Posted on 05/27/2008 11:48:44 AM PDT by PA Engineer
My source was a liberal site which had its facts wrong. :/
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/5/27/1719/01583
Funny, I was just looking at that site too. They say it was found on LexisNexis from the Charleston Gazette, so it seems that Obama simply re-used the passage from the 2002 speech? What interests me, primarily, is that he is so careless with the simplest facts from the history of his country, his family, and the Holocaust. Not only did his 7+ years at Occidental + Columbia + Harvard give him no elementary knowledge of history, but he did not even acquire the most rudimentary scholarly conscience or sense of the importance of accuracy when dealing with historical events. Typical leftist.
In West Virginia a few weeks ago, Obama said his grandfather enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, which was December, 1941. [Charleston Gazette (West Virginia) April 8, 2008, Tuesday, available on Lexis.com]
“My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.
Here is the WWII Kansas Veterans Index. His grandfather, Stanley A. Dunham, enlisted in the Army on June 18 1942, six months after Pearl Harbor. [Hat tip Baldilocks.)
http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/5/28/02342/3539
It seems there were two Stanley Dunhams who enlisted in 1942, one in January, and one in June.
Either way, the larger point remains: Stanley Dunham enlisting within six months was not adequate to Obama’s purposes; in order to meet Obama’s standards of patriotic excellence, it was necessary to imagine his grandfather standing in line outside the recruiting office on Monday, Dec. 8th at 8:30 a.m., salivating for his chance to shoot him some Japs.
“The soldier in question, Burton said, is Obama’s grandmother’s brother”
That should narrow down the name in question for the intrepid researchers.
The TalkLeft analysis is good, but it doesn’t go far enough: it isn’t just that Obama relates best to the Dunham/white side of his family tree as something reported to him by his campaign researchers, this is how Obama relates to most of America—something he read about in a campaign research memo.
Being uncertain as to the number of states, not being able to distinguish between Sioux City and Sioux Falls, not really being familiar with the history of the Civil Rights movement, these all indicate that the U.S. is, for Obama, mostly an abstraction about which he has read (on the subjects which interest him), rather than a reality he has lived.
Well-noted.
At the minimum it says that anyone with such apparent personal/psychological orientation problems has no business having charge of (or anything to do with) U. S. national security and thus the life and death decisions involving some 300 million U.S. citizens.
The campaign specified 89th Infantry Division, so they’d better hurry up and substantiate that. Of course, now they run into the tricky issue that it’s not up to Obama to release any service records, etc. - it involves the privacy of an 84 year old family relation who may not appreciate having been dragged into this - will Charlie Payne, who is alive IIRC, have to get involved in clearing this up or will he tell the Obama campaign to shove off?
It would be incredible if they pulled that out of thin air or off the web, but then they have shown that they are not a very professional organization. Still, as critical as I am of Obama, I would be astonished if they released the specifics about 89th ID and a sub-camp of Buchenwald and “Charlie Payne” was never even there. That would be an unbelievable whopper, even for them. Surely they know at this point some people are going to keep checking, digging, pushing. They’d better try to put this to rest soon.
Well you are right that Obama is unlikely to provide documentation. As I understand it, he refuses even to release his birth certificate, although that would seem to be a necessary part of the public record to demonstrate that he is constitutionally qualifed to run for president.
I’d also love to see his baptismal certificate. He has said that he is a “member” of Rev. Wright’s church, but that “church” curiously does not require its members to be baptized. So, was Obama ever even a Christian, under the normally accepted meaning of the term? I am not sure if he has explicitly said so, although the press often repeats it, since it might raise difficult issues of Islam and apostasy.
In “Audacity of Hope” he claims explicitly he was baptised, in a curious, passive voice passage notable for it lack of detail.
Given that, as you say, UCC does not mandate baptism for membership, it is quite likely that the ceremony was more like an altar call than a traditional water baptism by immersion or infusion. It is also most likely that the church would not keep special records of any baptism ceremony, if one did occur, only noting that he enrolled as a congregant on a particular date.
Thanks, I didn’t know that. I’ve read a number of key or controversial passages cited from his books, but I haven’t had the patience to sit down and read them, and I would never buy them and help put money in his pockets. (Similarly, I didn’t have to read “Mein Kampf” to know I didn’t like Hitler. A few extracts were enough, and I didn’t want to make myself sick.)
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