Usa Thread

[Flashermac]

The birthers' arguments make no sense. A pregnant teenage woman bigamously married to a penniless African student living on a scholarship decides to fly off to Kenya and live with his Kenyan wife to have her child in a country she'd never been to? Seems perfectly logical ...

[Steve]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-mcgurk-iraq-ambassador-20120619,0,2243189.story

 

Brett McGurk's nomination, which was scheduled for a vote Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became endangered after the release on the Internet of sometimes racy emails he sent to journalist Gina Chon while he was married and was negotiating a security agreement with the Iraqi government during President George W. Bush's administration.

 

Also

Scores, many of them Shiites, killed in Iraq bombings Obama highlights end of Iraq war during Memorial Day commemoration

Iranians criticize U.S. 'crimes' in Iraq while praising IAEA

The emails indicated McGurk had an intimate relationship with Chon. McGurk has since married Chon, who resigned from The Wall Street Journal last week after acknowledging that she violated in-house rules by showing McGurk unpublished stories.

 

 

From all accounts this guy was qualified. I hate losing good people in key, hard to fill positions over bullshit. Okay,the guy banged someone. Just tell him, look we know about you banging this broad. you're now gonna be in a very public, very important position. Keep it in your pants. Of course he will. Why lose important people over bullshit reasons? Like people who hired undocumented nannies. So the fuck what? Everyone in LA has hired some guy at the Home Plus to help him move apartments.

 

We gotta get our collective heads out of our asses and be more practical.

[Flashermac]

Obama's grandfather tortured by the British? A fantasy (like most of the President’s own memoir)

 

 

A new biography of Barack Obama has established that his grandfather was not, as is related in the President’s own memoir, detained by the British in Kenya and found that claims that he was tortured were a fabrication.

 

'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life.

 

One of the enduring myths of Obama’s ancestry is that his paternal grandfather Hussein Onyango Obama, who served as a cook in the British Army, was imprisoned in 1949 by the British for helping the anti-colonial Mau Mau rebels and held for several months.

 

Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah, Onyango wife, who is still living, is quoted in the future President’s memoir, as saying: ‘One day, the white man’s askaris came to take Onyango away, and he was placed in a detention camp.

 

But he had been in the camp for over six months, and when he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice. He was so ashamed, he refused to enter his house or tell us what happened.’

 

In a 2008 interview, Sarah Obama claimed that he was ‘whipped every morning and evening’ by the British. ‘They would sometimes squeeze his testicles with metal rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together. He was lucky to survive. Some of his fellow inmates were mutilated with castration pliers and beaten to death with clubs.’

 

But Maraniss, who researched Obama’s life in Kenya, Indonesia, Hawaii and the mainland United States, found that there were ‘no remaining records of any detention, imprisonment, or trial of Hussein Onyango Obama’. He interviewed five people who knew Obama’s grandfather, who died in 1979, who ‘doubted the story or were certain it did not happen’.

 

This undermines the received wisdom that Obama’s grandfather was a victim of oppression, an assumption that has in turn fuelled theories that Obama harbours an animus towards Britain based on a deeply-rooted rage about the way Onyango was treated.

 

John Ndalo Aguk, who worked with Onyango before the alleged imprisonment and was in touch with him weekly afterwards said he 'knew nothing' about any detention and would have noticed if he had gone missing for several months.

 

Zablon Okatch, who worked with Onyango as a servant to American diplomats after the supposed incarceration, said: ‘Hussein was never jailed. I know that for a fact. It would have been difficult for him to get a job with a white family, let alone a diplomat, if he once served in jail.’

 

Charles Oluoch, whose father was adopted by Onyango, said that ‘he did not have any trouble with the government in any way'.

 

Dick Opar, a relative by marriage to Onyango and a senior Kenyan police official, gave what Maraniss judged to be the most authoritative word. ‘People make up stories,’ he said. ‘If you get arrested, you say it was the fight for independence, but they are arrested for another thing.

 

‘I would have known. I would have known. If he was in Kamiti Prison for only a day, even if for a day, I would have known.’

 

Maraniss also casts a sceptical eye on Obama’s grandmother’s tales of racism in Kansas, doubting whether she was ever chastised for addressing a black janitor as ‘Mister’ or ridiculed for playing with a black girl.

 

Obama himself, Maraniss finds, deliberately distorted elements of his own life to fit into a racial narrative. The author writes that Obama presents himself in his memoir as ‘blacker and more disaffected’ than he really was.

 

The memoir ‘accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white’.

 

n the forward to his memoir, Obama wrote that ‘for the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology’.

 

But Maraniss writes that Obama’s book is ‘literature and memoir, not history and autobiography’ and concludes: ‘The character creations and rearrangements of the book are not merely a matter of style, devices of compression, but are also substantive.’

 

Writing about his schooldays, Obama created a friend called Regina, a symbol of the authentic black American experience that Obama yearns for.

 

Maraniss found, however, that Regina was based on Caroline Boss, a white student leader at Occidental College. Regina was the name of Boss’s Swiss grandmother.

 

The book also notes that Obama removed two white roommates in Los Angeles and New York from his story. Obama himself told Maraniss in a 90-minute interview that a racial incident involving a New York girlfriend had in fact happened in Chicago.

 

A tale of the father of Obama’s Indonesian stepfather Soewarno Martodihardjo being killed by Dutch soldiers as he fought for Indonesian independence turns out to be ‘a concocted myth in almost all respects’, Maraniss finds.

 

According to the book, both Obama’s father and his paternal grandfather were abusive towards women and Maraniss finds that Obama’s story that he was abandoned by his father when he was two was false – in fact, Obama’s mother fled to Washington state a year earlier, possibly because she was being beaten.

 

A character in Obama’s memoir called Ray, portrayed as a symbol of young blackness, is in fact based on a fellow pupil who was half Japanese, part native American and part black and was not a close friend.

 

‘In the memoir Barry and Ray, could be heard complaining about how rich white haole [upper class white Hawaiian] girls would never date them. In fact, neither had much trouble in that regard.’

 

Obama notes of his own grandfather that he was apt to create ‘history to conform with the image he wished for himself’.

 

Maraniss, who also wrote an acclaimed biography of Bill Clinton, suggests that throughout his life Obama himself, following on from his forbears on both sides, has done the same thing.

 

My link

[allistar]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fgw-mcgurk-iraq-ambassador-20120619,0,2243189.story

 

Brett McGurk's nomination, which was scheduled for a vote Tuesday by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, became endangered after the release on the Internet of sometimes racy emails he sent to journalist Gina Chon while he was married and was negotiating a security agreement with the Iraqi government during President George W. Bush's administration.

 

Also

Scores, many of them Shiites, killed in Iraq bombings Obama highlights end of Iraq war during Memorial Day commemoration

Iranians criticize U.S. 'crimes' in Iraq while praising IAEA

The emails indicated McGurk had an intimate relationship with Chon. McGurk has since married Chon, who resigned from The Wall Street Journal last week after acknowledging that she violated in-house rules by showing McGurk unpublished stories.

Isn't the WSJ owned by Murdoch? I didn't know that they had any in house rules about professionalism. Concerning hiring undocumented aliens, the government just wants their cut, as in employment fees, like social security. When my father died, it took 6.5 years after his death to close his estate, in part because he had Practical nurses taking care of him for his last 2 years and hadn't paid their taxes for half of that time. When it comes to taxes and perjury, the government will get their pound of flesh. I don't know why the Secretary of the Treasury got away with not paying taxes on work done in Europe for years. Even when he was appointed to the Fed board from New York, he refused to pay them. Only when he was nominated for the Treasury position did he pay them. His excuse was that he had used Turbo Tax and it made the mistake. I've used Turbo Tax the last 2 years. I think I'll try that excuse if I'm ever audited by the IRS.

 

From all accounts this guy was qualified. I hate losing good people in key, hard to fill positions over bullshit. Okay,the guy banged someone. Just tell him, look we know about you banging this broad. you're now gonna be in a very public, very important position. Keep it in your pants. Of course he will. Why lose important people over bullshit reasons? Like people who hired undocumented nannies. So the fuck what? Everyone in LA has hired some guy at the Home Plus to help him move apartments.

 

We gotta get our collective heads out of our asses and be more practical.

I thought that the WSJ was owned by Murduch. Since when did he start having in house rules of professionalism?

[unit731]

"This undermines the received wisdom that Obama’s grandfather was a victim of oppression, an assumption that has in turn fuelled theories that Obama harbours an animus towards Britain based on a deeply-rooted rage about the way Onyango was treated."

 

I say bring back colonialism.

There was law and order.

The markets were open.

There was plenty of food (for the colonialists anyway).

There was education (for the colonialists anyway).

There were trains and the trains ran on time.

Roads were constructed.

Utilities were constructed.

There were grand hotels (for the colonialists anyway).

[Flashermac]

And most African countries probably had just as much democracy ...

 

 

 

 

 

[Steve]

Obama, anti British? I'd doubt it. I think he embellished many parts of his book. Either his doing or was encouraged to by the publisher. Many publishers will encourage famous people to embellish books to make it more marketable.

I don't think Obama is any more anti British than JFK, the former being Irish catholic. I don't think Obama hates any certain group per se and I'm judging by how he governs. Here was a community organizer who one would assume harbors far left politics but has often governed right of center. For someone who grew up with a strong moslem influence having a step father who is moslem he's killed enough to suggest he's no moslem sympathizer. The Rev. Wright concerns that he would be anti white have not come to fruition. If anything he's alienated promiant political blacks and other than Holder, a Clinton person and the UN ambassador he's surrounded himself with whites and jews.

 

Nah, its a bit of a stretch unless I was brought some evidence in AngloAmerican relations that told me otherwise.

[Flashermac]

...

 

The Obama administration responded to questions with the following statement:

 

"There's nothing special about Britain. You're just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn't expect special treatment."

 

Um... Excuse me? Nothing special? The British government has been our strongest ally in the world for almost two centuries. Our people share a special bond through the history of our nation. We've fought, bled, and died together. American blood has been shed for British freedom and British blood has been shed to protect Americans.

 

Forget the DVD's and the bust and the improper protocol during the Prime Minister's most recent visit. All of that can be overlooked, but this statement that specifically places the United Kingdom on the same footing as backwards, terrorist breeding grounds, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, must be challenged and corrected.

 

So does Barack Obama hate England for some reason? Review the evidence the administration has displayed so far and judge for yourself.

 

 

My link

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Flashermac]

The British Wonder "Does Obama HATE Us?"

 

<< Small wonder that his relationship with Gordon Brown borders upon the disastrous.

 

Even some of our Prime Minister's sternest critics - myself among them - thought he was appallingly treated by the Obama administration when he visited Washington in March.

 

Denied the traditional honour of a joint press conference in the Rose Garden of the White House, Brown was treated more like a Third World dictator than the Prime Minister of Great Britain. His farewell present from the U.S. President of 25 DVDs can have done nothing to repair the damage.

 

Nor have things improved since, with Obama apparently keener on sitting down with President Ahmadinejad of Iran, or cosying up to his new friends in France or Germany than he is on spending time with the Prime Minister.

 

Indeed, he singularly failed to do just that when both men were in New York in September for the United Nations' General Assembly.

Once again, Obama's refusal to grasp that opportunity to stress the special relationship was seen as an insult to Britain.

... the speed at which the special relationship - an alliance that had endured for seven decades - has fallen apart in barely 11 months is both remarkable and deeply alarming.

 

One of the greatest forces for good, liberty and freedom - not to mention the defence of the free world - is in very real danger of being banished to the history books for ever. >>

 

My link

[kamui]

Sounds like a storm in a (British) teacup.

 

PS: Flash, I really enjoy you frequent presentation of the most obscure anti Obama article/websites on the web.