Dreams

I just ran across a 56-minute video of Barack Obama discussing his book, "Dreams from My Father," at the Cambridge Public Library in September of 1995 ... see: Video. Please watch it ... it is a worthy hour investment. This reference also contains a video of a discussion of this Obama lecture as it relates to Frank Marshall Davis being a father figure for Obama (the first video). I recommend that you watch the second video first and then, if interested, go back and watch the first one second to see if you can agree with its observations.

But it is the second video that is most important in my mind as it gave me a few insights into this man's being ... a man who has been at the helm of our country for the last seven years. Here are a few of my thoughts that I derived from his lecture:

- I now believe that Obama did in fact write this book ... as opposed to the rumor that it was ghost written. He may have had lots of editorial assistance ... but it was clearly an Obama original.

- Obama was then an older student at Harvard Law School ... after he had been a community organizer in Chicago and traveled to Africa. Perhaps this added to his gravitas and helped propel him to edit the Harvard Law Review without the usual requisite law writings.

- I also now believe that Obama is brighter and more articulate than I have given him credit for in the past ... not as articulate as those who lade his Teleprompter, but certainly glib and perspicacious.

- It also seems obvious that Obama is a complex and layered personality ... much more layered and hidden today than he was back in 1995 ... possibly a product of the many handlers that have shaped his political career during the ensuing 20 years.

- To me it is also obvious that race has been the idee fixe in most of Obama's political decisions during his presidency ... driven by the kind of incidents to which he relates in the book passage he reads in this lecture. This obsession seems the basis of many of Obama's poor presidential decisions.

- At one point in the video Q and A, Obama makes the point that white America today lives in a mainly black culture. I concur, but feel forced to add that, up until about 1960, the opposite was true. It was the final liberation of American blacks that more balanced justice  ... but also flipped our culture ... not always for the betterment of our society

Comtained

Fifteen months ago Obama, in a attempt to backtrack on his "JV" assessment of the ISIS terrorists, promised that we would "degrade and destroy" the Islamic State. Like most everything that our Muslim Apologist in Chief says, this was horse puckies. In the interim the air power of the United States has been as effective as a fart in a windstorm. The number of our air sorties has been de miniimis and the rules of engagement imposed by our petulant president meant that two thirds of these planes returned without dropping their munitions.

It was only after the recent terrorist attacks in Paris that Raqqa, the capital of the Islam State, was bombed by the French. This shamed America into bombing 100 tanker trucks ... carrying the oil that finances these terrorist scumbags. However we first dropped leaflets warning the truck drivers that we were coming. To show us what war really is, Russia, the following day bombed 500 tanker trucks ... without warning the drivers ... and flattened 15 oil refineries. Is this what B.H.O.'s strategy of "containment" means? That we don't attack any meaningful ISIS targets for over a year and we need to be shamed by France and Russia into doing something militarily meaningful in Syria ... long after we were told that we were going to "degrade and destroy" ISIS?

I guess we can't trust anything the Blowhard Barry promises ... but, then again, we should have known this for years.