This is a comment thread for Chapter 3. "Nightmare of a Father" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 4. "A Preppie in Paradise" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 5. "Obama as a Man of Letters" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 6. "The Lost Years" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 7. "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 8. "Making a Religion Out of Race" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 9. "Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr." in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 10. "Mrs. All That" in the revised version of Steve Sailer's America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance" that was posted online 11/3/08:
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for Chapter 11. Kenyan Climax in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
This is a comment thread for chapters in America's Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama's "Story of Race and Inheritance."
This is reserved for the final chapter:
12. President Obama?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Thanks to all your proofreading, we have a version of my book online with about 800 fixes of problems of the first version. (Although about 500 involved curly quotes, em dashes, and other things that are hard to notice on screen, but look bad in print.) A couple of hundred more involved one letter typos that are particularly hard to fix. But that still leaves about 100 lulus fixed, such as getting maternal and paternal grandparents confuses, which is kind of show stopper with Barack Obama.
You can read it online here.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Went to a Halloween party dressed as The Bradley Effect. The elemental conceptual simplicity of my costume somehow failed to terrify, even in a Dem heavy Hollywood crowd. ... This may be the first election where average Web-surfing, procrastinating liberal comedy writers know more about the last Insider Advantage poll in Pennsylvania than Howard Fineman does.... Unfortunately, they thought the photo of George Deukmejian on my costume** was Robert Rubin.
**--Pinned to the red half of the costume under a blue flap that--easier to show than tell--flopped over to obscure a photo of long-serving L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, whom they mistook for an Asian man. They had been drinking. ...
Meanwhile, Christian Lander blogs on Stuff White People Like:
Halloween is so important to white people because they have to wear a costume. It is a chance to literally show everyone how clever you are without having to say a word. ... For this reason any white Halloween Party is less of a celebration than it is a contest. And as with any contest, there are a lot of rules.
The first thing you need to know that white people are the only people on the planet who will dress up as a concept. So while your initial thoughts about a costume might be “cowboy,” “policeman,” or “Count Dracula,” white people are more likely to think “math,” “the economy,” or “Post-Modernism.”
Dressing up as a concept is always a major gamble. On one hand, there is the chance that you nail it just right and everyone in the room will recognize how you not only cleverly interpreted the idea but also executed it perfectly in physical form. If you get it wrong, you will be required to spend the entire night explaining yourself. Then again, it is a good way to get white people to talk to you.My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Fr0m the Associated Press:
But it was another incident, one to which he was a party, that had a most profound effect on the biracial teenager.
Toot had asked her husband for a ride to work because a particularly aggressive panhandler had accosted her for money the day before. When Stanley refused, his grandson couldn’t understand why.
“She’s been bothered by men before,” his grandfather explained, according to the memoir. “Before you came in, she told me the fella was black. That’s the real reason why she’s bothered.”
Obama described the words as “like a fist in my stomach.” It was a life-changing moment for him.
“Never had they given me reason to doubt their love; I doubted if they ever would,” he writes. “And yet I knew that men who might easily have been my brothers could still inspire their rawest fears.”
Obama referred to the incident again this spring when racially charged comments by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, forced him to make what many now consider a seminal speech on race relations in America.
“I can no more disown him,” he told an audience in Philadelphia in March, “than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.”
Charles Payne [retired assistant director of the U. of Chicago library] says his sister’s response to the reference was “like, ’Oh, well.”’ But his reaction was that Obama shouldn’t have shared that anecdote.
“She was really a very liberal person; liberal in politics and, I think, liberal in thinking,” says the brother, who has worked hard on his great-nephew’s campaign. “Frankly ... that story, when it was in the book, I felt didn’t need to be in there.”
It's bad enough that Obama wrote that in 1995. It's grotesque that Sen. Obama dragged up that absurd story about his dying grandmother in 2008 in order to justify his comparison of Rev. Wright to her.
A little background on Obama's maternal grandmother Madelyn's family.
Madelyn Payne came from a respectable, relatively well-off family with some brainpower. Her sister Margaret is a now-retired professor of statistics living in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her brother Charley was an engineer for awhile, then attended graduate school at the U. of Chicago, where he ended up working for the rest of his career, becoming the assistant director of the massive UC library, and played a role in introducing computer technology to libraries.
Obama claims that the Paynes ordered the University of Chicago's intellectually heavyweight Great Books series through the mail, perhaps the seed of the long U. of Chicago connection in the family, although that series didn't debut until 1952, a decade after his grandmother had given birth to his mother.
Uncle Charlie's U. of Chicago connection might have helped Madelyn's daughter Ann get accepted at age 15 by the U. of Chicago, which used to take smart 15-year-olds frequently, such as geneticist James D. Watson, political philosopher Allan Bloom, composer Philip Glass, and one of the Leopold & Loeb guys. (Ann eventually got her BA at the U. of Hawaii in math, then a Ph.D. in anthropology.)
Madelyn's big mistake in life was falling in love with an unsuitable salesman from a dubious background named Stan Dunham, much to her parents' regret. Madelyn paid for her rebellion with a lifetime of hard work. She didn't particularly want to be a feminist role model (her ambitions were more to be a genteel housewife with time for volunteer work and bridge), but her erratic husband didn't leave her much choice except to be one of the first women to climb the career ladder to executive rank in Honolulu's banking industry.
So, the Paynes were a family with a fair amount of analytical ability.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Read your book all the way through this evening: can't sleep tonight ...as a result. Congratulations on its completion. I hope it will be purchased and referenced. I donated again. In return, I'll open up and rant a bit.
IMHO, although you address Rev. Wright in some detail, I still think you underestimate his influence on Sen. Obama's politics. I agree that the Senator is likely to be agnostic, wrapping the cloak of religiosity around himself only as needed to insulate himself against criticism of insincerity: he certainly doesn't appear to have the religious gene, either phenotypically or by judging his paternal or maternal DNA. He is too bright to take Islam, especially the Black Muslim stuff, seriously. However, his personal and political philosophy appear to be compatible with the teachings of Christianity: alms for the poor (at least certain groups of them), a rejection of materialism (at least for others; he also appears to be comfortable with the belief that some animals are more equal than others), and a need for a meaning and community based on a shared value system and unspecified higher good. Unfortunately for you and me, and as you point out, the main values in his system are being black and poor.
This is where the black liberation theology comes in. If you strip away the religiosity and view it as simply a political position - it is the appropriate function of the state to impose Christian virtues on the citizens of the state, whether it be alms (forcible redistribution of wealth), pacifism, a call for personal responsibility, health care as a natural right (as a physician I have somewhat different views on this), glorification of the poor and rejection of materialism (in the form of antipathy towards capitalism), all tending toward special privileges for Africans - it comes much closer to defining his political philosophy than Socialism.
He doesn't seem that interested in economics or proletariats: he is all about emotions. He wins converts like any evangelist, by first empathizing with, then amplifying, their frustrations and fears, then promising them salvation if they embrace his message, although this part could be as much from Alinsky as from Wright. The liberation theology part justifies the compulsion, by the force of the state, to serve their interests. From Trinity and Rev Wright then, and again as you and others point out, all he does is substitute more politically conventional and less inflammatory terms for the subjects and objects of the sermon: the structure of the argument, the rhetorical style, the romantic and religious promise of it all remain intact and create his Messianic image. So call it black liberation politics.
My points are that belief, or at least an acceptance of, black liberation theology as taught by Wright 1) explains his political positions quite well, better than a belief in Marxism, 2) explains just why he sat in that pew all of that time, and 3) is antithetical to a belief in the American idea of limited government as expressed in the Bill of Rights (as confirmed by his recently discovered radio comments).
All of the other people and needs in Sen. Obama's life come together in Wright as well: his father's blackness and will to power without the character flaws, his mother's rejection of traditional American ideals, his earlier and concurrent influences, his own need to be approved, his need to express himself, and his need to prove to himself (and Michelle) his blackness. Compare the power and rhythm of his current speeches, heavily influenced by Wright, with the plodding and complex prose style that you slogged through and that he still reverts to verbally when caught off guard. He really did rip off the Rev.: I almost feel sorry for the guy.
What this suggests about a President Barack Obama and his administration does not reassure me in the least. I hope your dispassionate take proves more correct than mine.
Or maybe he is just another crooked Chicago politician with an odd history. That fits the data pretty well, too.
I don't know either. But I do think it shames our Republic that a candidate can spend 20 months running for President without being seriously examined on his "deepest committments" just because they're all tangled up in his race.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
I want to thank everybody who has helped me proofread my book. I'm incorporating your hundreds of suggestions right now, and we'll be putting up a much-improved version either later today or on Monday. We'll see how it goes in terms of timing.
So, no need to submit any more comments or emails with corrections right now because we'll have a new version out fairly soon.
Then you can tell me what's wrong with that version! When that's up, we'll try a more organized fashion where we have a comment thread for each chapter, as Blue just suggested.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
and we're just living in it.
From the NYT:
Following the Script: Obama, McCain and ‘The West Wing’
By BRIAN STELTER
When Eli Attie, a writer for “The West Wing,” prepared to plot some episodes about a young Democratic congressman’s unlikely presidential bid, he picked up the phone and called David Axelrod.Mr. Attie, a former speechwriter for Vice President Al Gore, and Mr. Axelrod, a political consultant, had crossed campaign trails before. “I just called him and said, ‘Tell me about Barack Obama,’ ” Mr. Attie said.
Days after Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, delivered an address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the two men held several long conversations about his refusal to be defined by his race and his aspirations to bridge the partisan divide. Mr. Axelrod was then working on Mr. Obama’s campaign for the United States Senate; he is now Mr. Obama’a chief strategist.
Four years later, the writers of “The West Wing” are watching in amazement as the election plays out. The parallels between the final two seasons of the series (it ended its run on NBC in May 2006) and the current political season are unmistakable.
Italics are mine.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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