that the worst has happened despite our best efforts, and “President” Obama has begun to implement his stealth program, I think it is time for conservatives to review their tactics, and return to the forms of textual manipulation that have served us so well in the past.

Besides, as conservatives, we should be working to maintain high intellectual standards.  Apparently, the Internet allows anyone to “check” fabrications like this, and apparently some people actually go to the trouble of doing it.  That just makes us look bad in the end.  We don’t need to make up new sentences!  We don’t need to add anything at all.  The way to deal with upstarts and frauds like Obama is not to put more words in, but rather to take words out.  Thus, “I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns” becomes

I suspect that I sound . . . like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns.

There’s no “plausible deniability” there, because Barack Hussein Obama, General Secretary of the ACORN Income and Property Redistribution Program, wrote every word.

Similarly, when Obama writes “even the trauma of bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic when spun through the loom of my grandparents’ memories” (13), the proper, conservative thing to do is to trim this down to “bank failures and farm foreclosures seemed romantic.” That passage, in turn, can be used to explain why Obama joined the Galadriel Foundation and, together with Bill Ayers, Fr. Michael Pfleger, and Marcus Garvey, began to implement a three-decade “slow dipping device” plan to destroy the U.S. banking and housing industries: as he himself admits, he was, and remains, an incurably naive Communist who finds bank failures and farm foreclosures romantic.

The most damning passage in Dreams from My Father, however, deals with Obama’s shadowy arrival in New York City.  From the opening of chapter six:

I spent my first night in Manhattan curled up in an alleyway. It wasn’t intentional; while still in L.A., I had heard that a friend of a friend would be vacating her apartment in Spanish Harlem, near Columbia, and that given New York’s real estate market I’d better grab it while I could. An agreement was reached; I wired ahead with the date of my August arrival; and after dragging my luggage through the airport, the subways, Times Square, and across 109th from Broadway to Amsterdam, I finally stood at the door, a few minutes past ten P.M.

I pressed the buzzer repeatedly, but no one answered. The street was empty, the buildings on either side boarded up, a bulk of rectangular shadows. Eventually, a young Puerto Rican woman emerged from the building, throwing a nervous look my way before heading down the street. I rushed to catch the door before it slammed shut, and, pulling my luggage behind me, proceeded upstairs to knock, and then bang, on the apartment door. Again, no answer, just a sound down the hall of a deadbolt thrown into place.

New York. Just like I pictured it. (113)

What jumps out about this passage?  One thing, certainly, is the baldfaced lie in the first sentence; for as one astute conservative blog has pointed out, “there aren’t any alleys in Manhattan.” Advantage, blogosphere!  (That blog, “Sweetness and Light,” has recently been named CPAC’s Blogger of the Year for 2009—and I should add that the citizen journalists of S&L are singularly discerning political commentators in their own right.) But the final sentence is arguably even more important. “New York.  Just like I pictured it.” It’s not merely a sneering, dismissive line about a great city that was viciously attacked by murderous fanatics, uttered by a callow youth who had spent his first twenty years jetting from Hawaii to Indonesia to Los Angeles; it’s also, crucially, evidence of plagiarism.

Yes, plagiarism.  Incredible as it may sound, the American people were basically hornswoggled by the liberal media into electing Ward Churchill as their President.

For as I have discovered after spending almost four months researching this seemingly insignificant passage, the phrase “New York.  Just like I pictured it” actually derives from a 1973 song written by Stevie Wonder, called “Living for the City.” The line in question has been mysteriously expunged from official Internet transcripts of the song’s lyrics, but my research has revealed quite clearly that this line is spoken by the protagonist of the song, an unnamed black man from Mississippi who is subsequently sentenced to ten years in prison for drug dealing.

No doubt Obama counted on the “stealth” aspect of this obscure song and felt secure in the belief that no one would ever pursue the matter so far as to reveal its source.  But after spending almost four months researching this seemingly insignificant passage, and after spending almost four months researching this seemingly insignificant passage, four months researching this seemingly insignificant passage, I have uncovered ironclad evidence that should bring down the illegitimate Obama presidency, and end for once and for all its bloody reign of romantic-Communist terror.

I have alerted Andrew Malcolm of the Los Angeles Times to my findings, and since he has lately been a beacon of light and sanity as the Obama hordes seek to shroud all in murk, I have every reason to believe that this important issue will soon receive the full-court-press treatment it deserves.

I thank Michael Bérubé for the use of his blog and for the opportunity to address you today.  And I ask you to spread the word far and wide, so that we can initiate impeachment proceedings with all deliberate speed.
_______

* This is not true.  This post was not really written by Stanley Kurtz of the National Review.  And Lee Siegel never really guest-blogged here, either.  Alas.

Posted by Michael on 02/24 at 10:02 AM
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