Obamessiah Suck-Up of the Day

This morning's post noted the new revelations about President Obama's mother (and how he altered her story) in a recent book. Well, there's also a new book about the President's father -- The Other Barack: The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obama's Father, by Sally Jacobs. I don't intend to read it; rather this post is about the David Garrow's book review in Sunday's Washington Post.

I don't know much about the President's father, and I'd never heard of David Garrow. But after reading the review, I can say this: Barack Obama Sr. was a dog, and David Garrow is a typical liberal.

The review summarizes Obama Sr.'s life in the U.S.:

When Obama flew to Hawaii in August 1959, he left behind a young Kenyan wife already pregnant with their second child. . . In the fall of his second year, hardly six weeks elapsed before one new female classmate, 17-year-old Stanley Ann Dunham, became pregnant with their child. The university’s foreign student adviser told U.S. immigration agents, who took an active interest in foreign students whose visas required annual renewal, that she already had cautioned the married Kenyan about his dating habits. When Obama informed her in April 1961 that he and Dunham had married two months earlier, Obama also asserted that he had divorced his Kenyan wife. The adviser told the immigration agency she was dubious of that claim, but that Obama had told her that "although they were married they do not live together.. . ."

Within weeks of Barack Jr.’s birth, Dunham and the baby left Honolulu for her previous home town of Seattle, leaving behind the husband with whom she had never lived. When Obama prepared a resume just before leaving Hawaii for graduate school at Harvard in 1962, he listed "a wife and two children in Kenya," Jacobs reports. "He made no mention of Dunham or Barack Jr.". . .

Obama’s admission to Harvard’s PhD program in economics attested to his academic success in Hawaii, but once again his freewheeling personal life attracted official criticism. A Unitarian minister complained to U.S. immigration that Obama was intimately involved with a young Kenyan woman attending a Boston-area high school, and after two years, Harvard’s international student adviser told immigration agents that the university did not want Obama’s visa to be extended for a third year. Obama had passed the examinations qualifying him to begin writing his dissertation, but Harvard’s action -- expressly motivated by animus toward his personal conduct, and with no academic rationale -- forced the visibly upset graduate student to return to Kenya with only a master’s degree.

Back in Kenya, Obama Sr. married at least once again, killed a friend in a drunken car crash, then finally "kill[ed] himself in his umpteenth drunken car crash in November 1982."

After dating an underage girl and without evidence that Obama Sr. was treated differently than any other Harvard student acting like a Viking marauder, who's to blame for his expulsion from America? The reviewer David Garrow has no doubt, ending with this sentence:

But had white antipathy toward his unrestrained personal life not shattered Obama’s life dream of a Harvard PhD, whiskey might not have derailed a brilliant alcoholic from a life of far greater length and achievement.

In other words, it's all Whitey's fault; the man kept him down--and made him a drunk.

Nonsense. But, for true believers like Garrow, worshiping the Obamessiah means never having to say Barack Senior was sorry.

(via reader Helen W.)