January 2007

Indonesian Story on Obama

Is translated on this blog–if you get past the weirdness about how Obama hasn’t been wanting to talk about the experience when he actually highlights it in both books and is willing to answer questions, but is just now being asked the specifics, the story provides a decent understanding of his time in Indonesia.

And funny enough, that matches the exact information Eric Zorn got from David Axelrod.

And this former page indicates that Besuki is, wait for it, a public school.

They are referencing Frontline to point out that the Saudi’s didn’t start sending money for madrassas until late in the 1970s, but frankly this is sort of a common knowledge point for anyone who has a basic understanding of Middle East history (yes, Indonesia isn’t in the Middle East, but the relevant notion of Saudi Arabia funding radicals is the point).

The bit about Suharto is a bit more complicated, but essentially correct–Muslim students were part of the coalition he used when he undertook the coup, but they were not Islamist students.

The lesson here is that expect this to only get worse for all of the Democratic candidates. Loons and their publications will create thousands of rumors with just enough to them to make sure the regular press checks them out and puts them in print even if to debunk them. And reading the comment thread over at Eric’s you see one particular twit who still thinks it’s a credible story.

For extra fun, you can find many folks who attended Besuki on Friendster–though it’s hard to tell if it’s a district in some cases or the particular elementary school. None of the pics seem to be of Islamists and in fact, there is quite the international flavor of past school attendees with many having moved around the world.

Keyes’ Company

The title refers to amazing feats of right wing baloney

Today’s winner: Insight Magazine, a magazine funded by weird religious cult leader, gets into the Obama is really a dangerous Muslim with ties to terrorism because he went to a predominantly muslim school. There’s some irony there.

And Fox News gets in on the lie

There are several problems with the idea, but the most central problem is that it is completely and profoundly ignorant of history. Obama is 10 years older than I am. I was in 5th grade in about 1981. He would have been going back to Hawaii in 1971. Madrassas built by Saudis and espousing Wahabism in different countries didn’t start until the huge increase in oil during the 1970s. So he left before the Saudis started to even undertake the expansion of madrassas in other countries. Oops.

Now, we don’t know from the books whether Obama even attended a madrassa. He said he went to a predominantly Muslim school which would be most schools in Indonesia including the public school system and private schools. Madrassas of the time would have stressed some study of the Koran, but also been fairly broad in the form of instruction, especially compared to today’s madrassas that are Saudi funded and Islamist.

Public schools in Indonesia teach religion–as many conservatives here would like to….

The Daily Dolt

Mike Allen:

BECK: Unfortunately, not all of it is going to look exactly like that masterpiece many Americans have painted in their heads. Mike Allen is Time magazine’s White House correspondent. Is Barack Obama the non-crazy Ross Perot, and we’re just on a first date with him?

ALLEN: Well, Glenn, all this talk of grilled caribou is making me hungry, but I’ll try to focus on the matter at hand. Glenn, you’re right. Senator Obama is smoking right now, no doubt about it. You’re right that none of those other candidates, Republicans or Democrats, are getting their picture with no shirt in People magazine as they try to have a beach vacation. And I think the Ross Perot analogy is a good one. You’re right that right now people are projecting onto Senator Obama what they hope to see in a politician. But, you know, that’s not a bad thing. And it’s certainly not a bad place for Senator Obama to be positioned.

The question, Glenn, is whether people like the idea of Senator Obama in the way that you’re describing, this sort of post-partisan, after November ’06, “why can’t we get along?” How will they feel as they learn more about Senator Obama, as they fill in the strokes, as you say? And, Glenn, that’s already starting to happen today.

There was an Associated Press story today about the liberal votes that Senator Obama took when he was a state senator in Illinois. Now, one of his colleagues points out to me that none of these are likely to hurt him in a Democratic primary, but there’s probably not many people who watched that clip of Senator Obama saying at the convention, “We worship an awesome God in the blue states, too,” who know that Senator Obama had 100 percent from Planned Parenthood when he was in the state legislature.


From the Call to Renewal Speech
:

I think that we should put more of our tax dollars into educating poor girls and boys. I think that the work that Marian Wright Edelman has done all her life is absolutely how we should prioritize our resources in the wealthiest nation on earth. I also think that we should give them the information about contraception that can prevent unwanted pregnancies, lower abortion rates, and help assure that that every child is loved and cherished.

But, you know, my Bible tells me that if we train a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not turn from it. So I think faith and guidance can help fortify a young woman’s sense of self, a young man’s sense of responsibility, and a sense of reverence that all young people should have for the act of sexual intimacy.

For those whining about triangulation, this is the point of that speech–to reframe the debate so morons like Allen understand many people of faith have different views on reproductive rights. In some cases that extends to abortion and even when it doesn’t it very often includes sensible sex education and contraception access.

Today’s Tosser

Fran Eaton

More angry letters are coming into The Star for the columns (Dec 31 and Jan 14) I’ve been writing about Barack Obama’s Chicago Southside church and his controversial pastor/spiritual advisor.

Yesterday I published on IR a letter I received from an Obama fan that called me “Satan” and “a dog” for questioning the black supremacy teachings at Obama’s church.

And yet, no black supremacy teaching has been identified at Obama’s church. Eaton has tried to claim that Afrocentrist Christianity is some sort of ideology of supremacy, but it is the concept that Western historical perspectives shouldn’t be used alone to understand history. That’s hardly a supremacist view–it’s more like a rounded view of history.

Daily Dolt

An early winner with ABC’s Jake Tapper claiming Obama has no plan for Iraq (never mind the ‘winning’ phrase as the administration has no plan to ‘win’ Iraq).

Earlier in the report, after playing a portion of Obama’s video announcing his decision, Tapper suggested that Obama has no plan for Iraq, saying, “Left unanswered today: responses to tough questions on how to win the war in Iraq.” Tapper went on to note that, in 2002, Obama was “[r]allying against the [Iraq] war in Chicago,” but made no mention of several interviews Obama gave, including one on Nightline itself, in response to President Bush’s January 10 address, during which Bush called for 21,500 additional U.S. troops to be deployed to Iraq. On the January 10 edition of Nightline, Obama told co-host Terry Moran that the problem in Iraq is “political,” not “military,” and said that “[a] phased withdrawal is the only leverage we have to force that political accommodation.”

Not to mention he has given two long policy speeches on a plan for a phased withdrawal in a little over a year. Details, schmetails….

I currently have about 1000 Daily Dolts for Obama alone, but eventually we will get back to some sense of normalcy and other Illinois doltishness.

Someone Tell Roeser about Snopes

It’s really hard to tell how this idiot ever was given any public credence, but he has four questions to Barack Obama:

Barack Obama can end the controversy as well. His office seems to regard any questions of a possible earlier religious commitment as unfair. Not so. If he can answer the question as completely as Kennedy did, he deserves to move up to the next level.

Question No. 1: When you were a youth, you went to a Muslim school for several years. Did you ever embrace the Muslim faith then and later renounce it?

Question No. 2: Do Muslims have any reason to believe that you were once of their faith and have rejected it?

Question No. 3: Was there ever a time when people would have reason to believe you were a Muslim? The fact that Hussein is your middle name is one reason-the name of Mohammad’s grandson whose date of death is regarded as a high holy day in the Muslim faith.

Question No. 4: Do you realize that the Koran specifies that anyone who was a member of the Muslim faith and rejected should be done away with?


The famous internets has already dealt with the issue-
-as has Obama

Barack Obama’s father (also named Barack Obama) departed Hawaii, leaving his wife and son behind, when young Barack was only two years old. Four years later Barack’s mother, Anna, remarried (to an Indonesian oil company manager), and she and Barack moved to Djakarta, the capital and largest city of Indonesia. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama did not provide any detail about the schools he attended in Indonesia, saying only that:

[My mother’s] initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send me to the International School, where most of Djakarta’s foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course.

Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama elaborated on his early schooling, explaining that he attended both Catholic and Muslim schools in Indonesia; not out of any particular religious affiliation, but because his mother wanted him to obtain the best education possible under the circumstances:

During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables.

Confusingly, a 2004 Salon profile of Obama reverses the order in which he attended those schools:

When Obama was 6, Anna remarried. Her new husband was Lolo, an Indonesian oil company manager, and the new family moved to Djakarta, where Obama’s sister Maya was born.

After two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school, Obama was sent by his mother back to her parents’ home so that he could attend Hawaii’s esteemed Punahou Academy

So the reason Obama’s office thinks the questions are unfair is because there are only so many ways you can answer the same questions over and over again.