ECOL Video

Glenn Donovan
20 hours ago
Here’s how lame conservatives are. Garrow is a legendary progressive biographer, beyond his MLK work. This book on Obama, Rising Star, was published in 2017. I of course read it as I’ve found the only way to accurately understand a US presidency is by reading the books written after as our media sucks so badly at reporting anything accurately or in depth anymore. I knew all of this in 2017. Why on earth does it take some Leftist rag publishing an interview with the author 6 years later make a big splash? //

instead of what a bankrupt fraud of a person Obama is. How his life is defined by trying to be ‘black enough’ and how inside is a man without a sound moral compass. Fyi, this is why celebrity and wealth are what he focuses on cuz he’s empty and confused deep down inside. Due to his very effed up childhood of course.

Obama is much more white than he ever was or will be black. He hates this about himself. The reason he married Michelle is that she was called ‘white’ by other blacks where she grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The truth of Michelle is that she’s a climber and she and her family did everything they could to remove her from the black community in Chicago, from school to activities etc. They both were struggling with a legit black identity. Lol. //

Garrow is clearly a Progressive hit man and he represents that bizarre corner of Progressive politics where all they do is try to out moralize each other, nothing is ever good enough or pure enough etc. I had more empathy for Obama after reading this book.

Why? Cuz his mother and his father abandoned him. He was raised by a grandma VP of a bank and her dissolute, pothead husband – Obamas maternal Grandpa – who was a horrible influence on him as a teenager. Obama was screwed from birth by most of the member’s of his ‘family’. He emerged into the world lost, seeking an identity. Garrow’s book is deep and incisive about all of this and you get a much more human view of Obama, while of course noting his hack political vibe (he’s just a hack, always has been, it’s nothing new). He just acted white enough for Dems to try running him for POTUS. In a sense, they used him as much as he used the voters to fill up that empty spot inside of him that will always be lost and not good enough and aching for the love of his mother and father. Fame and celebrity and wealth won’t do it and I’m sure Obama has discovered this by now.

The White House just needed to create, with the help of a slavish media, narratives that could help people admit they were wrong and come around to his way of thinking.

Ironically enough, I thought of the “permission structure” remark reading David Samuels’ interview in Tablet with Obama biographer David Garrow, which is shaping up to be perhaps the most discussed piece of journalism of the year. That’s because the entire article is a really effective “permission structure” for a lot of Obama voters and moderates to finally admit he’s an entirely overrated, largely failed president who was far more radical than he ever let on. He’s also obsessed with celebrity and not very loyal to the people who helped him along the way.

In other words, he’s pretty much the guy his critics on the right said he was all along. //

As Garrow observes, “What I could never understand was Obama’s contempt for the idea of American exceptionalism. … Why would the president of the United States feel the need to disabuse his countrymen of the idea that they are special?” //

Perhaps it’s unrealistic to expect America ever to stamp out racism (or any other sin for that matter), but King’s call to a virtue-based vision of equality was nonetheless deeply taken to heart by most Americans. Otherwise, the fact it took just 40 years for America to go from assassinating civil rights leaders and turning firehoses on peaceful black protesters to electing a black president is just another “historical accident.” //

Americans thought they were electing a guy who had tacitly, if not explicitly, said he would fulfill Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, a man who, in Garrow’s considered words, “did not buy into identity politics.” Instead, they got a guy invested in defending Louis Farrakhan’s vision of race in America.

Being a president in the mold of King­­­ would entail evaluating leadership failures as a matter of the content of your character and judgment. Following Farrakhan would entail blaming… well, it seems hard to believe Obama would embrace antisemitic conspiracies, but certainly there’s ample evidence that Obama and his defenders do dodge accountability by blaming a more socially acceptable villain of shadowy cabals of racists and Republicans.