Hugh Kingsmill, “The Genealogy of Hitler”, section 1, The Poisoned Crown (1944):
Most of the avoidable suffering in life springs from our attempts to escape the unavoidable suffering inherent in the fragmentary nature of our present existence. We expect immortal satisfactions from mortal conditions, and lasting and perfect happiness in the midst of universal change. To encourage this expectation, to persuade mankind that the ideal is realizable in this world, after a few preliminary changes in external conditions, is the distinguishing mark of all charlatans, whether in thought or action.
May 8, 2012: The Night the Primaries Became a Lot of Fun
In Wisconsin, Scott Walker received more votes running against no one in the Republican primary than the two major Democratic candidates got combined.
In North Carolina, “No Preference” garnered 21 percent in the Democratic Party presidential primary against Barack Obama.
In West Virginia, “A felon incarcerated in Texas took one in three votes away from President Obama in West Virginia’s Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday. Keith Judd, who is serving time in a federal prison in Texarkana, Texas, for extortion, took 37 percent of the vote, with 50 percent of precincts reporting. Obama captured the remaining 63 percent.”
The night could have gone worse for Democrats, but . . . I’m not sure how.
Retired General Jack Keane tells Mike Huckabee that the US knew the location of Osama bin Ladin’s hideout by the summer of 2010, and the Obama Administration dithered for nearly a year before authorizing the mission to eliminate him.
James Taranto explains that Julia really represents the Obama Administration’s new model for society’s fundamental relationship: the union between the dependent individual and the administrative state.
In 1999 Lionel Tiger coined the word “bureaugamy” to refer to the relationship between officially impoverished mothers of illegitimate children and the government. “The Life of Julia” is an insidious attack on the institution of the family, an endorsement of bureaugamy even for middle-class women.
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Nicole Gelinas describes just how Julia’s choices subsequently impact her son Zachary and what ultimately happens to Julia.
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Iowahawk swings at the Obama Campaign’s low, hanging curveball, offering his own version of Julia’s life, which ends with a a characteristically left-wing bang.
There was general wonder and astonishment over the revelation that Obama’s New York girlfriend in Dreams from My Father was actually a composite character based on multiple girlfriends in New York and Chicago.
Jim Geraghty contended that the use of composite characters in Obama’s autobiography was a key aspect of the book’s evasive, downright mendacious, character.
Why was young Obama’s mentor in Hawaii, Frank Davis only identified as “Frank”? (Probably because Davis was alleged to be a Communist.)
Why does Obama’s description of his duties at a consulting house not match the memories of his co-workers at all?
Why does the book’s kind, easygoing portrait of Jeremiah Wright… not match the man seen in videos of his sermons and at National Press Club years later?
Every autobiography probably includes some inaccurate or self-serving memories, some interpretation of past events that portrays the author in the best possible light. But when Obama describes conversations and interactions with people who didn’t exist, or at least existed in a quite different form from the way they’re described on the page, readers have a right to wonder if they’re reading fiction or nonfiction.
Among the conservative grassroots, it is an article of faith that one of the reasons Barack Obama won in 2008 was because he misrepresented himself to the American people, and he was “not vetted.”...
When you think about telling the world your story, and telling the world about the people who shaped you… would you use a composite?
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Some excerpts from a 1982 letter from Barack Obama to girlfriend Alex McNear provoked discussion.
I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
On a Yale conservative discussion list, one of our alumni who teaches English Literature at a major Eastern university, remarked that from the perspective of a professional student of Eliot, Yeats, and Pound Obama’s verbiage struck him as “half gibberish, half misunderstanding,” and commented with frustration that he’d never heard of “Münzer” and could not even find him in Wikipedia.
I, too, was puzzled, but only a little investigation made it clear that Obama had misspelled the name of Thomas Müntzer, an early Reformation era heretic extremist and leader of a servile insurrection in Thuringia, who was defeated and well-deservedly executed in 1525.
Müntzer is, like Gracchus Babeuf, the kind of obscure historical figure that is remembered by specialists in the particular period and by members of the hard-core revolutionary left. Obama’s knowledge of the very existence of Thomas Müntzer is one more proof of his upbringing in a communist family, the kind of family in which the works of Engels are a standard reading staple.
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The above and this additional excerpt of the same letter seem to, at least, clear up, once and for all, more than one major historical controversy.
Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.
John Hinderaker: That, folks, is not a parody. It may provide a hint as to why Obama’s college and law school grades remain a well-kept secret.
Ann Althouse concluded: “I am now willing to believe Obama wrote his own memoir.”
John Hinderaker points out that, behind all the frivolous humor about Obama eating dogs, something serious was really going on. The commentariat of the Right was able to take an Obama campaign attack meme, turn it right around, and make the whole thing into a national humor fest.
The Obama Eats Dogs theme is silly, of course, but as many others have said, it is silliness with a purpose. The Obama campaign seriously intended to make an issue of the fact that decades ago, Mitt Romney put the family dog on the roof of his car, in some sort of kennel or container, because there was no room inside. The dog was fine, but the Democrats crowed that focus group testing showed that the incident would make voters dislike Romney. I think that claim was sheer fantasy, but in any event, the Democrats won’t be able to talk about Seamus now that everyone knows that Obama used to eat dogs. ...
While in the microcosm these issues may seem silly, they are important in the context of the 2012 campaign. The Democrats can’t defend Obama’s record and want to talk about anything in the world other than the economy and the federal debt. Thus, their campaign will consist of one distraction after another. The Romney campaign’s ability to hit back, turn the faux issue back on Obama, and return the conversation to the economy will be critical. At the moment, Romney’s counterpunching against Obama’s irrelevancies is looking strong.
, hitting the shelves on June 19th.
was actually a composite character based on multiple girlfriends in New York and Chicago.
