(PJ Media) Who is Barack Obama? You’d think a guy who’s penned three memoirs and is the subject of several authorized and unauthorized biographies would be an open book, but he isn’t, as most sentient Americans know. But now we’re learning more.
A recent story in Tablet Magazine by David Samuels, which includes an interview with one of Obama’s biographers, David J. Garrow, gives us some clues about America’s first half-black, half-white president and why he has meticulously hidden details of his life from the American people.
Basically, Barack Obama fantasized about gay sex and was a social-climbing, wanna-be billionaire who loathed his real-life story. Obama carefully refashioned a new character named Barack Obama into a carefully curated creature whose reputation the real Obama and his acolytes continue to tend with the scrupulousness of a bonsai master.
Many of these things have been whispered about the man since he came onto the American political scene. Those who said it out loud were largely dismissed. And, as Garrow acknowledges, an incurious media didn’t want to be that guy who asked too many questions because they’d be called racist.
Only one person ever bothered to look up the love of Obama’s life, Sheila Miyoshi Jager. They were together for years and lived together. “I mean,” Garrow told Samuels, “one would think that there’d be a journalist in America who would go look at the student directory in the University of Chicago Library in 2008.” Garrow jokes, “Yeah, we’re looking for the Black guy’s white girlfriend.” Samuels adds, “I mean, why go through all that trouble to be labeled a racist and lose your job?”
Garrow tracked down Jager, whom Obama asked to marry twice. She claims to have dumped him over the issue of the cavalier statements from an anti-Semitic friend. Jager’s dad’s parents were members of the Dutch Resistance and hid a Jewish child for three years during the Holocaust.
If Obama speaks of Jager at all, which he barely did in his first big book, “Dreams From My Father,” a book labeled “historical fiction” by Garrow—”Oh God, did that infuriate him”—it is Obama who dumped her. When Garrow spent eight hours interviewing Obama, the only off-limits topic was his father.
Another ex-girlfriend who talked to Garrow showed him the letters she got from Obama with a one-paragraph redaction. Why did she hide it? “It’s about homosexuality,” she said.
Throughout the years, Obama is alleged to have been a real-life Manchurian candidate, a member of the Down Low Club at Reverend Wright’s church, a cocaine lover, a purveyor of male prostitutes, a man placed in an arranged marriage by his church, and born in Kenya, among other things. That last one, his birthplace, was started by none other than Obama himself when he tried to sell his first book. His literary agent was only too willing to make the young author sound more mysterious. “[B]orn in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii,” went the author blurb. Andrew Breitbart’s news outlet broke the story in 2012, and though the famed founder of Breitbart News wasn’t a birther, he was simply disgusted by the media’s lack of curiosity about Obama and the curated “fiction” from the man with the halo, St. Barack.
Obama’s own engineered origin story was set upon in a whispering campaign by Hillary Clinton in the Democrat primary, setting off a torrent of people concerned about Obama’s qualifications for office. Among those millions of people who wanted to get a look at Obama’s long-form Hawaii birth certificate was Donald Trump. He eventually got it.
Though media “fact check” stories abound finding Hillary fault-free from her birtherism roots, political insiders and, yes, Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, told Politico, “This started with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, No. 1. No. 2, it was Donald Trump who put the issue to rest when he got President Obama to release his birth certificate years later. And, No. 3, he said ‘President Obama was born in this country, period.’”
Hillary almost got away with her libel of Trump as a Russian spy through a similar, though far more sophisticated, method of media and deep state manipulation.
Garrow says he “never paid much attention to birtherism for a large chunk of time, but I know I thought that [the Obama camp was] making a mistake by not putting the actual birth certificate out there.” He told Samuels that “it was horrific political malpractice not to put the birth certificate out there ASAP.” The situation gave the Obama acolytes room to label any who bought it up as racist. That’s all it took to dissuade the incurious media from looking into it. Indeed, this is where white suburban wine moms often derive their Donald-Trump-is-a-racist claptrap from and where their sons, who write for Slate, amplify it.
Samuels asked why Obama didn’t set the record straight. “Because Barack was so deeply contemptuous,” he didn’t think he had to prove he was born in America. “It is comical,” Garrow says, “it is bizarrely comical to imagine he was born anywhere other than Kapi’olani Hospital.” Most people agree, but Obama created the wedge issue and did what comes naturally to him as a long-time Saul Alinky-inspired community activist: divided people.
Samuels added that he believes Obama considered his real origin story too “foreign.” He believes the birther issue is “…not about racism, I think—at least not primarily. It was about foreignness, un-American-ness.” He continues, “I think that what Obama feared was that showing the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain.”
Beyond the personal hagiography the former two-term president carefully curated for himself, there are larger issues at play in Samuels’ piece. For example, why is it that after Barack Obama’s presidency, Silicon Valley tech companies were seeded with his apparatchiks? Why did the man who objected to the Patriot Act allow intelligence agencies to spy on Donald Trump? Why is the awful Iran shrink-wrapped-money-not-to make-nukes deal the lodestar of his presidency? And why did race relations get worse, not better, during the presidency of America’s first black president?
