It's Saturday, time for a political piece

The other day I got an email, one of those internet rumor things, about Barack Obama. This one questioned Obama's entire life, not just his birth certificate. The email/rumor wants to know why there aren't people from his past relating stories of being a friend of Obama in elementary or high school, or hanging out with him at Columbia University.

So, naturally, I checked with Snopes. That internet font of all knowledge. Snopes is like Wikipedia with a sense of humor. There, I learned that there have been people recalling Obama and Snopes even referenced an article by Barack Obama while he was at Columbia in the school's weekly newspaper. I urge you to read the article. It will tell you a lot about the president when he was in his early 20's.

In the article, he talks about how dangerous Reagan's policies in Europe over nuclear disarmament were. He, like so many back then, worried that Reagan would destabilize the world and trigger war with the Soviets by backing them into a corner.

"The Reagan administration's stalling at the Geneva talks on nuclear weapons has thus already caused severe tension and could ultimately bring about a dangerous rift between the United States and Western Europe. By being intransigent, Reagan is playing directly into the Russian's hands."

This was followed by a subtle correlation of Reagan to Hitler and praise of the Green Party.

I was around when Mr. Obama was known as Barry Soetero and we were embroiled in Vietnam. It amazes me that almost twenty years later, Columbia was still turning out people who thought America was the threat to world peace. And who viewed Selective Service (the draft) registration just as the draft itself was viewed back in the late 60's and early 70's. I'd read all of this before, countless times, back in the late 60's and early 70's. I had a number of friends who would have eaten this up.

Ironically, it was Reagan's "intransigence" that eventually led to the end of the Cold War. Many may disagree with me but Reagan's "out of the box" thinking won out because he called the Soviet bluff. Instead of Reagan playing into their hands, they played into his.

The email/rumor was concerned that Obama was some kind of stealth candidate, it implies a "Manchurian Candidate" status for him. So it seems the Birthers have a new campaign. I guess we could start calling them "Schoolers."

I am not making fun of the doubters. Some of the questions raised in the email/rumor are interesting. You see, if Obama wrote that article because he was working (or affiliated with) that paper then he did get involved in at least one college organization. If he wrote it as a contributing writer then it might be reasonable to assume he was close to the organizations and causes about which he wrote. He was not quite the loner he claimed to be:

"In his memoir and in interviews, Obama has said he got serious and buckled down in New York. "I didn't socialize that much. I was like a monk," he said in a 2005 Columbia alumni magazine interview. He told biographer David Mendell: "For about two years there, I was just painfully alone and really not focused on anything, except maybe thinking a lot."
[http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/columbia.asp]

He was only there two years. His first two years of college were at Occidental College in Los Angeles. And, based on the article he wrote in his second year, he seemed involved in causes and organizations.

I understand the "where are all the people who knew him then" questions. They didn't come out of the woodwork upon his running for the Democratic nomination or when he won it. They had to be sought out. See this article.


So, for the record, I don't worry about his place of birth nor do I worry that he is some kind of "Manchurian Candidate." What I worry about is that he immersed himself in Left-Wing politics in his 20's and, according to these articles, hasn't emerged from them yet.