A White Woman From Kansas (your drink will come out your nose alert)

New York Fishwrap ^ | 6/3/11 | Cohen

[pabianice]

LONDON — For a long time Barack Obama’s mother was little more than the “white woman from Wichita” mentioned in an early Los Angeles Times profile of the future president. She was the pale Kansan silhouette against whom Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Now, thanks to Janny Scott’s remarkable “A Singular Woman,” absence has become presence. Stanley Ann Dunham, the parent who raised Obama, emerges from romanticized vagueness into contours as original as her name. Far from “floating through foreign things,” as one colleague in Indonesia observes, “She was as type A as anybody on the team.”

That may seem a far-fetched description of a woman who was not good with money, had no fixed abode and did not see life through ambition’s narrow prism. It was the journey not the destination that mattered to Dunham. She was, in her daughter Maya Soetoro-Ng’s words, “fascinated with life’s gorgeous minutiae.” To her son the president, “idealism and naïveté” were “embedded” in her.

Yet she was also a pioneering advocate of microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world, an unrivaled authority on Javanese blacksmithing, and a firm voice for female empowerment in an Indonesia “of ‘smiling’ or gentle oppression” toward women, as she wrote in one memo for the Ford Foundation.

[Honorary Serb]

....I said “Bildungsroman” — in some essential sense “Dreams from My Father” was fictionalized....

Almost right! It was nearly pure fiction. And obama never wrote it, or anything else of consequence.

obama’s mother was a communist with a strong affinity for muslims. That explains a lot about how obama turned out.

[pabianice]

Better move fast. I’ll bet $10 that Google is even now scrubbing the Web of every trace of her.

[TennesseeGirl]

Nope. Name was no mistake, "The education of Obama the would-be politician didn't begin, of course, until after his birth in 1961, in Honolulu. But the parental traits that would mold him -- a contrarian worldview, an initial rejection of organized religion, a questioning nature -- were already taking shape years earlier in the nomadic and sometimes tempestuous Dunham family, where the only child was a curious and precocious daughter of a father who wanted a boy so badly that he named her Stanley -- after himself." http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-0703270151mar27-archive,0,2623808.story?page=1

[Marathoner]

“I had them read ‘The Communist Manifesto,’ and the parents went nuts,” said Wichterman,

Actually, I had to read that garbage for a college history class, and ironically it converted me to conservatism, as I instinctively knew it was the biggest pile of horsecrap I'd ever read.

[Revolting cat!]

Hey, I wanna read about John Edwards’ momma. Just think, a little, tiny change in one past election, and we’d all be reading it, like it or not.

As for this one - another trashy red diaper baby.

[TennesseeGirl]

Actually, I had to read that garbage for a college history class

Ditto on the crap -- I read Marx for a high school English lit class.

[cynwoody]

She missed her son. The decision to send him to get educated in America was brave — and has changed the world in that Obama would not otherwise have become a black American. This is a central conundrum of a book that makes Obama’s white parent palpable for the first time.

In an affecting passage one colleague, Don Johnston, describes how Dunham “felt a little bit wistful or sad that Barack had essentially moved to Chicago and chosen to take on a really strongly identified black identity” that had “not really been part of who he was when he was growing up.” She felt that “he was distancing himself from her” in a “professional choice.”

LOL! Blackness as a profession! Barack the Professional Negro!

[xtinct]

gag !! hurl !!

[Eagle of Liberty]

The Dunhams did not join the uproar. Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.

“In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as ‘the little Red church on the hill,’ “ said Peter Luton, the church’s senior minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism. Skepticism, the kind that Stanley embraced and passed on to his daughter, was welcomed here.” http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-0703270151mar27-archive,0,2623808.story?page=3

That would explain the clinging to guns and God quote from DEAR LEADER.

[Kenton]

As in getting pregnant at 17 by the first African student to enroll at the University of Hawaii, the brilliant Barack Hussein Obama Sr., who loved her and left her — for Harvard. Adulthood was thrust on her early.

Yeah, yeah, wasn't the little tramp noble. Got dumped by her African after he used her as a disposable scum bag, what a surprise...

I'm so tired of all the sad stories about white "baby mommas" getting mistreated by their black "baby daddies" that I'm just losing all my natural sympathy for these poor souls...

[TennesseeGirl]

Obama’s magnetic personality attracted Dunham, and in February 1961 the two got married, not telling their friends until afterward. By this time Dunham was nearly three months pregnant; it is something of a mystery whether the pregnancy or true love brought on the marriage. On August 4, 1961, Barack Hussein Obama was born in Honolulu. News of the marriage and baby shocked Dunham’s friends. She had not had a steady boyfriend in high school and had not seemed interested in children, even declining to babysit though nearly all of her girlfriends did. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0FDMgE-5P9wJ:www.historylink.org/_content/printer_friendly/pf_output.cfm%3Ffile_id%3D8897+%22ann+dunham%22+%22bellevue%22+seattle&cd=8&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&source=www.google.com

Apparently, the wallflower blossomed in HI.

[Elendur]

“Obama Sr., who loved her and left her — for Harvard.”
///
except that is also a lie. he remained in Hawaii after Aug 1961. SHE moved to Washington State, only weeks later.

(besides the fact that there is no record of their being married (invalid anyway, since Obama Sr was already married), no photos of them together, no friends recall them together at the time, no evidence they ever lived together, and Obama Sr.’s US STATE DEPARTMENT files don’t list Obama as his child in 1961, only his other son “Roy”.
...and his age in 1961, accord to the US State Department files, was 27, not 25 as the LFBC states. SAD didn’t even know her own husbands age?)

[griswold3]

i never got the impression that obama had a ‘questioning nature’. he seems not the least bit curious.
As Reagan said once, ‘A Communist is someone who reads marx. An Anti Communist is someone who understands marx.’

With all the imperical evidence that collectivism fails, is it his arrogance that causes him to believe he could make it work or deep down he knows the ‘tragedy of the commons’ is the desired end?

[IrishPennant]

...microcredit in the rural communities of the developing world...

Where's the part where she worked with Tax-Cheat Timmah's daddy in Indonesia????

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

That’s really funny!

[Gordon Pym]

Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham was nothing more than the Rachel Corrie of her day, without getting herself killed.

AKA useful idiot

[Apparatchik]

My favorite descriptive - Obama's "almost feline coolness"

The jokes write themselves.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

Obama drew the vivid Kenyan figure of his absent Dad in his Bildungsroman of discovered black identity, “Dreams from My Father.”

Recently, on FreeRepublic, I saw Obama referred to as "The Fresh Prince of Bill Ayers." I don't know who gets the credit for it, but it's my second-favorite line ever.

Okay, since you asked--my favortie line of all time was the headline in the New York Post alluding to the demise of Ike Turner:

Ike, 76, Beats Tina to Death

[Mashood]

“My favorite descriptive - Obama’s “almost feline coolness”

He’s cool like a spraying cat.

[Dallas59]

She liked guys of color. Didn’t care if they could take care of her and her offspring. Pop one out and push it off on the Grand parents. She had to discover the world. No time for kids.