Early Obama Letter Confirms Inability to Write

American Thinker ^ | 8/29/11 | Jack Cashill

[Nachum]

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.

[Victoria_R]

Obama's letter and Michelle's thesis are written in that pseudo-intellectual academic mumbo-jumbo which they teach to students. It's just plain bad writing designed to confuse people and to give the impression of the author's superior knowledge and intelligence.

[FrogMom]

He’ll do the most damage between election and leaving. MUST count until Jan 21.

[CanaGuy]

The quality of oratory these days certainly seems to be on a downward slope. Check this masterly putdown by one of history's great Conservative speakers:

"A sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can, at all times, command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself."

-- Benjamin Disraeli (about his parliamentary opponent, and Liberal, Gladstone; from a speech at Knightsbridge, July 27, 1878)--[Bartlett's]

[Madame Dufarge]

Carol Platt Liebau was first female managing editor of the Harvard Law Review:

It reminds me a little bit of my experience with him when he was president of the Harvard Law Review. You know, I hesitated to say a lot about this during the campaign because I really thought maybe it wasn't fair. That maybe, finally, when he got to be President, this would be a job big enough to engage and hold Barack Obama's sustained interest, because really, is there a bigger job out here?

[...]

[W]hen he was at the HLR you did get a very distinct sense that he was the kind of guy who much more interested in being the president of the Review, than he was in doing anything as president of the Review.

A lot of the time he quote/unquote "worked from home", which was sort of a shorthand - and people would say it sort of wryly - shorthand for not really doing much. He just wasn't around. Most of the day to day work was carried out by the managing editor of the Review, my predecessor, a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be one of the assistant attorney generals now.

He's the one who did most of the day to day work. Barack Obama was nowhere to be seen. Occasionally he would drop in he would talk to people, and then he'd leave again as though his very arrival had been a benediction in and of itself, but not very much got done.

So, you know, you see that and you think, gosh, maybe that's the way the guy operates, hut then you figure ok, obviously he always had his eye on bigger and better things.

But now he's President...there really isn't a bigger or better thing.

Obama and Harvard Law Review

[poobear]

“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.”

~snicker~

[Quiller]

Lake Alynsky said...MAKE THEM live up to their own standards.

Kinda tough, when they have repeatedly demonstrated they have NO STANDARDS!

[Hoodat]

Smartest President ever. It was like taking a demotion for The One to become President. Instantly the most brilliant man in any room he enters.

[Right Wing Assault]

...a great guy called Tom Pirelli whose actually going to be...

This appears to be an error by a person who transcribed her spoken words. I hope Carol knows better.

[Repeal The 17th]

bookmark for later

[bgill]

435 more days...

Seriously? That many? Far, far too long.

[Hoodat]

Thanks for that link. I have been searching for that transcript ever since I heard that Liebau interview back in 2009. I remember her recounting a meeting she had with Obama a year after he left. She was having trouble with hangers-on at the Review who did no work but still expected accreditation for their position. She decided she would ask Obama how he would handle something like that. His response was something to the effect of, “What difference does it make who does the work as long as it gets done?” In other words, it is OK to take credit and benefit from the hard work of others.

[R. Scott]

AKA using big or ‘smart’ words to sound impressive and hide a lack of knowledge.

We used to have a phrase in the Army that describes this nicely, “If you can’t blind them with brilliance baffle them with bull$***.”

[nathanbedford]

The election vehicle of the left is the Democrat party and both the party and the political philosophy for which it fronts are essentially nihilist. They are the product of The Frankfurt School which has created an entire epistemology for the left which operates as a sword and a buckler but ultimately entraps its practitioners in a psychic cage.

The new epistemology must first destroy the established order to clear the ground for the imposition of its utopia. To do this it has devised various tools to manipulate thinking to facilitate its political aims and, when all of this is taken together, it forms a "deconstructive" political philosophy which most of us would regard as "destructive". Feminism, atheism, Freudianism, critical thinking, etc. condition the college students at one level or the denizen of the ghetto on another level, to reject the legitimacy of the existing order of things.

There is very little left after all of this "deconstruction" takes place in the psyche or in the reasoning processes which can truthfully be called "positive." To compensate for this void, the left has seized upon race as the intellectual, emotional, and political refuge of last resort. That is one reason why I constantly harp on Nathan Bedford's maxim: all politics in America is not local but ultimately racial.

The left can play the race card as a sword and a buckler. It has worked beautifully for them and nowhere is the power of this stratagem more flagrantly on display than in the career of Barack Obama. So effective and intimidating is this ploy that during the campaign one dared not even use Obama's middle name. His entire biography was left unexamined or at least not critically examined by the establishment media. He was regarded as the Messiah, a kind of black savior who would fulfill all of the spoken and unspoken yearnings implicit in the race card.

One might also wish to cite, as the author has, the career of Michelle Obama or the recent elevation of Reverend Al to a television gig as further examples of this phenomenon. But the career of Barack Obama has done the country incalculable damage.

We on the right have still not devised any tactic or strategy which is reliably effective to deal with this pernicious doctrine. Progress certainly has been made, Obama himself is no longer untouchable, but the race card still exists and it is played every day. By way of confirmation, one need only think of manufactured allegations of racial taunts which never happened on the infamous walk by Nancy Pelosi and black legislators as they were committing Obamacare.

But more important even than the fact that this pernicious doctrine shuts down debate (as was its purpose during the walk), it shuts down thinking. It rationalizes an academic discipline that has departed from the Enlightenment and seduces our youth with propaganda. Women's studies, African-American studies, even studies of American movies, the list is almost endless, are shameful abnegations of a commitment to real critical thinking for a cheap and easy doctrine of mind control.

America is on the edge of a very difficult trial one in which we will find ourselves beleaguered on all sides by international competitors and domestic 5th columns. If we do not have our thinking clear we will lose the struggle. Those who engage in mind control, who try to place us in this psychic cage, want exactly that result.

[Hoodat]

You may be interested in the latest from the White House Insider: Obama Rushed to Hurricane Irene Photo-op

It shows Obama as a disgruntled puppet who is dragged along to do his masters' bidding. He wanted to stay on vacation another day, but the powers-that-be forced him to return to DC to give the appearance that he was showing competence in handling the hurricane. I sense that Michelle is fed up with her husband's loss of manhood as well.

Does this look like the countenance of a man who has been on vacation for the past nine days?

[Hoodat]

Ping - must read

[john mirse]

I believe Obama is a fraud and a liar.

Having said that, doesn't it take some intelligence to pass the bar exam? Did Obama pass the bar on his try? If he did, I would think that he must be pretty smart.

I don't really care what Michelle does because she is not the one in the family running for president, but if she passed the bar exam especially on her first try, I would think that she would have to be pretty smart to do so.

Affirmative Action: I believe that it was needed many years ago to help minorities when it was first applied to our society, but I think that today it needs to be re-designed and streamlined so that it is not abused as much as it seems to be today.

[Envisioning]

Ruh Roh!

Affirmative action CIC and wife (((ping)))

[muir_redwoods]

435 days until massive civil unrest begins following the “stolen” election that put the messiah out of office. “Urban youth” will torch cars, homes and whole cities. Watch it happen.

BTW, I wonder if the current administration will find it necessary to set up a Committee of Public Safety and retain office until the “emergency” has passed.

[kearnyirish2]

I commented on this after watching him sign some document (probably ObamaCare or some similar nonsense, splashed across the evening news); he looked very uncomfortable writing. At the time people said it was because he is left-handed, but I don’t buy it. I’ve seen lefties write, and this wasn’t the same; he looked like someone who hadn’t lifted a pen since third grade.

[kearnyirish2]

“Affirmative Action: I believe that it was needed many years ago to help minorities when it was first applied to our society”

Any policy that holds one group to a lower standard than others is a de facto admission of genetic inferiority. Other ethnic groups that have succeeded here simply buckled down and met the requirements of the predominant WASP culture (even if it took a generation or two to do so); has anybody even considered that for blacks & Hispanics? They are victims of their supposed beneficiaries, and will never grow up with these policies in place.