mykeystrokes.com

"Do or Do not. There is no try."

“No Guilt On Mother’s Day”: President Obama Is His Mother’s Son

Barack Obama’s mother died on Nov. 7, 1995, a few weeks before her 53rd birthday. She was less than two years older than the president is now. Her death from uterine cancer came between two key events in her son’s life. Four months earlier “Dreams From My Father” had been published; it seemed destined to drown unnoticed in the deep ocean of books. One year later Obama won his first election, to the Illinois state Senate, the initial stop on his swift journey to the White House that, along the way, brought a mass audience to that forgotten memoir, which in its best-selling revival defined his political image and provided him with lifelong financial security.

The title of the book was at once understandable and misleading. Obama barely knew his father except in dreams, or nightmares. He spent time with the old man only once, when he was 10, for an unsatisfying month. It is harsh to say but nonetheless likely that Barack Obama II was lucky never to have lived with Barack Obama Sr., an abusive alcoholic. By far the most influential figures in Obama’s early life were his mother and grandmother. He has some of the demeanor of his grandmother and the will and much of the outlook of his mother. “Dreams From My Mother” better evokes his life’s story.

She was a woman of many names. Born Stanley Ann Dunham, she assumed, as most people did, that her unusual first name was imposed by her father. An uncle tells a different story, attributing the choice to Madelyn Dunham, Stanley Ann’s mother, who as a small-town Kansas girl yearned to emulate Bette Davis, the sophisticated actress she saw on the big screen at the air-conditioned Augusta Theater. While Madelyn was pregnant, Davis was starring in a movie in which she played a female character named Stanley. (As it happened, no two people could have been less alike than Madelyn’s daughter and this film character, who was cruel, cunning and racist.) Stanley Ann became Stannie Ann in grade school, Stanley in high school and, finally, Ann in adulthood. Her last name changed as often, from Dunham to Obama to Soetoro to a final spelling of Sutoro.

By any name, she was a searcher. She married a Kenyan and an Indonesian (both marriages collapsed; the first quickly, the second slowly) and spent most of her adult life overseas. She was constantly on the move. She earned a doctorate in anthropology and had an anthropologist’s nature as a participant observer, a character trait shared by her son. She was fascinated by other cultures and ways of living. A polyglot, she could speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently and had a working knowledge of Urdu, Hindi, Javanese, French and Latin. There was never a foreign film she did not want to see, a batik dress she did not want to wear, a mythology she did not wish to understand. In Indonesia, where she spent most of her adult life, she became obsessed with the work of rural blacksmiths, who were said to forge human souls. She devoted herself later to helping Javanese women maintain their handicraft livelihoods in a male-dominated society that practiced what she called “the gentle oppression” of women. She would wake up before dawn every morning and, in notebooks with the black-and-white speckled covers, record her travels, her encounters and her hopes for people, including her only son.

Barack Obama’s relationship with his mother was complicated. She called him Barry or Bar (sounds like bear). She pushed him to be serious and to look at people with empathy. He always felt protective of her, according to his memoir. He describes a scene in which she told him that she intended to marry Lolo Soetoro and that, after the marriage, they would all live in Indonesia. As Obama recalls it, he turned to her and asked, “But do you love him?” — a question that made her chin tremble. It was, at the least, precocious. At the time he was only only 31 / 2. But it was also in keeping with one of the themes that weaves through his dealings with his mother over the years — that she was naive and idealistic, sometimes too good for her own good. In the journal that his New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, kept during their time together in the early 1980s, Cook wrote, “Told me the other night of having pushed his mother away over past 2 years in an effort to extract himself from the role of supporting man in her life — she feels rejected and has withdrawn somewhat.”

Ann once joked that she had children with a Kenyan and an Indonesian so that the kids would not have light skin and get sunburns. She herself looked like a Kansas schoolmarm, she noted, which made it easy for her to sail through Customs during her foreign comings and goings. Barry, the hapa Kenyan, and his little sister Maya, the hapa Indonesian, could never say the same. The mother and her two children struggled to find their identities, but in very different ways. Ann found hers through her work and travels, a lifestyle that, among other things, meant she and her son were apart for most of his adolescence, he in Honolulu with his grandparents, she in Indonesia. The search for identity was more psychological for her children, something that Maya said her mother must have understood but never fully acknowledged. In her career, Ann was idealistic but not naive. If she at times came across as naive to her children, it was in the role of a mother not wanting her children to suffer.

“She made sure that laughter was the prevailing form of communication and that nothing ever became acrimonious and that everything was pretty and everything was sacred,” Maya told me during an interview. “Maybe she didn’t want us to suffer with identity. She wanted us to think of it as a gift. The fact that we were multilayered and multidimensional and multiracial — it meant that she was perhaps unprepared when we did struggle with issues of identity. She was not really able to help us grapple with that in any nuanced way. Perhaps she felt that if she did acknowledge the difficulty of it, she would feel guilty.”

No guilt on Mother’s Day. Barack Obama’s mother, by any name, did not live to see her son’s rise, but she shaped the essence of this president.

By: David Maraniss, The Washington Post Opinions, May 11, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Mothers Day | , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Ideological Orthodoxy”: How The Media Is Enabling The GOP’s Rightward Drift

Richard Lugar’s loss in Tuesday night’s primary has been heralded by commenters on both sides of the aisle as a harbinger of doom for moderate Republicans. The conventional wisdom has quickly congealed: Lugar lost because he voted for Barack Obama’s Supreme Court candidates, worked with Obama on an arms control treaty, and was generally not partisan enough for a GOP dominated by the Tea Party.

That interpretation is plausible. But it’s not the only, or even the most likely scenario. There’s a high probability that Richard Lugar lost because he was 80 years old, didn’t keep a house in Indiana, ran an indifferent—at best—campaign, and focused on foreign policy rather than bringing home benefits to his state. But the first reading is the one that will be accepted by the press and, more importantly, by Republican politicians. Everyone is biased to believe that Lugar lost because of an ideological purge—and the acceptance of that interpretation will unfortunately further encourage Republican Members of Congress to stick as closely as possible to the rejectionist ideologues who run the GOP.

There’s a long history of foreign policy experts in the Senate finding that their constituents care a lot more about goodies for the state than accounting for loose nukes in the former Soviet Union (or whatever national security issue is on the table). And a Roll Call story by Shira Toeplitz a week before the vote made a good case that Lugar, like many aging legislators who hadn’t needed to engage in a serious campaign in years, had no idea how to run a modern campaign.

Why is there such a strong bias to accept the other interpretation? Movement conservatives, of course, want to claim credit for defeating Lugar; they’d like to use that story to pressure politicians into ideological orthodoxy. Individuals and organizations within that movement, too, have an interest in acquiring a reputation for being giant-killers. Oddly enough, partisan Democrats also prefer this narrative: It’s much better for fundraising to tell your donors that you’re competing with a powerful extremist movement than to tell them that some out-of-touch Republican senator lost.

Who else? Washington-based centrists love Dick Lugar. Therefore, they’d prefer to pin the loss on outside forces and crazy ideologues than to find any fault with Lugar’s own behavior. Nor do they want to accept the perhaps sad reality that part of the price for foreign policy leadership may be that constituents won’t care about your accomplishments. The national press gets a better storyline, too. In Indiana, “what happened to Richard Lugar?” might make a compelling headline, but from a national perspective a continuing story of conservative purges is far more exciting than a one-off about a Senator who may be a Washington institution but isn’t very well-known outside the Beltway.

There is one person, though, who has an incentive to play up the “out-of-touch” version of events: Richard Mourdock, the guy who won. After all, he’s now a general election candidate, and whatever he wants to be known for down the line (and whatever he said during the nomination campaign), right now he wants to win votes of moderate Republicans. However, Mourdock may well believe the pervasive ideological purge story himself—and, even if he doesn’t, the conservative groups who invested in his victory (whether or not they were the ones who made a difference) will be sure to remind him of it if he wins in November.

Add it all up and there’s an excellent chance that by the time the 113th Congress meets in January, every Republican Senator will “know” that Dick Lugar was defeated for being too reasonable and too moderate. Granted, they’ll also all make sure to check that the state of their home state residency; we’re not likely to see that mistake again for a while.

But congressional Republicans will take Lugar’s defeat more as a call to pay attention to Club For Growth’s key votes than to schedule some extra visits home and a few more town hall meetings. They’ll be even more motivated to reject compromise on principle and be uber-vigilant about opposing by filibuster Barack Obama’s judicial and executive branch nominations (if Obama is still in the White House). That’s bad for the proper functioning of democracy regardless of the reason, but it will be especially tragic if the real cause was just Dick Lugar’s losing touch with home.

 

By: Jonathan Bernstein, The New Republic, May 11, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Congress | , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Ed Klein’s “Bio-Porn”: Author Of New Book Smearing Obama Devoid Of Skills And Credibility

The New York Post yesterday published the first excerpts from an upcoming biography on President Obama by Edward Klein, “The Amateur.”

In the Post’s excerpt, Klein alleges that former President Clinton called President Obama an “amateur” and desperately tried to convince Hillary to resign as Secretary of State and challenge Obama in the Democratic primaries this year. (The Clintons swiftly and forcefully denied the claims.) The article was prominently featured on the Drudge Report.

Although you wouldn’t know it from reading the New York Post, the Drudge Report or other popular right-wing outlets, Klein is a discredited author with a history of presenting falsehoods as fact. Here’s what you need to know about Edward Klein:

1. Klein’s last book, which was self-published, suggests Obama was born on foreign soil and is a practicing Mulism. In his 2010 work The Obama Identity: A Novel (Or Is It?), Klein co-authored along with a former Republican congressman is a compendium of Obama conspiracy theories. He had to self-publish the book.

2. Klein promoted a shameful conspiracy theory that Bill Clinton raped Hillary. In his 2005 book, Klein promoted an anonymous, hateful allegation supposedly made by two people who “claim” to have spoken with Bill Clinton about the circumstances surrounding the birth of the Clintons’ daughter Chelsea.

3. Klein repeatedly questioned Hillary Clinton’s sexual orientation. He has similarly disparaged Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy and Katie Couric in previous works, leading the Washington Post to comment that Klein “has made a second career of leaving knuckle prints on famous women.”

4. Klein has a history of publishing demonstrably false allegations about Obama as fact. In a 2010 entry in The Huffington Post, Klein detailed President Obama’s “humiliation” of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netenyahu, claiming that sources told him of Obama leaving during a meeting with Netenyahu to have dinner with Michelle and their two daughters. One phone call would have revealed that to be impossible, since Michelle, Sasha and Malia were all in New York City at the time.

5. Klein’s book is being published by Regnery, a far-right imprint specializing in the promotion of conservative talking points. He was rejected by every respectable publishing house. In an interview, Klein claimed his difficulty locating a publisher was because Barack Obama was an “untouchable” subject. Yet several other books on the same subject, like Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, set off a bidding war between the major New York publishers.

6. Even conservative critics view Klein as disreputable. Kathleen Parker, writing for the Tribune’s network of newspapers, described Klein’s 2005 book as “prurient tabloiding,” while New York Post columnist John Podhoretz said it was “one of the most sordid volumes I’ve ever waded through.” Peggy Noonan’s Wall Street Journal review said it was “poorly written, poorly thought, poorly sourced and full of the kind of loaded language that is appropriate to a polemic but not an investigative work.”

The nation’s top book reviews have all panned Klein and his work. The Boston Globe called him “an author devoid of credibility,” the New York Times described him as “smarmy and sleazy,” the Los Angeles Times called his work “bio-porn,” and the Tucson Citizen referred to it as “the literary equivalent of a backed up-septic tank.” (It got a grade of “F”).

Nevertheless, The Washington Post and Fox are reporting Klein’s latest allegations as if they were news.

By: Adam Peck, Think Progress, May 12, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“If It’s Sunday, It’s Meet My Friends”: NBC’s David Gregory To Headline Conference For Major Republican Advocacy Group

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.

Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics states:

Journalists should:
— Avoid conflicts of interest, real or perceived.
— Remain free of associations and activities that may compromise integrity or damage credibility.
— Refuse gifts, favors, fees, free travel and special treatment, and shun secondary employment, political involvement, public office and service in community organizations if they compromise journalistic integrity.

Regardless of whether Gregory is being paid for this event and of what he says in his keynote, allowing the NFIB to raise money for its political mission using his name, reputation, and celebrity appears to be at odds with journalistic ethics.

Gregory did not to respond to a ThinkProgress request for comment.

 

By: Josh Israel, Think Progress, May 12, 2012

May 13, 2012 Posted by | Media | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Look Out For Thunderbolts”: The President Dares To Defy Franklin Graham

We still don’t know for sure who if anyone is responsible for shoving 93-year-old Billy Graham back into the harness of right-wing politics after so many years of devoting himself to loftier causes, in order to marginally boost the numbers for North Carolina’s Amendment One. But this statement from his son in response to the president’s announcement of support for same-sex marriage is certainly a pretty big hint:

On Tuesday my state of North Carolina became the 31st state to approve a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between a man and a woman. While the move to pass amendments defining marriage is relatively new, the definition of marriage is 8,000 years old and was defined not by man, but by God Himself.

In changing his position from that of Senator/candidate Obama, President Obama has, in my view, shaken his fist at the same God who created and defined marriage. It grieves me that our president would now affirm same-sex marriage, though I believe it grieves God even more.

The institution of marriage should not be defined by presidents or polls, governors or the media. The definition was set long ago and changing legislation or policy will never change God’s definition. This is a sad day for America. May God help us.”

A swift response to Franklin Graham from a fellow North Carolina minister, the Rev. Murdoch Smith, pastor of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte, said it all for me: “I am always suspect when someone says that they know the mind of God.”

I understand that many sincere Christians fundamentalists believe they are submitting themselves to God and subordinating their own egos and their own self-interest by simply following in their lives what they understand to be infallible divine revelation of the Bible. Many of them, indeed, are so humble it would not occur to them to impose their views on other people, much less force them to live as they do.

If there is anything humble or self-effacing or ego-immolating about Franklin Graham, I certainly don’t see it. As Rev. Smith says, he doesn’t follow God; he knows God and speaks for him, the God that not only fully reveals his Will to Franklin Graham via Franklin Graham’s infallible interpretation of scripture, but through God’s great and characteristic conservatism, his deep and manifest satisfaction with people like Franklin Graham who defend the ways things used to be before women and gay people and other lesser breeds got all uppity.

When people like Graham presume to accuse the President of the United States of “shaking his fist at God,” they are assuming the Prophetic Stance, the Hebrew tradition of calling down divine wrath on a depraved society. Ask yourselves: what kind of prophet would look at today’s world, with its poverty and violence and gross inequality, its environmental brinksmanship, its intolerance, its sheer wastefulness and lack of charity—and decide that what merits divine wrath is gay marriage? What sort of man of God could look at all the grievous occurrences on earth, and declare, with absolutely no indication of self-doubt, that God is grieving over gay people deciding to commit themselves to each other in love?

I’m sorry, I just do not get it. Graham has confused himself with God to an extent that when Barack Obama dares take a position he doesn’t like, he’s shaking his fist at God. I think Franklin Graham’s the one who’d better look out for thunderbolts.

 

By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, May 11, 2012

May 12, 2012 Posted by | Religion | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »