Michelle Obama Pants On Fire

 

By Karin McQuillan
AmericanThinker.com

For those of you who couldn't stomach watching Michelle Obama Tuesday night, you missed quite a performance. She has become a pro at public speaking. She reads the teleprompter as smoothly as her husband, with emotion added in all the right places. It went over just fine in the hall, with Democrats mooning over her with the same creepy rapture we saw in Obama's mass appearances in 2008. They cried when she called herself Mom-in-Chief. Enough said.

What was most interesting was that her speech had obviously been reworked rapidly in the last week. It was a weird, copycat complement to Republicans. It's like an unsure competitor looking to see what the champion is doing, and quickly trying to mimic it. "Oh, you talked a lot about the American Dream and that resonated with the public -- watch me, I can do it, too." She even cribbed lines and phrases from the Romneys. The trouble is that the pretend principles did not match who the Obamas actually are. It was the perfect ersatz speech from the wife of our Faker in Chief.

It seemed to me that the Dems have been polling the impact of Dinesh D'Souza's important film, 2016: Obama's America and feel they have to counter it. Although all the experts keep telling us we mustn't say anything negative about Obama because the public won't believe it and won't like it, Obama does not share their confidence.

Michelle's whopper of the night was a direct lie to counter the impact of 2016:

And as I got to know Barack, I realized that even though he'd grown up all the way across the country, he'd been brought up just like me. ... But when Barack started telling me about his family - that's when I knew I had found a kindred spirit, someone whose values and upbringing were so much like mine. You see, Barack and I were both raised by families who didn't have much in the way of money or material possessions but who had given us something far more valuable - their unconditional love, their unflinching sacrifice and the chance to go places they had never imagined for themselves.

Michelle's Lie One: "even though he'd grown up all the way across the country."

Barack didn't grow up all the way across the country. He grew up in Indonesia. One of most the powerful parts of 2016 is the visual impact of seeing what Indonesia looks like, to realize this is the place where Obama spent his most formative childhood years. It is not America.

Michelle's Half-Lie Two: "he'd been brought up just like me." The true part of this is that both Obama and Michelle were brought up to despise America. They and their families had the same dream of redistributive "justice" for blacks. Obama's life passion has been overcoming what he sees as America's twin problems of racial and economic oppression. His goal, from the days he attended socialist conferences to becoming a community organizer, a state senator, and our president, has remained consistent. He wants to radically transform America from a free-market country based on equal opportunity and individual achievement to a European socialist model plus, with guaranteed income and all the big-government programs that tear down the wealthy and raise up the poor, evening out society in the name of social justice and equality. Journalist Ed Klein, author of The Amateur, Barack Obama in the White House, says Michelle is "even further to the left than her husband."

The false part of it is that Michelle was brought up in an intact family, in a homogenous community, secure in her self-identity. Her father worked hard, was a ward boss, and was even able to save some money to help her at Princeton.

Obama's upbringing -- brought to the screen with dramatic impact by D'Souza -- was not like that of other Americans.

It is true that Obama had a deprived childhood, but not materially. His parents didn't even date. His mother took him away from Hawaii and from his father a few weeks after he was born. He didn't meet his father until Obama was ten. It was a flying visit. He didn't get unconditional love or any kind of love at all from his father.

His mother married an Indonesian, then fought with him when he abandoned political purity for a good job with an American company. Ann Dunham was too interested in being an anthropologist to be a stay-at-home mom in Indonesia. According to the New York Times, Ann Dunham did hire a nanny to care for her young son -- the "tranny nanny," an openly gay man who carried on an affair with a local butcher.

Obama was miserable and lonely in Indonesia, teased for being black and fat.

D'Souza has a voiceover by Obama himself, reading his own memoir, explaining that his mother taught Obama to disrespect the stepfather he lived with as a sell-out and idolize his mythical Marxist anti-colonialist Kenyan father. She sent Obama off to live with his grandparents as a lonely pre-teen, rather than living with her son.

Obama described his feelings this way: "I was to live with strangers." And: "I'd arrived at an unspoken pact with my grandparents; I could live with them and they'd leave me alone so long as I kept my troubles out of sight."

Obama had no one making sure he was safe.

Obama's grandfather chose a black male father figure for him: Frank Marshall Davis. D'Souza spends some time on this relationship, but not the most distressing parts of it. Obama discusses Frank over a dozen times in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. Davis was a drinking buddy and shared the same politics as Obama's grandfather. Davis was a member of the Communist Party.

D'Souza leaves out that Marshall wrote a fictionalized memoir boasting of his bisexual and pedophilic exploits. In his memoir, Marshall describes how he and his white wife sexually abuse a 13-year-old girl entrusted to their care.

Anne came up many times the next several weeks, her aunt thinking she was in good hands. Actually she was. She obtained a course in practical sex from experienced and considerate practitioners rather than from ignorant insensitive neophytes....I think we did her a favour, although the pleasure was mutual.

This same Frank Marshall Davis, according to Obama's memoir, counseled Obama not to trust white people.

Michelle's Lie Three:

[Our two families] didn't begrudge anyone else's success or care that others had much more than they did ... in fact, they admired it. They simply believed in that fundamental American promise that, even if you don't start out with much, if you work hard and do what you're supposed to do, then you should be able to build a decent life for yourself and an even better life for your kids and grandkids.

Readers of American Thinker and viewers of 2016 know -- though Democrats don't -- that all of Obama's parental figures were leftists -- his grandfather; Frank Marshall Davis, his god-awful Communist father-substitute; his leftie mother and his absent Marxist father. Obama was taught by everyone he loved that American is unjust. He embraced their teaching that the highest calling in the world was to bring down the rich and make them pay, give their money to the poor, and bring America down to size on the world stage.

Michelle's Lie Four:

We learned about dignity and decency - that how hard you work matters more than how much you make ... that helping others means more than just getting ahead yourself. We learned about honesty and integrity - that the truth matters...that you don't take shortcuts or play by your own set of rules ... and success doesn't count unless you earn it fair and square.

Obama didn't do hard work. He was a slacker. According to his own memoir, corroborated by interviews with people who knew him and by archives from leftist organizations at the University of Chicago, Obama drifted in a druggie haze through high school and college, a tortured soul who wanted to be an authentic American black and felt he wasn't due to his white middle-class family. He latched on to revolutionary politics as a way to prove his loyalty to black suffering. He was driven to keep alive his fictive tie to his absent father and his father's dream of Marxist justice.

After a lackluster performance in prep school, he went to a middling college and continued his druggie ways, hanging out, he says in his memoir, with Marxist professors. He doesn't believe that anyone earns his achievements: "you didn't build that" is deep in his psyche. He didn't even build his own life.

Obama was accepted on the Harvard Law Review after they adopted an affirmative action policy that dropped the grade point requirements for the honor. He didn't earn that.

He was elected president of the Review. He was wrongly praised as the "first" black student to be president of the Law Review -- since the 1920s, which is never mentioned. It was such a big deal that it made national headlines. This one success led to job offers and book offers, and years later it was quoted as one of Obama's highest achievements and qualifications for the White House. Democrats did not learn, or want to learn, that Obama was also the first Harvard Law Review president to not write a single signed article for the Review. Hard work? Only in manipulating his fellow students to get elected to a post he could not fill.

It was on the basis of being the first black Law Review president that Obama was given a $125,000 advance to write a book about race relations. He never delivered. First he changed the book to a memoir, but he was not able to write that, either. No worry. Harvard law graduate Obama had already spent the money, but he begged poverty to be allowed to keep the advance and did. According to Jack Cashill, he got Bill Ayers to write a memoir for him, which he sold to another publisher for $40,000. (He did not pay the first publisher back.)

Obama was given a job as a lecturer at the University of Chicago based on the same slim qualification of being a black law review editor at Harvard. This lecture position was relabeled by himself and the press as being a constitutional law professor, an impressive title he never earned.

Hard work, honesty, integrity, truth -- not so much.

Michelle's Lie Five:

We learned about gratitude and humility - that so many people had a hand in our success, from the teachers who inspired us to the janitors who kept our school clean ... and we were taught to value everyone's contribution and treat everyone with respect.

Gratitude and humility -- just the qualities everyone associates with Obama.

From this Sunday's New York Times:

"I think that I'm a better speechwriter than my speechwriters," Mr. Obama told Patrick Gaspard, his political director, at the start of the 2008 campaign, according to The New Yorker. "I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I'll tell you right now that I'm going to think I'm a better political director than my political director."

Michelle's Lie Six:

Barack's grandmother started out as a secretary at a community bank...and she moved quickly up the ranks ... but like so many women, she hit a glass ceiling. And for years, men no more qualified than she was - men she had actually trained - were promoted up the ladder ahead of her, earning more and more money while Barack's family continued to scrape by. But day after day, she kept on waking up at dawn to catch the bus...arriving at work before anyone else ... giving her best without complaint or regret. And she would often tell Barack, "So long as you kids do well, Bar, that's all that really matters." Like so many American families, our families weren't asking for much. ... if you work hard and do what you're supposed to do, then you should be able to build a decent life for yourself and an even better life for your kids and grandkids.

Michelle wants us to imagine Obama's grandmother as an exploited secretary waiting for the bus, a victim, not "asking for much," just for a chance to build a better life for her children, but cheated by an unfair system that Obama is trying to correct.

His grandmother was vice president of a bank, the second largest in the state. She came from a middle-class family. She sent him to Hawaii's most prestigious prep school.

Barack didn't grow up in a disadvantaged family. His mother was a professional woman with an advanced degree. His stepfather worked for an American oil company in Indonesia.

Michelle did say one true thing about Barack:

So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago.

That is exactly the message of D'Souza's film, and Stanley Kurtz's book Radical-in-Chief, and every in-depth and honest analysis of Obama's life story. He has remained true to himself.

That is the tragedy and the danger to America.

Karin McQuillan served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Senegal, wrote mystery novels set in Kenya, was a clinical social worker and psychotherapist, and contributes regularly to American Thinker.