John Podhoretz excoriated me for a characterization of Barack Obama that has earned wide if not universal acceptance among conservatives. Surely he protests too much. John is a very good journalist; if he had read my essays rather than react to a one-line reference to them in a blog post, I am convinced he would have come away with a different impression.
On pages 38-39 of his new book Conservative Victory, for example, Sean Hannity approvingly quotes my two-year-old sketch of how Obama’s family background cultivated a hostility to the United States:
But it’s been suggested that one of Obama’s voluntary relationships is more revealing of his radicalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-capitalism than all of the others: his choice of marital partner. The columnist known as Spengler, writing for the Asia Times, quoted Alexandre Dumas: “When you want to uncover an unspecified secret, look for the woman.” In Obama’s case, wrote Spengler, there have been two principal women in his life: his late mother and “his rancorous wife Michelle. Obama’s women reveal his secret: he hates America.”
Michael Ledeen has had some things to say about this as well.
I also parsed Michelle Obama’s Princeton undergraduate thesis and reviewed Obama’s own writings, citing in particular this passage from Dreams of My Father, writing in July 8, 2008:
. . . As we walked back to the car, we passed a small clothing store full of cheap dresses and brightly colored sweaters, two aging white mannequins now painted black in the window. The store was poorly lit, but toward the back I could make out the figure of a young Korean woman sewing by hand as a child slept beside her.
The scene took me back to my childhood, back to the markets of Indonesia: the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betel nut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms . . . I saw those Djakarta markets for what they were: fragile, precious things. The people who sold their goods there might have been poor, poorer even than folks out in Altgeld [the Chicago housing project where Obama engaged in community organizing]. They hauled fifty pounds of firewood on their backs every day, they ate little, they died young. And yet for all that poverty, there remained in their lives a discernible order, a tapestry of trading routes and middlemen, bribes to pay and customs to observe, the habits of a generation played out every day beneath the bargaining and the noise and the swirling dust. It was the absence of such coherence that made a place like Altgeld so desperate, I thought to myself.
This Romantic notion about the authenticity of Third World people as opposed to the alienation of Americans comes right out of his mother’s doctoral dissertation, on the struggle of Indonesian blacksmiths to survive in a globalized market. It is true, as John says, that one could have picked up this sort of ideological orientation at an American university. That, presumably, is where Ann Dunham absorbed the left-wing views that took her to Indonesia. But there is something more: Obama spent four formative years in Indonesia and was raised by an anthropologist with a fierce ideological attachment to the Third World. It is one thing to acquire a general ideological view, and quite another to feel an existential connection to the struggles of the Third World.
And in a way, I have a modicum of sympathy for Obama’s view of things. My first piece of professional journalism was a report from Kenya on the plight of East African Asians, published in the London Spectator in 1974. As an economist I have worked in Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, Thailand, and Russia at the peak of its economic crisis in the early 1990s. I have seen more hungry children begging in the streets than I like to remember. At times it was almost (and I emphasize “almost”) enough to make me a communist. It is a terrible thought that America can’t fix all the world’s problems; when you see these problems as individuals, not as statistics, it is a heart-wrenching thought.
As I wrote in the July 2008 essay,
To ascribe a special grace to America is outrageous, as outrageous as the idea of special grace itself. Why shouldn’t everyone be saved? Why aren’t all individuals, nations, peoples and cultures equally deserving? History seems awfully unfair: half or more of the world’s 7,000 or so languages will be lost by 2100, linguists warn, and at present fertility rates Italian, German, Ukrainian, Hungarian and a dozen other major languages will die a century or so later. The agony of dying nations rises in reproach to America’s unheeding prosperity.
One has to come from the Third World, or at least have spent a good deal of time in the Third World, to comprehend quite how agonizing is the plight of failing peoples. One response is to blame the hated hegemony of America; that is precisely what President Obama did at the United Nations on Sept. 23, 2009 when he said:
No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between nations of the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War.
That statement appears absurd; as Charles Krauthammer pointed out, Henry Kissinger observed that peace is only maintained by hegemony or balance of power. The Obama administration is doing a number of things that leave the world baffled, alienating friends, propitiating rivals and appeasing enemies, with foreseeably disastrous results for America’s position in the world. These destructive actions, I maintain, are the predictable impulses of a man whose deepest loyalties pertain to the existentially-challenged peoples of the Third World.
I stand by this analysis. I believe that events since I wrote my essay on “Obama’s Women” confirm it. Whether a particular phrase crossed the line is a subject I don’t care to debate. As a teenager I raced small sailboats, and was taught that if you don’t turn over once in a while, you’re not taking the risks you need to win. Sailors and writers who don’t take risks are boring.
April 14th, 2010 | 10:18 am
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April 14th, 2010 | 10:51 am
David Goldman’s thesis strikes me as a real stretch — would it be fair to characterize Abraham Lincoln on the basis of Mary Todd Lincoln? I don’t think it would be. Would it be fair to characterize Ronald Reagan because he married a wife who was a devoted believer in astrology? I don’t think so…..
April 14th, 2010 | 11:34 am
Lincoln and Reagan did not grow up in the shadow of an ideologically committed and fanatically opinionated mother. Obama certainly did and she is a permanent presence in his innermost persona. Goldman’s analysis in this is important and useful. Since Obama is such a slick customer and is rarely truthful it is important to try to understand what is at the base of his thinking. And Goldman is undoubtedly right in ascribing the ur-text to his mother.
There have been other influences in his evolution, and his wife is probably also a significant influence but not nearly as central as that of his mother. She helped in his choices of career and social behaviour but the innermost person, which is what directs his thinking as he leads the world towards a possible disaster, is what he was taught by his mother.
April 14th, 2010 | 11:35 am
I would absolutely consider it fair to characterize a man, at least in part, on his choice of a wife, and vice versa. To consider such a choice neutral only reveals one’s contempt for marriage or one’s ignorance of its primacy in shaping and/or reflecting a person’s worldview.
April 14th, 2010 | 11:45 am
David Goldman is saying the right sort of things, and they need to be repeated more frequently. This is just the beginning of a long and painful process that must continue until we have restored our society to health. If we do not start “psychologizing” our politicians, our celebrities, our institutions, our media elites, and our popular culture, we will never get to the bottom of the ills that pague this country. How else are we supposed to clean up the mess made by decades of leftist agitprop, sentimentality, pseudo-religion (much of it peddled here in the pages of FIRST THINGS), mis-education, and entitlement? We can start by psychologizing, that’s how. We can start by exposing this all for the weakness and rot that it is, and the personalities behind it for the for the subversives they are. It is about time somebody cut through this politically correct fog and mock-decency and began telling it like it is. Thanks to David Goldman for psychologizing with a hammer.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:05 pm
“I also parsed Michelle Obama’s Princeton undergraduate thesis…”
So you did sentence diagrams of it to find the verb and so forth? How nice.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:10 pm
The choice is not neutral, but the factors are many. For you to assume from a distance that you can understand a person’s worldview by his choice of a wife is, at best, an overstatement. Stalin’s wife, by all accounts, was relatively stable and kind. Can we learn about Stalin from looking at his wife? I think not. And as for Mr. Rosset’s psycho-analysis of Obama’s “fanatically opinionated” mother — well that belongs on a birther website.
April 14th, 2010 | 12:38 pm
If you are going to psychoanalyze Obama, just read his own words in “Dreams from My Father” and “The Audacity of Hope”. He is a pretty fair writer and his first book offers a pretty good look at his thinking. (The second is pretty much a campaign-style fluff piece).
If you just take his own words seriously, it is pretty clear that he identifies strongly with people and viewpoints that are anti-American (or at the very least, anti-American exceptionalism). The conspiracy theory nonsense is sad in many respects, but also it is completely unnecessary if one wants to place Obama properly in the political landscape. He speaks moderately, but his viewpoints and actions are far left-wing and they have been his entire political career.
When one wades into the tall grass of how his mother’s education and viewpoint affected him it is pretty easy to get into fever swamp territory.
I agree that Obama is slick and not particularly truthful in his political pronouncements, but his first book is stunningly honest and frankly should have set warning bells ringing off in anyone who was paying attention.
April 14th, 2010 | 1:10 pm
“Stalin’s wife, by all accounts, was relatively stable and kind. Can we learn about Stalin from looking at his wife?”
Oh you bet you can. Dive into Montefiore’s “Young Stalin”, published a couple of years ago, to learn about his deep passions, his taking everything personally and his repeatedly choosing violence over mercy, using for excuses the pain he suffered over personal losses. His choice of wife is in accord with his view of and wishes for himself.
April 14th, 2010 | 1:25 pm
Oh yes, Obama and his leftist friends like Larry Summers and Tim Geithner. I wish that he had more deeply internalized a “preferential option for the poor,” but as it is he is as moderate as they come.
And, “alienating friends?” Perhaps “being a real friend and not letting ostensible friends commit long-term strategic suicide by pissing off powers like Russia” is a more accurate take on that. If that’s supposedly damaging America’s place in the world, I’ll take such common sense any day.
April 14th, 2010 | 1:47 pm
I agree with Steve Billingsly. I’m not a fan of Ayn Rand, but she does have a terrific essay on “psychologizing” which I urge everyone to read. Her point is that psychologizing is a “racket”, a game which those of the gnostic persuasion love to play. She would have us focus on actions, words and conscious choices rather than on our own exquisite sensibilities. Yes, Obama does have an anti-American and anti-military streak, but so do many other liberals, including other elected officials.
April 14th, 2010 | 1:55 pm
It’s ironic that the writer characterizes Ann Dunham’s work in Indonesian as being of Communist orientation. In reality, she was an early and influential pioneer of the microfinance movement, which is dedicated to bringing households in the developing world out of poverty by lending entrepreneurs small amounts of working capital. Not exactly the stuff of socialism, now is it?
April 14th, 2010 | 2:09 pm
And so under theory of the “choice of a wife shapes a man’s worldview ” we can devine that Abraham Lincoln married Mary Todd (whom the President’s secretaries nicknamed “the Hellcat”) because he too wished to engage in manic shopping sprees and divine with psychics?
April 14th, 2010 | 2:41 pm
“On pages 38-39 of his new book Conservative Victory, for example, Sean Hannity approvingly quotes my two-year-old sketch”. Is this reference, this approval, to be taken seriously?
“I also parsed Michelle Obama’s Princeton undergraduate thesis”
Is the use of “parsed” an assurance that the analysis is sound and to be accepted uncritically? No comprehension or human feeling are shown for Ms. Obama’s logical assessment, emotionalism included, of black separatism, indicating a lack of a human-ness necessary to a journalist of spirituality, and indicating a discounting of that history that gives as much validation to the ethos of black separatism as to that of Jewish ease, and even assimilation, in the USA. That is not at all to say a journalist of spirituality has to be nice, but that they have to treat topics and people comprehensively rather than polemically.
Misrepresented, it seems, is Barack Obama’s juxtaposition of the Altgeld denizens with those of South Asia by labeling it a “Romantic notion about the authenticity of Third World people as opposed to the alienation of Americans” which seems not to be the sense of the passage (parsers can jump off track). The clue to the passage may rather be traced by the phrase, “It was the absence of such coherence…”, as to be found in Indonesia, in Altgeld society which Obama found to be “a heart-wrenching thought”. It may also have been enough to “almost (…emphasize “almost”) enough to make [Obama] a communist”.
But Obama’s words, “No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation. No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold. The traditional divisions between nations of the South and the North make no sense in an interconnected world; nor do alignments of nations rooted in the cleavages of a long-gone Cold War”, are not necessarily supporting evidence that it did make him a communist or near-communist and that he is acting today upon that view.
They can as well be regarded as proof that Obama can speak to the nations in the cant which they all prefer, which is the scrim before all their own self-interested machinations. And that he can speak it in such as way that not only are they unable to accuse him of cant, but must applaud his words, words which work also to actually absolve the USA of responsibility for those very heart-wrenching world problems, going some way to disarm those using such cant against the United States.
It may be that Obama is actually a chess player, and tries to keep it quiet, a skill required for dealing with China. Maybe partly identifying with others is to pull them off-balance a bit. The fact that, in contrast to Clinton, instead of crafting his own healthcare plan to be trashed by them, he made Congress own the health care legislation and mark it with all its own rottenness is evidence of this. If he can get Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, Venezuela, Israel, Republican, Democratic hypocrites, etc. never to be sure whether he’s a rube or a stealth bomber, that’s good for the USA.
As long as any commentator is compulsively determined to see Michelle and Barack Obama as monsters or as saints, instead of human beings, so their analyses of the Obamas will be degenerate. One value of such analyses may be, of course, in the number of readers who might continually click, and might even pay, to feed a psychological addiction to them, and thus serve to attract advertisers, and/or to cut a path to the next commentator’s gig or byline.
‘Fox Things’, indeed. Hannity might make Goldman a regular (nice work if you can get it) and if he looked liked Ann Coulter, I might tune in.
April 14th, 2010 | 3:01 pm
David Goldman, as Spengler, was one of the very very few writer-pundits who tried to get a true angle on Obama, and he did it in a way that would show what a mess we were in for. He tried to warn us about the reality behind the Obama mask. The great Shelby Steele also took a crack at it, but got stuck on a larger but less pointed theory of process about black public figures in America.
On the other hand, I think that Obama can now be approached much more directly and understood by his serial actions against American interests. There’s less need for the deeper psychology now that we see that the behavior predicted by Goldman’s insight has come to fruition.
We are now in the predicted terrible mess, and it has been tiresome to watch how, of the many uses that the Left can make of a black president, they have gone to the well so routinely for the You’re All Racists! song and dance revue. And that was as predictable as water flowing downhill. Again, what a mess.
April 14th, 2010 | 3:15 pm
Thanks to Goldman for an astute and telling analysis that over time has proven to be more accurate than some might wish. The Worlds of Steve seems stuck on denials, a few even going to extreme lengths in attempts to foist off fair comment with absurd comparisons. President Barach UnBush indeed shows the strong influence of his misguided maternal upbringing in far too many ways. Though male by gender, he’s regretfully never learned to be “a man”. Too our nation’s ultimate sorrow and chagrin, and his eventual shame.
April 14th, 2010 | 3:25 pm
First time commenter, long time reader. Mr. Spengler, you are perhaps one of the most intelligent and independent voices in the blogosphere, and you have changed my viewpoints on a good number of things. That’s why it pains me when you write these things to pad your conservative resume to become a FoxNews commentator. What you quote Obama as saying is kinda true, didn’t you say as much when you pointed out the Western fascination with Susan Boyle, and how American kids are turning away from learning classical music, and the fact that East Asian kids are learning it is part of the reason for that regions rise? You are vastly more intelligent and interesting than Sarah Palin, and I understand how seeing the zeros on her contract can burn, but stick to your guns.
April 14th, 2010 | 3:48 pm
Keep up the good fight. “Respectable” conservatives have been afraid to call Obama what he is. I’ve spent my life around hard-core leftists. They really do hate America. Normal people have trouble grasping this. Especially since the hard-core leftists tend to be wealthy. How can they hate a country that has given them so much? Well, they do.
April 14th, 2010 | 4:07 pm
Who the hell is Barach UnBush, 49erDweet?
I sure hope that First Things isn’t turning into the sort of cesspool that condones not even calling world leaders by their own given names. As John Cummins queries, since when is being quoted by Sean Hannity a mark of honor and an indication of insight?
Don’t we traditional types have our hands full defending Benedict XVI against the barbarians within the gates (as David Goldman has rightly done)? There’s no need to then join forces with the FoxNewsCorp band of barbarians.
April 14th, 2010 | 4:29 pm
Barack Hussein Obama/Soetoro concealed his background with more care than other recent candidate for the presidency. It is natural that in trying to understand who he is and what he stands for, that one would try –like any biographer– to account for the experiences and the dynamics that shape his world-view and his sense of himself. This Mr. Goldman has done, and for years. Pace some more sanguine commentators, the President’s radicalism is not something he picked up at either Occidental or Columbia in the usual way that undergraduates pick up the fold-marxism prevalent among academic faculties. Rather, his radical leftism was cultivated from birth. It has recently been revealed that his maternal grandfather had an FBI file (now destroyed), and his mother’s anti-Americanism and choice to become an expatriate in a third world Muslim nation are surely significant. The fact that his maternal grandfather arranged for him to be mentored by an African-American stalinist in Hawaii (one who had signficant connections in Chicago, by the way) is surely significant. His ault friendships with apoligsts for Muslim terror liek Rashid Khalidi and with actual American terrorists like Billy Ayers are surely consonant with themes to which he was exposed with his mother’s milk. Psychologically, I tend to think that the most significant factors in his development are his abandonment by first his father and then his mother. Like many abused people, he came to identify with those who –he must have felt– had betrayed him, internalizing the anti-American values his mother must have taught him. Whether he knew of Brack Obama, Sr.’s communism during his childhood is unknown. Mr. Goldman’s pithy comment was written to bite, but have the verifiable facts been disproven? They have not, because what he said, in the larger article of course, but specifically in the tidbit quoted by John Podhoretz, is true. Stanley A. Dunham was a left-wing anthropologist; she did marry two Muslim 3rd world men; and characterizing her son as a 3rd world anthropologist who does not identify with the American people accurately reflects the tenor of more than a few of the President’s public statements (such as the inadvertently public statement from the San Francisco fund-raiser.) Keep the hits coming, Mr. Goldman; the movement to save America has nothing to gain from censoring you.
April 14th, 2010 | 5:17 pm
Dear Mr Goldman,
My apologies for too-rapid typing.
April 14th, 2010 | 6:09 pm
Mr. “Punditarian”, you’d watch Mr. Goldman on Fox, right?
April 14th, 2010 | 7:06 pm
The Michael Ledeen link is wrong – it should be
http://pajamasmedia.com/michaelledeen/2010/04/13/the-what-is-barack-obama-debate/?singlepage=true
April 14th, 2010 | 7:16 pm
I believe the essential criterion for “appropriate” is whether it is true, second is whether it is relevant, distant third is whether it is “sensitive”. In this case, criteria one and two are amply fulfilled while the third is not abandoned completely (I can think of a lot more reprehensible ways to say the same thing).
April 14th, 2010 | 9:23 pm
“Tom”,
“Obama is the loyal son of a left-wing anthropologist mother who sought to expiate her white guilt by going to bed with Muslim Third World men”
Where can you go to make this “more reprehensible? Pinko”? Four-letter words for “going to bed with”, or can he stop at ‘schtupped by’? And he uses “going to bed with” to refer to the woman’s marriages. Hardly the way to treat a lady, and de mortuis nil nisi bonum, so Mr. Goldman’s expressive choices seem to energetically display contempt and do dishonor. Though he may have intended them only to intensify the assertion of her identification and sympathizing with the “Third World” (boy, that takes us back 30 or 40 years, doesn’t it?) they, as virtual character and sexual slurs, intrinsically cross the bounds of such an application.
To give the benefit of the doubt, Mr. Goldman may have intended that the phrase “Third World men” signify not racism but a concept subordinate to and subsumed by “expiate her white guilt”. But in the context of his other political concerns, the addition of “Muslim” to “Third World men” seems akin to, in another time and place but a similar spirit, spouting “schwarze”.
By the way, I’m not as exercised over, and not surprised at, this instance of Mr. Goldman’s style of thinking and writing as are so many others here, and feel he should be free to wield it.
April 14th, 2010 | 9:33 pm
For the sake of temperance, let’s marry this with Mr. Goldman’s picture,
“The Story of Barack Obama’s Mother”
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1
729524,00.html
or
http://tinyurl.com/Time-story-obamas-mother
April 14th, 2010 | 11:32 pm
That a debate can still exist–at this point in his presidency–about the composition of Obama’s core is proof enough that some essential, soulful element is missing.
April 15th, 2010 | 12:07 am
“That a debate can still exist–at this point in his presidency–about the composition of Obama’s core is proof enough that some essential, soulful element is missing.”
Nonsense. It’s proof only that you want there to be an essential, soulful element…missing”. You want Obama to be a monster.
In case you don’t come up with lines like that for a living, be aware that your skill is salable.
April 15th, 2010 | 5:58 am
@John Cummins:
I would be unable to watch Mr. Goldman on Fox News because I do not own a television set.
I would be delighted to read Mr. Goldman, however, wherever he decides to publish: First Things, The Asia Times, wherever.
I continue to believe that Mr. Goldman’s concerns about the President’s biography are legitimate, and at any rate his expression of them is 1,000% milder than what used to pass for attempts to understand the President on the left-wing side, during the previous administration.
April 15th, 2010 | 9:29 am
Sorry, John Podhoretz is right, and it is disingenuous to play the “If he had taken the time to read my essay…” card. We’re not in a psychology seminar or writing an autobiography. This is at least partially a political advocacy blog and the issues at play are the tone of political discourse and basic decency in public debate. It is very disheartening to see one of Mr. Goldman’s stature sink into the gutter of trash-talking Obama’s entire family under the guise of seeking “truth”. You think that language is grounded in objective evidence, Mr. Goldman? Well, Grandma is standing by with her lye soap and she isn’t much interested in hearing it. Conservatives had better start standing up to this kind of bilious talk, because it seems to be spreading. At the very least, Mr. Goldman and his defenders now have no cause to complain about the vile attacks on the Palin family.
April 15th, 2010 | 10:18 am
The background of any American president is well worth looking into, and should be examined. The office is too important, and wields too much power, for questions about family, upbringing, political views to be brushed aside as “Now, now, that’s not being NICE!”
It’s too bad the American public didn’t take a closer look at Obama, before electing him to this powerful, crucial office!
An excellent essay, Mr. Goldman.
April 15th, 2010 | 11:18 am
Why is it too bad, Rhinestone Suderman? One thing I don’t understand is the reason why people who stoop to vile slander against the current president simply assume that a great disaster has occurred as a result of people not heeding the slander.
What exactly is the disaster into which the American people have walked? I’m not saying that Obama is perfect or that his policy decisions are not debatable, but I’m having a great deal of trouble getting inside the heads of those who find it axiomatic that he is a monster. Is there perhaps some sort of projection going on here? I wouldn’t leap to that conjecture if there was some more plausible explanation of the bile, but I can’t think of one.
April 15th, 2010 | 11:38 am
It seems quite clear that both John Podhoretz did not read Goldman carefully and that Goldman enjoys both racing and tipping sailboats.
April 15th, 2010 | 12:02 pm
Other Steve,
As Thomas Sowell said in an interview with Peter Robinson, the election of John McCain would have been a disaster; the election of Barack Obama is a catastrophe. What is the nature of that catastrophe? Very simple. Even without the President’s disastrous foreign policy innovations, his economic policies mean the destruction of the American economy. Now when the American economy chokes on its debt, its over-regulation, and the shortsightedness and corruption of the bureaucrats who run it, the result will not be the same as the collapse of the Argentine or Greek economy. When the American economy goes down the toilet, it will take the rest of the world with it. And the collapse of all of the economies which depend on the engine of the American economy in order to keep grinding poverty at bay means war across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe on a scale that you can not imagine. There will descend on the world a dark age to make the dark age of medieval Europe seem positively bright and sunny by comparison. David Goldman has been writing about the danger of this situation for years, at the Asia Times. It is an awful shame to see it finally come to pass because willfully self-indulgent and self-deceiving American voters decided that they were the ones they were waiting for.
April 15th, 2010 | 1:03 pm
Thanks David, a good response and as always, to the point.
April 15th, 2010 | 2:36 pm
Greg, 4/14 at 1:55: Microfinance not exactly the stuff of socialism? Well, yes – exactly the stuff of socialism. Or, more accurately, cell-based communisim accompanied by feminist social engineering in the undeveloped world.
Have you heard of the Grameen Foundation and the Sixteen Decisions?
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=215&sortorder=articledate
April 15th, 2010 | 3:51 pm
Well, among other things, Other Steve, it’s too bad, because:
The American people are now saddled with a bloated, unsustainable national health care plan. The American economy has changed to a socialist one, which won’t be good for the future.
Obama makes a habit of trying to appease enemies, such as Iran, while insulting allies like Israel and Canada. (He even managed to diss the Dalai Lama!)
Failed plans like the cash for clunkers, and the stimulus program, which haven’t worked, and which have put us more deeply in debt.
And, many other things I don’t have time to do into now. In short, yes, the presidency has been a disaster. I suspect you, however, find it all a success, in which case there’s no arguing with you.
There’s also no arguing with those who see Obama as being above criticism. I don’t consider him a monster; I consider him a bad president. You, however, seem to think him beyond any sort of criticism, or disagreement.
April 15th, 2010 | 5:07 pm
Hereby another piece which supports Goldman’s maternal hypothesis:
A Jewish Frankenstein
http://www.forward.com/articles/127217/
April 15th, 2010 | 6:46 pm
Borderline Conditions and Pathological Narcissism
Otto F. Kernberg, M.D.
Jason Aronson, Inc. – New York, 1975
p.234-235:
Chronically cold parental figures with covert but intense aggression are a very frequent feature of the background of these patients. A composite picture of a number of cases that I have been able to examine or to treat shows consistently a parental figure, usually the mother or a mother surrogate, who functions well on the surface in a superficially well-organized home, but with a degree of callousness, indifference, and nonverbalized, spiteful aggression. When intense oral frustration, resentment, and aggression have developed in the child within such an environment, the first condition is laid for his need to defend himself against extreme envy and hatred. In addition, these patients present some quite specific features which distinguish them from other borderline patients. Their histories reveal that each patient possessed some inherent quality which could have objectively aroused the envy or admiration of others. For example, unusual physical attractiveness or some special talent became a refuge against the basic feelings of being unloved and of being the objects of revengeful hatred. Sometimes it was rather the cold hostile mother’s narcissistic use of the child which made him “special,” set him off on the road in a search for compensatory admiration and greatness, and fostered the characterological defense of spiteful devaluation of others.
April 16th, 2010 | 10:16 am
Until Sunday morning it seemed as if Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister, was under attack from everybody in the world except his mother. Then it all changed. Zila Netanyahu, 84, said in an interview that her son’s actions made her feel embarrassed rather than proud. She particularly objected to his release of Palestinian prisoners and said peace with the Arabs was “preposterous”. —–Patrick Cockburn (1997)
Should we infer that Zila did not bed with Muslim Third World men or is it more prudent to investigate? Paradoxical but unsurprising is that by the yardstick of the Y chromosome, the world’s Jewish communities are closely related to Syrians and Palestinians, suggesting that all are descended from a common ancestral population that inhabited the Middle East some four thousand years ago. Maybe Bibi is disinclined to peace negotiations with people of his common ancestry because of his mother’s influence who did or did not bed with Arabs. If she did not, then her animosity towards Arabs might be the result of her not being able to taste the forbidden fruit. Maybe David Goldman’s mother has a theory of her own about Zila. It is certainly worth a cursory check because it might also explain why Bibi is thought to be a liar.
Ariel Sharon, his own Infrastructure Minister and architect of his victory in the election last May, was quoted last week as telling a group of Israeli settlers: “Bibi Netanyahu is a dangerous man for the state of Israel. I do not believe one word that leaves that man’s mouth.” —–Patrick Cockburn (1997)
…Referenced “Cockburn” because it seems so fitting. :-)
April 16th, 2010 | 11:44 am
Anyone who writes something so crude and hurtful about someone’s long-dead mother and her marriage is certainly unfit to edit a magazine that purports to present a religious worldview. Goldman should go. Spit vitriol as “Spengler” if you want, but the idea that the hate-filled “Spengler” could edit “First Things” never made sense.
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