[Breitbart] A new report from the Tablet online magazine alleges that former President Barack Obama is the power behind much of what happens in President Joe Biden’s White House, controlling key decisions through an army of Obama administration alumni.
The lengthy article, “The Obama Factor,” consists of a lengthy introduction by author David Samuels, followed by an interview with civil rights historian and Obama biographer David Garrow. The article covers a wide range of topics, including many areas that few journalists bothered to explore during his 2008 campaign and subsequent presidency, such as the fact that much of Obama’s first memoir, Dreams from my Father, was fiction; or that he had privately expressed having homosexual fantasies.
However, the most important portion for current political debates — made relevant by new reports that Obama had advised Biden on the dangers of a Trump candidacy in 2024 — is that Obama is the prime mover in his former vice president’s administration.
Samuels writes:
That Obama might enjoy serving as a third-term president in all but name, running the government from his iPhone, was a thought expressed in public by Obama himself, both before and after he left office. “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front man or front woman, and they had an earpiece in, and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff, and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony,” he told Steven Colbert in 2015, “I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Even with all these clues, the Washington press corps—fresh off their years of broadcasting fantasies about secret communications links between Trump Tower and the Kremlin—seemed unable to imagine, let alone report on, Obama’s role in government.
Instead, every few months a sanitized report appears on some aspect of the ex-president’s outside public advocacy, presented within limits that are clearly being set by Obama’s political operatives—which conveniently elide the problems that are inherent in having a person with no constitutional role or congressional oversight take an active role in executive decision-making. Near the end of June, for example, Politico ran a long article noting Biden’s cognitive decline, with the coy headline “Is Obama Ready to Reassert Himself?”—as if the ex-president hadn’t been living in the middle of Washington and playing politics since the day he left office. Indeed, in previous weeks Obama had continued his role as central advocate for government censorship of the internet while launching a new campaign against gun ownership, claiming it is historically linked to racism. Surely, the spectacle of an ex-president simultaneously leading campaigns against both the First and Second Amendments might have led even a spectacularly incurious old-school D.C. reporter to file a story on the nuts and bolts of Obama’s political operation and on who was going in and out of his mansion. But the D.C. press was no longer in the business of maintaining transparency. Instead, they had become servants of power, whose job was to broadcast whatever myths helped advance the interests of the powerful.
Samuels adds, in a cautionary way:
In the absence of what was once American journalism, it is hard to know which portrait of Obama’s post-presidency is truer to life: Obama as a celebrity-obsessed would-be billionaire, or as a would-be American Castro, reshaping American society from his basement, in his sweats.
Several salient points emerge from the interview, such as that Samuels and Garrow agree that Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, Obamacare, was a “fraud”; that he was a failed president, at least on foreign policy, especially in Syria and Russia; and that he lacks empathy, or even strong convictions, other than his own importance.
They point to the Iran nuclear deal, which was a failure when it was signed, and which Biden has pursued quixotically despite the obvious lack of interest from the Iranian regime: all the players are Obama’s former staff, protecting their former boss’s legacy.
The two authors, in conversation, speculate that Obama’s strategy of boosting Iran as a regional power had to do with his sense of resentment toward Jewish self-determination — not out of antisemitism, but a feeling of envy vis-a-vis black communal identity.
Samuels describes Obama’s public persona as a literary creation by Obama himself: “So the conclusion I’ve come to in time is that that best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page.”
They also discuss Birtherism, and Obama’s reluctance to produce his true, “long-form” birth certificate: “I think that what Obama feared was that showing the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain,” Samuels says at one point.
What they could have added is what Breitbart News uncovered in 2012: that Birtherism was likely an inadvertent creation of Obama himself, early in his career, when he (and his literary agent) spun a different version of his life story, one that he may have hoped would help him build a following as an aspiring writer, because it seemed more exotic than the actual facts of his birth.
[770KTTH Conservative Radio] After taking over recruitment efforts for the Seattle Police Department (SPD), Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell’s office demanded the department show fewer white men and "military bearing" in recruitment materials, according to a memo exclusively obtained by The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH. The document was seemingly destroyed and the Mayor’s office did not initially turn it over through a public disclosure request, as required by law.
Ben Dalgetty, a Digital Strategy Lead from the Mayor’s office, took control of SPD marketing efforts. In a March 2023 memo to SPD human resources staff titled "SPD Marketing More and Less," Dalgetty asked for "less" images and videos of "officers who are white, male," and "officers with military bearing." In their place, Dalgetty asked for more "officers of color," "officers of different genders," and "officers who are younger."
The memo was part of a larger effort to hire fewer white men, according to a source, and it may be illegal.
’YOU PUT THIS IN WRITING?’
The memo caused a stir and the demand was seen by some at the SPD as discriminatory.
"I thought, ’Are you kidding me? You put this in writing?'" one source inside the department tells The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH on the condition of anonymity. "It shows not only a lack of respect for officers, but a lack of respect for the military. They have no understanding of someone willing to put their lives on the line for their fellow man. They don’t have respect."
The source said the intent of the mayor’s recruitment team was to hire fewer white officers and military veterans. After learning that the memo raised significant concerns, Dalgetty edited the file of the memo, effectively destroying a record that the city was obliged to maintain for public disclosure.
#6
Well, life's not a comic book. Probably explains why the Marvel and DC movies are so popular. Or used to be until they also became vehicles for wokeness.
Posted by: M. Murcek ||
08/05/2023 10:13 Comments ||
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#7
Well, you get what you reward. If third best but socially reliable is what you want, you'll get it.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/05/2023 12:06 Comments ||
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#8
As a child during World War II, Harrell's mother was incarcerated with her family at Minidoka internment camp in Idaho.
------- Chief legal advisor to the First A.M.E.. The AME Church was created and organized by people of African descent (most descended from enslaved Africans taken to the Americas) as a response to being officially discriminated against by white congregants in the Methodist church.
------- A Struggle for Equality and Justice
Civil rights movement was a nonviolent social movement to end racial discrimination in the US from 1954 to 1968.
#10
Concurrently with this is the abandonment of Seattle by those commercial functions that any 'city' relies upon to exist. This only will confirm any entrepreneurial individual to move out and move on. They'll have to engage in central planning as actual capitalism will no longer provide the staples of life.
#11
Been to Seattle a couple times - last time was when Son #1 came home from Iraq to JB Lewis Mcchord. A LOT different than when I was a kid although we hit the Space Needle and Pike Place again. Ugh
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/05/2023 18:46 Comments ||
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"Crazy Nancy Pelosi is looking at the 25th Amendment in order to replace Joe Biden with Kamala Harris. The Dems want that to happen fast because Sleepy Joe is out of it!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 9, 2020"
#5
She's not even House Speaker. Not in line any more. Barely sentient back then
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/05/2023 18:50 Comments ||
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#6
If Biden retires, the replacement VP is likely to be a House Dem. The person has to be approved by vote of the House. That is the process as I remember it for Ford and Rockefeller, but I was young. In other words, no Newsom, AOC, Michelle Obama, Pelosi, or Schiff are likely. McCarthy makes some dumb deals. I don’t think he would do any deal that dumb. I think the GOP could also leave the position open to freak out the Dems. If Gaetz was Speaker, he would try to put Trump into the VP slot. I don’t think he could do that.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
08/05/2023 19:44 Comments ||
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[Blaze] Historian David Garrow released a biography on former president Barack Obama in 2017, but it’s just now making headlines.
The biography contains a few shocking passages, one that includes a claim that Obama had once admitted to a former girlfriend that he had repeated fantasies about making love to men.
The admission was made in a letter that Garrow claims to have personally seen, and it paints a vastly different picture than most Americans have of Obama, who once opposed gay marriage.
The letter is currently in the possession of Emory University, however, Obama’s ex-girlfriend had provided a copy of the letter — with one paragraph redacted.
Garrow told the Tablet magazine that she had revealed the paragraph was about homosexuality.
"This is kind of important," Glenn Beck says, "because when he got into office he was against gay marriage and everything else and tried to say that, you know, he was, you know, a family values kind of guy."
#8
Big Mike isn't a manly man - and THAT is what Obama is fantasizing about/pining for, and the knowledge that he will never have that feeds his bitterness. It's a not uncommon theme in the gay community.
Posted by: Rex Mundi ||
08/05/2023 9:37 Comments ||
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#9
I bet that his girlfriend was pleased with his willingness to share his innermost self.
Posted by: Super Hose ||
08/05/2023 10:01 Comments ||
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#10
Yeah, but Oprah is cool with it.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
08/05/2023 12:08 Comments ||
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#11
This is one more thing I wish I hadn't heard about.
I mean, he's a disgusting nacissicistic prig. They mostly desire to love themself, but never quite do.
Posted by: ed in texas ||
08/05/2023 12:10 Comments ||
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#12
Remember the dead paddle-board chef was going to include in his booth that the Obama's almost never had meals together. Curious bit of info to add to this.
#15
#9 I bet that his girlfriend was pleased with his willingness to share his innermost self.
Made it easier for a threesome when she didn't have to find another chick
Posted by: Frank G ||
08/05/2023 13:21 Comments ||
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#16
And the talk that there are no photos of a pregnant Michelle.
It would be kind of cool-interesting if "they" take down Obama along with Biden. Barry had to have been in on Joe's dealings or certainly knew of them.
"They" need to cut the snake's head off. Besides, there's a new sheriff and a new deputy sheriff in town who both hail from Davos, and their names are Gavin Newsom & Gretchen Whitmer.
[Dawn] The US Army’s chief of staff stepped down on Friday, leaving a second military branch without a confirmed leader as a politician stalls the approval of Pentagon nominations to protest efforts to aid child sacrifice abortion access for troops.
More than 300 nominations — including the generals selected as the next heads of the Army and the Marine Corps — are awaiting confirmation by the US Senate, and the number continues to grow.
The Senate can still vote on nominees individually, but the "hold" by Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, means they cannot be quickly approved in groups by unanimous consent.
"Unfortunately, today, for the first time in the history of the Department of Defence, two of our services will be operating without Senate-confirmed leadership," Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a ceremony marking the end of General James McConville’s tenure as chief of staff.
"The failure to confirm our superbly qualified senior uniformed leaders undermines our military readiness. It undermines our retention of some of our very best officers. And it is upending the lives of far too many of their spouses, children, and loved ones," he said.
The Pentagon has emphasised that the delay in approving the nominations is negatively impacting military families, as they are unable to plan for things such as school for their children given the uncertainty about where they will be living.
LIVES, CAREERS ’IN LIMBO’
General Randy George — the current vice chief of staff of the Army — has been nominated to replace McConville as the head of the service and will perform those duties in an acting capacity in addition to his current job.
#1
Exercising the power of Congress per the Constitution.
The failure to confirm our superbly qualified senior uniformed leaders undermines our military readiness
1. They're politicians in uniform.
2. They're managers not warriors.
3. What was the last war they won?
4. If the borders of your homeland are being overrun, what is the purpose of a large standing army?
First, welcome back to the world of uncertainty that you people (the Flag Officers involved, AKA the Echelons Above Reality) left behind long ago in your climb to the top.
Second - and more importantly - improvise, adapt, and overcome, you goddamned idiots. The 2IC in each of those jobs needs to step up and take charge until the goons on Capitol Hill can get their heads out. MAKE DECISIONS - that's what you're paid for. I'm gonna remind you that right now, an O-10 makes nearly eighteen thousand dollars a month - EARN IT.
And I will gently point out to my fellow 'Burgers that the morning the Nazis rolled across their western border into France in 1940...there was no Minister of Defense or Army Chief of Staff, because they had been fired/resigned over a moronic political dispute.
We all know how well that turned out.
Mike
Posted by: Mike Kozlowski ||
08/05/2023 7:00 Comments ||
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#3
On Trump’s attempts to cling to power through force, General Milley reportedly told his colleagues in the Joint Chiefs: “They may try, but they’re not going to f@@###g succeed…You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the ones with the guns.”
#4
Gotta be honest, this Randy George looks like a REMF sapolio.
In 2008 George returned to the 4th Infantry Division, where he commanded 4th Brigade Combat Team. deployed to Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. Following command, he was a fellow on the Council of Foreign Relations, chief of the strategic policy division for the Pakistan-Afghanistan coordination cell on the Joint Staff, executive officer to the 33rd Vice Chief of Staff of the Army and then executive assistant to the commander of U.S. Central Command. He then returned to Fort Carson as the deputy commanding general (maneuver) of 4th Infantry Division.
After two staff assignments as the director of force management for the Army G-3/5/7 and deputy director for regional operations and force management in the J-3, George took command of the 4th Infantry Division in June 2017. In this role he deployed again to Afghanistan.George’s most recent command, I Corps at Joint Base McChord, after which he served as the senior military asst to the Secretary of Defense. He assumed duties as Vice Chief of Staff of the Army on August 5, 2022.
#7
Back in the old days the embassies in the central American countries would issue warnings that trying to cross the desert at this time of year was pretty much a death sentence.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
