"I direct your attention to Mrs. Obama's 1985 thesis at Princeton University. Its title (rather limited in scope, given the author and the campus) is "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community." To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language. Anyway, at quite an early stage in the text, Michelle Obama announces that she's much influenced by the definition of black "separationism" offered by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton in their 1967 screed Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. I remember poor Stokely Carmichael quite well. After a hideous series of political and personal fiascos, he fled to Africa, renamed himself Kwame Toure after two of West Africa's most repellently failed dictators, and then came briefly back to the United States before electing to die in exile. I last saw him as the warm-up speaker for Louis Farrakhan in Madison Square Garden in 1985, on the evening when Farrakhan made himself famous by warning Jews, "You can't say 'Never Again' to God, because when he puts you in the ovens, you're there forever."I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask."

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30968819)

HH: Yup. Now Christopher Hitchens, let’s turn to the Obamas. First of all, brilliant piece in Slate on having read Michelle Obama’s undergraduate thesis. Now it’s not really fair, because I would shudder if anyone went over to Widener and pulled out my undergraduate thesis. But nevertheless, it was impenetrable. It was gibberish.

CH: Well, yes. I mean, of course, none of us terribly want our undergraduate journalism, or even in my case, graduate journalism, be revisited. But here’s the thing. The first thing is the subject. She is a black woman at Princeton. And the subject of, the dissertation of the thesis is what it’s like being black at Princeton. I would submit to any fair-minded person that’s a slightly narrow choice of subject.

HH: Very.

CH: I mean, you can’t really claim you’re being educated if the subject of your thesis is what it’s like being me at this college.

HH: Agreed.

CH: So that, I find partly laughable, and I’d have to add slightly sinister.

HH: Now let me ask you about her…

CH: But on the other hand, okay, you get to write about yourself and your own predicament. Well in that case, you’re writing about something you know. So you should be able to be fluent, witty, self-deprecating, insightful, amusing, personal. Not a bit of it. It’s a trudge. It’s a hateful, lugubrious, boring, resentment-filled screed written in some very bad form of sociologies. The only think you can definitely tell from the attempt to read it, because I maintain it cannot actually be read, it’s a degradation of the act of reading, is that she favors, or views with favor, black separatism, or as she calls it, separationism.

HH: Have you listened to either of her most recent stump speech of the Friday and the Friday night before that?

CH: I haven’t had that privilege.

HH: I’m going to play for you just one little clip as well…I played it for John McCain earlier today, and I’ll also give you John McCain’s response to it. It takes about two minutes, but I think you’ll find it interesting. Here’s Michelle Obama and John McCain responding to Michelle Obama.

MO: what did Barack do? He became a community organizer, working in some of the toughest neighborhoods on the South side of Chicago, worked for years in neighborhoods where people had a reason to give up hope, because their jobs had been lost, steel mills shut down, living in brown fields left by those closed steel plants, unsafe streets, schools deteriorating, grandparents raising grandkids. Barack spent years working with Churches, busing single mothers down to City Hall to help them find their voice, building the kind of operations on the ground just like he’s doing in this race, block by block, person by person. And you tell me whether there’s anybody in this race who can claim to have made the same choice with their lives. You tell me, but I think that Barack Obama is the only person that can claim that kind of choice. So trust me, we’ve seen it all. Barack has seen it all.

HH: Senator McCain?

JM: Well, I respect anyone’s service to their community and their country. And obviously, I admire and respect that. But the fact is that a number of people in this country, including those who sought the presidency, and in my own record, will speak for itself. And people will judge me by my experience and service and knowledge and background, and they will judge Senator Obama, if he’s the nominee of his party. I think they will judge Senator Clinton. But I would match my record with anyone’s, obviously, but I don’t claim that my record of service is superior to anyone’s. I’m just proud of my own service, and there are many ways of serving, and I’ll continue to seek the opportunity to serve a little while longer. So all I can say is I respect anyone’s service to their community and their nation, and I will let my credentials and my knowledge and background and judgment, but most importantly, Hugh, my plan of action to bring about meaningful change, and not just talk about it, and my record of working across the aisle in order to get things done, which Senator Obama claims, but actually, to my view, is a very, very thin record.

HH: Christopher Hitchens, it’s an extraordinary claim by Michelle Obama that Barack Obama’s experience is the most unusual, and that he’s seen everything. And I thought John McCain’s response was rather understated, but it doesn’t need to be anything else. What do you think?

CH: No, both of those statements are an embarrassment to anyone who cares or thinks about politics. I mean, they have in common two things – windy, in the case of McCain, as with many of his statements, incredibly long-winded, rather querulous combined with a slight geniality in a sort of senile whistle, and unable to wrap it up, and just stop, and stop saying it all over again. Obama, not unlike her thesis, constant statements of the blindingly obvious, there is no one else in the race who has been a community organizer on the south side of Chicago. That’s the most she was able to say.

HH: I think she was making…

CH: It’s unbelievably trite.

HH: I believe it was a claim of unmatched virtue for having been a community organizer.

CH: There’s a bit of that. There’s certainly aggrandizing. It’s making the most of what you’ve got. But what all she can really say is name me anyone else who has done all this. By the way, I don’t, I didn’t think the south side of Chicago was all that famous for its steel mills.

HH: Neither did I. That came in yesterday, by the way, that there’s a very couple of eyebrows arched over that. Here’s another cut from Michelle Obama, cut number 16.

MO: And Barack Obama is one of those guys raised by a single parent, teenage mother. His mother was a young, 18 year old white woman raising a black kid in the 60’s. Now you tell me whether that sounds like, you imagine the life that she was living, and you tell me whether there was silver spoons. You tell me whether there is the creation of an elitist from that kind of upbringing. Well see, his mother had a lot of nerve on her own, right? She thought that she could be something special, even though she grew up in a little town in Kansas.

HH: Christopher Hitchens?

CH: Well now, this is why I’m sure that I’m right, that the Reverend Jeremiah, the disaster pastor, is her idea, because you can tell from that tone of voice, taking it again, an incredibly long time to say, in a very high and hysterical register, something that’s actually a fairly modest claim, who she has penis envy for. And it’s this big mouth demagogue who’s overcompensating for the fact that he’s a light-skinned black person in a white church, and feels that rather than preemptively, rather than be accused of not being down with the brothers, he’ll really show off as if he was Stokely Carmichael. It’s pathetic, isn’t it?

HH: Well, I need you to stick around, because I’ve got to follow up on that. I’m absorbing that, and there’s a lot more to talk about, because Michelle Obama has set the table. Last night’s events are merely a sideshow to the drama that’s going to unfold in the next six months.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30968845)

LMAO what was his moniker?

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30968861)

Big sucker here for dry, understated English wit.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#42330515)

ugust 29, 2011

Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

By Jack Cashill

On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.

Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?

The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.

I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.

Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.

Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.

Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.

In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.

Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.

In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."

To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."

On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.

Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?

What else could it be?

On November 16, 1990, Barack Obama, then president of the Harvard Law Review, published a letter in the Harvard Law Record, an independent Harvard Law School newspaper, championing affirmative action.

Although a paragraph from this letter was excerpted in David Remnick's biography of Obama, The Bridge, I had not seen the letter in its entirety before this week. Not surprisingly, it confirms everything I know about Barack Obama, the writer and thinker.

Obama was prompted to write by an earlier letter from a Mr. Jim Chen that criticized Harvard Law Review's affirmative action policies. Specifically, Chen had argued that affirmative action stigmatized its presumed beneficiaries.

The response is classic Obama: patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing, one on full display in his earlier published work: his inability to make subject and predicate agree.

"Since the merits of the Law Review's selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues," wrote Obama, "I'd like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works."

If Obama were as smart as a fifth-grader, he would know, of course, that "merits ... have." Were there such a thing as a literary Darwin Award, Obama could have won it on this on one sentence alone. He had vindicated Chen in his first ten words.

Although the letter is fewer than a thousand words long, Obama repeats the subject-predicate error at least two more times. In one sentence, he seemingly cannot make up his mind as to which verb option is correct so he tries both: "Approximately half of this first batch is chosen ... the other half are selected ... "

Another distinctive Obama flaw is to allow a string of words to float in space. Please note the unanchored phrase in italics at the end of this sentence:

"No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind." Huh?

The next lengthy sentence highlights a few superficial style flaws and a much deeper flaw in Obama's political philosophy.

I would therefore agree with the suggestion that in the future, our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer who would even insinuate that someone with Mr. Chen's extraordinary record of academic success might be somehow unqualified for work in a corporate law firm, or that such success might be somehow undeserved.

Obama would finish his acclaimed memoir, Dreams from My Father, about four years later. Prior to Dreams, and for the nine years following, everything Obama wrote was, like the above sentence, an uninspired assemblage of words with a nearly random application of commas and tenses.

Unaided, Obama tends to the awkward, passive, and verbose. The phrase "our concern in this area is most appropriately directed at any employer" would more profitably read, "we should focus on the employer." "Concern" is simply the wrong word.

Scarier than Obama's style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would "even insinuate" that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatizes its presumed beneficiaries.

In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license.

Had the partners investigated Michelle's background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."

She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as "dense and turgid." The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language."

Michelle had to have been as anxious at Harvard Law as Bart Simpson was at Genius School. Almost assuredly, the gap between her writing and that of her highly talented colleagues marked her as an affirmative action admission, and the profs finessed her through.

In a similar vein, Barack Obama was named an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Although his description of the Law Review's selection process defies easy comprehension, apparently, after the best candidates are chosen, there remains "a pool of qualified candidates whose grades or writing competition scores do not significantly differ." These sound like the kids at Lake Woebegone, all above average. Out of this pool, Obama continues, "the Selection Committee may take race or physical handicap into account."

To his credit, Obama concedes that he "may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy." This did not strike him as unusual as he "undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career."

On the basis of his being elected president of Law Review -- a popularity contest -- Obama was awarded a six-figure contract to write a book. To this point, he had not shown a hint of promise as a writer, but Simon & Schuster, like Sidley Austin, took the Harvard credential seriously. It should not have. For three years Obama floundered as badly as Michelle had at Sidley Austin. Simon & Schuster finally pulled the contract.

Then Obama found his muse -- right in the neighborhood, as it turns out! And promptly, without further ado, the awkward, passive, ungrammatical Obama, a man who had not written one inspired sentence in his whole life, published what Time Magazine called "the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician."

To question the nature of that production, I have learned, is to risk the abuse promised to Mr. Chen's theoretical employer. After all, who would challenge Obama's obvious talent -- or that of any affirmative action beneficiary -- but those blinded by what Obama calls "deep-rooted ignorance and bias"?

What else could it be?

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/08/early_obama_letter_confirms_inability_to_write.html#ixzz4ErpW52cS

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30968891)

On the other hand, all the articles about MO in this thread are fair. A pothead from a third-rate state school UG could bullshit a better thesis these days.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#33835973)

Ayers is a nasty piece of work, but he can write

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#47393104)

In other words, she was but one more victim of the bigotry of low expectations.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30969003)

his take is that michelle has suffered for her entire life from survivor guilt and awareness of her personal inadequacies; this has made her perpetually resentful

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30969076)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#37037661)

(major law firm recruiting director)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#30970700)

http://obamaprincetonthesis.wordpress.com/chapters/six/thesis.htm

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#31637056)

no, it's from Michael Robinson's Princeton thesis

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#45874362)

Fantastic thread. Great bump for Sunday morning reading.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#33835852)

'Anyone who has read Michelle's college thesis - a document so illiterate and incoherent that it was written, as Christopher Hitchens put it, in "no known language" - will chuckle heartily at this one,' he wrote in a Facebook post."

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6506533/Dinesh-DSouza-claims-Michelle-Obamas-college-thesis-illiterate-incoherent.html

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#37426875)

'So that, I find partly laughable, and I'd have to add slightly sinister.'

Hitchens then went on to say that Michelle's thesis was 'hateful, lugubrious, boring, resentment-filled screed written in some very bad form of sociologies'.

'The only think you can definitely tell from the attempt to read it, because I maintain it cannot actually be read, it's a degradation of the act of reading, is that she favors, or views with favor, black separatism, or as she calls it, separationism.'

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#46491518)

Also, doubtful that any professors spent more than 3 minutes reading it

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#40391926)

saying this as someone who's never felt ill-will towards michelle obama and even feel bad for her when people ridicule her appearance.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#40448782)

however, we may be being overly critical. im sure a lot of us were pretty stoopid in ug

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#40448828)

This makes me want to dig up my undergrad papers and see how I compared

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3291626&forum_id=2),#40448818)