Though he’s written two books about himself already, most people know very little about Barack Hussein Obama Jr.’s uncommonly privileged private life.
The conspiracy to install a radical Muslim in the White House runs wide and deep, dating back nearly four decades and incorporating a wide range of nefarious characters, from former Black Panther Bobby Rush to the hot chick who played the character Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager.
Uh-huh.
Hang with me on this one. Barack Obama became the instant “rock star” (to quote the overused cliche) of American politics when he gave the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Though he was just a state senator who had never held national office and was unknown to most of the country, the handsome and magnetic Obama delivered a passionate speech that instantly catapulted him into the ranks of serious contenders for the 2008 presidential nomination.
Funny thing is, Obama had once been considered a long shot to win the Senate race in Illinois. If someone had mentioned him as a presidential candidate a year earlier, even Obama would have laughed.
In 1996, Obama won election to the Illinois State Senate. In 2000 he tried to unseat four-term congressman Bobby Rush, but Rush toppled the little-known Obama by more than a two-to-one margin.
Of course, that was all part of the plan. Obama couldn’t become a congressman because “they” had bigger things in store for him— like the United States Senate, and then the presidency!
In early 2004, though, Obama was just one contender in a crowded field of contenders for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate. A Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll in February of that year found investment banker Blair Hull in the lead among Democratic candidates with 24 percent, followed by Obama with 15 percent, state comptroller Dan Hynes with 11 percent, and Cook County treasurer Maria Pappas with 9 percent.
Given that Hull planned to spend at least $40 million of his own money on his campaign, and Pappas and Hynes were Chicago political veterans with higher name recognition, Obama was facing an uphill struggle. I remember meeting an Obama campaign operative in a Chicago restaurant, and he was lamenting the reality that his candidate was such an unknown commodity. “If only people knew about my guy, he could be the next John Kennedy,” said the operative.
It seemed as if Obama was destined to finish second at best. But then came the revelations that Hull had been involved in a nasty split-up with his third wife, who had also been his second wife, as they had divorced and then remarried. She had obtained orders of protection against him on two occasions, and according to a 1998 police report, he was accused of striking her on the shin.
Hull remained in the race, but his candidacy was dead. Obama left Pappas and Hynes in the dust and easily won the primary—but he still faced a formidable opponent in Republican candidate Jack Ryan, something of a golden boy himself.
With a name straight out of a Tom Clancy novel and a Kennedyesque head of hair, the Harvard-bred Ryan was a millionaire investment banker who retired from the business world to teach at an inner-city Chicago parochial school. He married actress Jeri Ryan, best known for her portrayal of the aforementioned Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, and they had a son. If you were casting a movie about a senator and his wife, you wouldn’t cast the Ryans because they’d be too attractive.
But by the time Ryan was actually running for Senate, he was divorced—and it was the decision by a California judge in summer 2004 to release those divorce papers that led to Ryan’s political demise.
In the files, Jeri Ryan alleged that during the marriage, her husband had taken her to sex clubs in New York, Paris, and New Orleans and had asked her to have sex with him while other couples watched.
Ryan said the allegations were overblown: “We did go to one avant-garde nightclub in Paris, which was more than either of us felt comfortable with. We left and vowed never to return.”
Didn’t matter. Like Hull, Ryan was a dead man running (for office). He dropped out of the race, blaming the media, and was succeeded by Alan Keyes, an out-of-state extremist who had a better chance of becoming the next “American Idol” than the next senator from Illinois.
Obama won the election in a landslide, thanks to a couple of very “convenient” scandals. Even before he was sworn in, people were talking about him as a presidential candidate.
Enter the Muslim element.
On December 18, 2006, far-right-wing hysteric Debbie Schlussel wrote a very subtle and understated column on her blog titled “Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim.”
Yes, and once an idiot, always an idiot.
Citing Obama’s middle name, noting that his father was “apparently a Muslim,” ominously adding that Obama’s mother’s second husband was Indonesian (“likely another Muslim, as Indonesia is Muslim-dominated and has the largest Islamic population in the world”), and mentioning Obama’s “born-again affinity” for his father’s country of Kenya, Schlussel saw a very disturbing pattern.
“Is a man who Muslims think is a Muslim, who feels some sort of psychological need to prove himself to his absent Muslim father, and is now moving in the direction of his father’s heritage, a man we want as president when we are fighting the war of our lives against Islam?” wrote Schlussel. “Where will his loyalties be?”
Schlussel was on to him! She had figured out that once Obama was in the White House, he’d strap on the turban and declare his loyalties to Osama bin Laden. She’s brilliant, I tell you, brilliant!
More shit from Schlussel:
Is that even a man we’d want to be a heartbeat away from the presidency, if Hillary Clinton offers him the vice-presidential candidacy (which he certainly wouldn’t turn down)?
NO WAY, JOSE.... Or, is that HUSSEIN?
The caps are hers, by the way. You can’t invent people like this. Or clone them. Thank God.
Most rational people on all sides of the political debate recognize Schlussel as a fringe wannabe—a predictable nutball who would have to get a better dye job and dress sluttier to socialize at the same hateful cocktail parties as the likes of Ann Coulter. But the Obama/Muslim story picked up momentum with a “report” in Insight magazine—which is published by the ultraconservative Washington Times—that was picked up by (surprise!) the Fox News Channel and other hardcore conservative voices, such as the humorless Mark Steyn, a syndicated columnist who’s just to the right of Atilla the Hun.
The Insight article claimed Obama was a student at a radical Muslim school, known as a madrassa. Just as nefarious (and untrue) were the allegations that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had uncovered this information as part of a background check on Obama.
From the lead of the Insight article:
Are the American people ready for an elected president who was educated in a Madrassa as a young boy and has not been forthcoming about his Muslim heritage?
This is the question Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s camp is asking about Sen. Barack Obama.
An investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic party has discovered that Mr. Obama was raised as a Muslim by his stepfather in Indonesia.
The article cites an unnamed source that claims, “Obama’s education became a life-long relationship with Islam as a faith and Muslims as a community. This has been a relationship that contains numerous question marks.”
In January 2007, Mark Steyn took up the cry in an allegedly humorous column dripping with sarcasm and resentment.
Barack Obama announced last week that he was forming an exploratory committee to explore whether he can really be as fabulous as the media say he is. And happily the answer is: yes! He’s young, gifted and black, and white, and Hawaiian, and Kansan, and charismatic, and Congregationalist and Muslim. ... He was raised in an Indonesian madrassah by radical imams, which is more than John Edwards can say....
Some commentators say he’s a blank slate. And how long is it since we’ve seen one of those?
I’ll bet in those radical madrassahs they’re still using blank slates.
Yes, and blank slates are more unpredictable than Steyn’s right-wing diatribes.
An unsigned e-mail (what, you thought it would be signed?) began making the rounds:
Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a radical Muslim. ... Since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the Church of Christ to help purge the notion that he is still a Muslim, which, ideologically, he remains today.
Hey that’s the same trick lifelong Cubs fan Hillary Clinton tried to pull when she donned that Yankees cap to cater to New York voters!
When some responsible news organizations, including CNN and the Associated Press, checked out the Obama/madrassa story, it wasn’t hard to debunk it.
CNN’s senior international correspondent, John Vause, journeyed to the Basuki school in Indonesia, which Barack attended from 1969 to 1971. Vause found a public school, open to people of all faiths, with the students dressed in uniforms and the teachers wearing Western clothing.
Obama told Chicago’s WLS-Channel 7, “When I was six, I attended an Indonesian public school where a bunch of the kids were Muslim, because the country is 90 percent Muslim. The notion that somehow, at the age of six or seven, I was being trained for something other than math is ludicrous.”
The facts:
Barack Obama’s biological father was born in Kenya. The elder Obama was brought up as a Muslim—not a radical Muslim, just a Muslim—and was agnostic by the time he married. Obama’s parents divorced when Barack was just two. When Barack was six, his mother married an Indonesian man and they moved to Jakarta. He was there for four years, spending two years in the nonradical Muslim school and two years in a Catholic school.
Obama is a Christian. He is a member of the United Church of Christ. The school he attended for two years as a boy does not teach and has never taught radical Muslim beliefs.
Yet even after the story was refuted, some conservatives in the media wouldn’t let it go. On John Gibson’s radio show, he said that CNN’s Vause “probably went to the very [same] madrassa” as Obama.
The conspiracy continues!