Amused Cynic

So, how the heck did this pencil-neck cipher end up poised to “lead” the free world?  Victor David Hanson provides a time-line, and although he doesn’t use the words, it’s pretty obvious that what we have in Obama is, potentially, (as I wrote back in July) the first Affirmative Action president.  He doesn’t have the qualifications to get where the social engineers wanted him to go, so they consistently changed the rules so he could acquire the requisite credential.

How did he go from Occidental College to Columbia?  From Columbia to Harvard Law?  Nobody is saying.  How convenient for him that the selection process for the Harvard Law Review was changed, just in time for him to become its first black editor.  If I hear one more person use that editorship as a sign of his intellectual superiority, I will barf.  It was an Affirmative Action hire, plain and simple.  You can read about the new, Obama-friendly selection process here (written by long-time HLS dean, Erwin N. Griswold), although a more detailed article on the new selection process has been scrubbed from Wikipedia.

Over the past decade, there have also been differences of opinion about the Review’s decision to change the method of choosing members of its Board through some sort of affirmative action, and by employing a writing competition as well as, or for some candidates in lieu of, academic grades. These changes, too, have been difficult, but any problems encountered have been resolved by the student editors themselves, though not without concern on the part of many who hold the Review in high esteem.

In the meantime, back to Hanson, whose careful recitation dramatically illustrates the weirdness of the Obama phenomenon.

And even then I would withhold judgment had Obama earned any record of success rather than played on identity politics. He had no distinguished record as an undergraduate at Columbia (so far as we can tell, given his refusal to release his transcripts) that would have won entry to Harvard Law School. Once there, he published nothing, in contrast to past editors at the Law Review. There is no record that his community organizing helped any but the career of Obama, and many of the Rezko projects are now boarded up. As a state legislator there is no record of legislative achievement, but plenty of ‘present’ votes to prepare for further career aggrandizement. As a Chicago Law Professor, there is not a single scholarly article of the sort Chicago insists on for everyone else. And as a US Senator, there is essentially a campaign for president from the day he was sworn in. So, yes, there is a pattern of rhetoric at the expense of achievement.

One sees that had Obama not been of half-African ancestry, or had he not used identity politics to accentuate that background, there is no reason to believe he would have ever left Chicago politics. Certainly he has no record comparable to a Rice or Powell, who excelled in their given areas of expertise, and while proud of their race, still felt it to be incidental to their professional personae. Again in contrast, when concerns about voter registration, Bill Ayers, or Obama’s experience are voiced, both the candidate and his appendages almost instinctively play the race card…we saw that today with the worries over Acorn and the attacks on Palin for raising the Ayers issue yesterday.

How utterly warped if the first supposed “post-racial” candidate ends up presiding over the first race-based Affirmative Action administration.

Related: The Anchoress is thinking similar thoughts about Obama the great writer, and reminds us not to go wobbly in the face of the media-constructed lunatic asylum.

Obama is a construct. He is a put-together illusion. He managed to use technicalities to have every opponent thrown off the ballot in his first run for the IL state senate, so that his name was the only name on that ballot. We all know it.

A while back, a friend of mine who is voting for Obama justified his vote in this way: ‘did you read either of his books? What a writer!’

There are a lot of exceedingly good writers out there who should never be president. Sometimes I’m one of them! But beyond that, what I did not say to my pal at the time is that I had my doubts he even wrote the books. Why? Because as editor of the Harvard Law Review, he has nothing published. Because we’re not allowed to see any of his college theses. We have absolutely nothing which which to compare his writings to, and that troubles me why?

Because the author of those two books is a WRITER, and this I know about writers – particularly writers who manage to put forth a voice of such lyricism – a writer WRITES; a writer cannot help himself but write.

The person who wrote Dreams of My Father and Audacity of Hope would have other writings out there for us to see. Obama does not. Not a scholarly piece such as might be expected from an editor of the Harvard Law Review, not a thoughtful piece on social issues written for a journal or magazine. Nothing. All those years working as a ‘community organizer’ or ACORN guy, or whatever – no small writings, anywhere, to indicate that this writer was writing. And, co-incidentally, there is nothing out there to which we might compare the voice of those two books. As my L’il Bro Thom often remarks, ‘you can always identify a writer by her voice.’