Old Obama Girlfriends Revealed in New Obama Book: With Excerpts From His Love Letters

[bsteadman]

Old Obama Girlfriends Revealed in New Obama Book — With Excerpts From His Love Letters

The Blaze
Jonathon M. Seidl
5/2/2012

Excerpt:

• New book by WaPo reporter David Maraniss reveals identity of Obama’s old girlfriends
• He exchanged several letters with one, Alex McNear, during a long-distance relationship — some of which Maraniss includes
• Other girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, was the mysterious woman Obama mentions in his “Dreams From My Father” Memoir
• Obama, however, says that in his memoir she was a “compression” of several girlfriends
• She reveals in her diaries a very distant, reserved, and sometimes confused young Obama
• “He felt like an imposter. Because he was so white. There was hardly a black bone in his body.”

"A new book due out next month, “Barack Obama: The Story,” by Washington Post reporter David Maraniss finally reveals the identity of two of Obama’s long-lost girlfriends. As if that wasn’t fascinating enough, it also includes excerpts of the love letters he sent to one of them and diary entries from the other.

“The six page excerpt [published in Vanity Fair -- http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2...david-maraniss] focuses on two of Obama’s early girlfriends. One, named Alex McNear, Obama met at Occidental College before he transferred to Columbia,” the Post writes in a teaser. “She came to New York for a summer, the start of a long-distance, letter-based relationship in 1982.” The other, Genevieve Cook, was a diplomat’s daughter he met at a party."
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View the complete article at:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/old-...-love-letters/

[bsteadman]

A detailed Obama history timeline compiled by © Miri WTPOTUS 2010 at 'We The People Of The United States' is linked below and can serve as a helpful reference regarding dates mentioned in the 'girlfriend' article:

http://wtpotus.wordpress.com/ot/

[bsteadman]

Is Forthcoming Book on Obama’s Past Fact, Fiction, or Both?

UNDERLYING THEME APPEARS TO BE “IDENTITY”

The Post & Email
Sharon Rondeau
5/3/2012

Excerpt:

"A book detailing an alleged college girlfriend of Barack Obama by David Maraniss is due for release on June 19 which raises the question of Obama’s “identity.” Obama has reportedly already admitted that one account in the book “did not involve” the [...]"

View the complete article at:
Subscription Required

http://www.thepostemail.com/2012/05/...ct-or-fiction/

[bsteadman]

Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend -- Powerline, John Hinderaker

Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend

Powerline
John Hinderaker
5/2/2012

Excerpt:

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"The Vanity Fair excerpt talks about another girlfriend, not the “New York girlfriend” but a woman Obama had known at Occidental who spent a summer in New York and dated Obama. Her name is Alex McNear. McNear, unfortunately, kept the love letters that Obama sent to her. They are hilarious, and tend to confirm the perception that Obama is a hopeless bullshitter:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

That, folks, is not a parody. It may provide a hint as to why Obama’s college and law school grades remain a well-kept secret."
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(bold emphasis added)

View the complete article at:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archive...girlfriend.php

[bsteadman]

Re-vetting wars: Obama's girlfriends speak

American Thinker
Thomas Lifson
5/3/2012

Excerpt:

"One of the foremost concerns of the Obama re-election effort is the promised re-vetting of Obama, playing off the widespread perception that the media utterly failed to investigate the reality beneath the highly manufactured identity peddled in 2008. Thus, there is a need to preemptively define the process, creating a safer version of re-vetting than the Breitbart-is-here blogosphere threatens.

The release of information about a couple of "real" girlfriends of Barack Obama in a Vanity Fair excerpt from a new biography of Obama by WaPo journalist David Maraniss fits this template. Somehow, Maraniss discovered the identities of, and obtained the cooperation of two women who state that they dated Obama, Geneieve Cook and Alex McNear, who even provided excerpts from love letters. I wonder if anyone helped him find these two women, because they have been hidden all these years.

Quite naturally, there has been a huge controversy, one which is being argued on terms highly favorable to the Obama campaign. Politico, home to a number of Journolist members, helpfully made an issue of the supposed revelation of a composite girlfriend, which was readily disposed of by the Atlantic's Eric Randall:

Politico's Dylan Byers writes:

... Obama has now told biographer David Maraniss that the 'New York girlfriend' was actually a composite character, based off of multiple girlfriends he had both in New York City and in Chicago ... Though Dreams From My Father is an autobiography, and hence non-fiction, Obama makes no mention of this "compression," nor is their any note by the publisher, Broadway Books. In fact, Obama only acknowledged the "compression" after Maraniss learned that Cook had no recollection of some of the events at which Obama said she was present.

The implication, obviously, is that the President was, up until this moment, dishonest about the contents of his book. It's also led to lots of snarking about "composites" of ex-girlfriends on Twitter. But read the introduction to Dreams from My Father and you'll find this little admission:

For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.

So the public takes away the lesson that Obama actually told the truth, more or less. He didn't deceive is about the composite nature of the girlfriend.

The unspoken subtext here, never to be mentioned in the mainstream media, is that Obama didn't write Dreams from My Father, and the "composite" girlfriend strongly resembles not Ms. Cook so much as Diana Oughton, the first love of Bill Ayers. Jack Cashill has found compelling evidence that, as described in Christopher Anderson's friendly and well-received biography of Obama, when Obama was hopelessly blocked and unable to turn in a manuscript to the second publisher to pay him a lavish advance, he shipped his notes and tape recordings of his personal anecdotes to Bill Ayers, who fashioned Dreams into a story that would win critical accolades and be cited as the primary evidence of Obama's intellectual capacities."
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View the complete article at:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/...nds_speak.html

[bsteadman]

The dangerous new Obama book -- Politico, Glenn Thrush & Dylan Byers

The dangerous new Obama book

Politico
Glenn Thrush and Dylan Byers
5/3/2012

Excerpt:

"Months before Barack Obama knew Mitt Romney would be his political opponent in 2012, the president knew the identity of his foremost literary challenger: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Maraniss, who had been reaching out to Obama’s old friends, classmates and lovers for the past several years.

The product of his big dig, “Barack Obama: The Story,” seems to be a nuanced, even sympathetic portrayal culled from people who still admire Obama. Yet, make no mistake, this is a dangerous book for Obama, and White House staffers have been fretting about it in a low-grade way for a long, long time — in part because it could redefine the self-portrait Obama skillfully created for himself in 1995 with “Dreams from My Father.”

The success of “Dreams” has given Obama nearly complete control of his own life narrative, an appealing tale that has been the foundation of his political success. But Maraniss’s biography threatens that narrative by questioning it: Was Obama’s journey entirely spiritual and intellectual? Or was it also grounded in the lower realms of ambition and calculation?

In the handful of excerpts released so far, there are no new bombshells involving personal or political corruption or indiscretion beyond anything Obama has already revealed, though the book isn’t out until June 19.

But a little White House anxiety might be in order. Maraniss is a biographer in search of real insight, not Drudge links or Colbert appearances, a writer and researcher who can’t be dismissed as a cheap hack or fortune hunter, a label Obama’s aides hang on lesser writers with regularity. If ever anyone could find the strand that unravels the sweater, it’s Maraniss, a Washington Post associate editor who defies the news cycle.

There are some signs the president himself is concerned. In fact, Obama was so intent on having his side of the story convincingly articulated, he granted the author a virtually unprecedented 90-minute Oval Office interview, twice the allotted time Maraniss thought he was getting.

“This book is about the world that created Barack Obama and how he refashioned himself,” Maraniss said in a Vanity Fair interview that accompanied excerpts of the book Wednesday. “I have done extensive research for all of his years leading up the White House and intend to write another volume, but not for many years — after more documents open up and the story of his presidency settles somewhat. I want to write for history, not for the moment.”

The threat implicit in that statement is no less significant because it is subtle: Maraniss, in his laid-back way, burrows in and unearths new insights, as he did with Bill Clinton in “First in His Class,” a tell-all biography published in 1995 that did feature new details of Clinton’s sexual improprieties."
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View the complete article at:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0512/75865.html

[bsteadman]

Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog -- The Telegraph

Why it matters that Obama dated a composite and ate a dog

The Telegraph
Tim Stanley
5/3/2012

Excerpt:

"There was a brief media firestorm yesterday when Vanity Fair broke the news that Obama’s famous “New York girlfriend” was a fiction. She appears in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, described in some detail by her appearance, voice and mannerisms. But a new biography of Obama – with an excerpt published in Vanity Fair – “reveals” that she was actually an amalgam of several different women. Politico immediately ran with “Obama: 'New York girlfriend' was composite” and Drudge headlined with “Obama Admits Fabricating Girlfriend in a Memoir.” Coming hot on the heels of the news that the Pres once ate a dog, his weirdo factor seems to have hit the roof.

Actually, it turns out that Obama always said that his New York squeeze was a fake. Within a couple of hours of the story breaking, journalists pointed out that at the beginning of Dreams From My Father it reads, “For the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people, I’ve known, and some events appear out of precise chronology.” Politico was forced to print a humiliating correction and David Graham of The Atlantic went in for the kill: “Politico has served as an unwitting pawn in a game conservative spinmeisters are playing to redefine Obama between now and November … It's much the same as the flap over Obama eating dog, in which a different piece of Dreams From My Father, in which he describes eating canine meat as a boy in Indonesia, was rediscovered. While conservative activists and journalists present these stories while claiming that Obama wasn't properly vetted four years ago, what's actually happening is they're reintroducing facts to the record, this time with a far more negative spin.”

I’m not sure. What stands out from the composite story isn’t that Obama amalgamated characters, it’s that the press hadn’t noticed until now. As with the dog story, this confirms the suspicion that the mainstream media gave Obama a free pass in 2008 and declined to check too deeply into his background. Even The Atlantic’s Graham admits that he’s never read Dreams From My Father, and neither, it would seem, has anyone else in the press corps. They have the excuse that the book is incredibly narcissistic and boring, but otherwise isn’t this exactly the sort of character assessment/assassination that should have happened four years ago?
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View the complete article at:

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ti...and-ate-a-dog/

[bsteadman]

Obama Kissed. But What Does It Tell?

The Huffington Post
Sandip Roy
5/4/2012

Excerpts:

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"Obama was "sexually warm" but "emotionally cool" says Genevieve Cook, an early girlfriend in a much touted article in Vanity Fair.

As kiss and tells go, this excerpt from an upcoming book on Obama by David Maraniss is rather tame.
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When his girlfriend says "I love you" his response is "Thank you."

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The comments have been fairly uniform.

Waste of space. E-tainment voyeurism. Who... cares? A story about paint drying would be more interesting than this.

Come on people, you read the whole piece, didn't you? Would you have read it with such interest if it said "Obama's early New York days show his nascent middle of road politics"?

In fact, that's what really comes out in the Vanity Fair article. The bare-chested Obama or the Obama in a Luscious Ladies t-shirt is just a decoy meant to tease you into thinking there are juicier bits buried in there.

But this is really the portrait of a man who is very carefully and deliberately fashioning an identity for himself. He writes in a letter that he is "caught without a class, a structure, or tradition to support me." He is not really looking for a girlfriend. He is looking for an identity.

He needed to become black. At one point he tells Cook he feels like a racial "impostor" -- a man who looks black but grew up with white grandparents in Hawaii. "There was hardly a black bone in his body," she writes. Then he started carrying around a frayed copy of Ralph Ellison's famous book The Invisible Man. As a man who looks visibly black but feels white he is a different kind of invisible man. Cook wrote in her journal that "in his own quest to resolve his ambivalence about black and white, it became very, very clear to me that he needed to go black."

He needed to become American. When Obama came to New York, he was the cool outsider, a sort of immigrant-like figure, a man who had lived around the world and grew up on an island far away from the American heartland. In New York his best friends were party-hearty Pakistanis who taught him how to cook a mean ginger beef dish. "He knew the ways of different cultures better than he knew himself," writes Maraniss.

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In the process of that identity-crafting Obama does what all writers do. He uses people as means to an end. He selects stories to prove a point. So his own memoir has a story about his fight with his white girlfriend about race after watching a play about an angry black man. The unnamed girlfriend in the memoir sounds like Cook, but the play incident didn't happen with her. Obama has said that the "New York girlfriend" was a composite character. That's well and good, except the New York girlfriend is also a real woman and now the right wingers are jumping up and down saying he fabricated his life story. (And by extension his birth certificate.)

That's rubbish, but the birthers who are harping about his birth certificate are unwittingly on to something. Barack Obama is really not 100% American in the way other presidents have been. It's not about where he was born. He was a loner with scattered roots who didn't belong anywhere. His biography is not fabricated but his identity is constructed -- the talented Mr. Obama. The question is is he at home in it?
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Yes, he also once wore a Luscious Ladies t-shirt and blue jeans and sat at the edge of the bed. Vanity Fair is excited about that. But juicy as that is, it will have little bearing on his presidential legacy. The identity stuff, however, can actually affect his policies."

View the complete article at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sandip...b_1478320.html

[InspectorSmith]

Thanks Bruce! I will read this book and publish a report on it.

[bsteadman]

What Does 'Composite Girl' Tell Us About Obama? -- American Thinker, Jack Cashill

What Does 'Composite Girl' Tell Us About Obama?

American Thinker
Jack Cashill
5/6/2012

Excerpt:

"Within hours after Dylan Byers of Politico created a mini-firestorm on Wednesday with the article titled "Obama: 'New York girlfriend' was composite," David Graham of the Atlantic had all but smothered the flames with his article, "Obama's Composite Girlfriend: How Politico and Drudge Created Fake News."

Graham argued that since Obama owned up to using composite characters in the forward of the book in question, his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, there was nothing shady about the practice. Not surprisingly, Graham overlooked the real problem. So did Byers. So did veteran Washington Post reporter David Maraniss, whose forthcoming book, Obama: The Story, ignited the controversy when it was excerpted in Vanity Fair. No, the real problem with Dreams is the inexcusable dishonesty throughout the book. The promiscuous use of composites is merely a symptom of the larger problem.

In the Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss profiles two former Obama girlfriends, heretofore unknown to Obama fans. One of them, the Australian Genevieve Cook, seems to have provided most of the grist for Obama's white "mystery woman," the only girlfriend mentioned in Dreams -- and she only briefly.

"Like many characters in the memoir," says Maraniss of Cook, "[Obama] introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race." What Maraniss does not say, and may not know, is that most, if not all, of the dramatic racial moments in the book are fully manufactured.

With the help of his muse and co-author, Bill Ayers, Obama wove a series of racial grievances into the narrative to toughen up Obama's life story. These stories aren't "compressed," as Obama claims. They are contrived. In his own memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers likewise shows a casual disdain for facts. "Is this then the truth?" he asks. "Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." When lesser memoirists do the same -- James Frey of A Million Little Pieces fame comes quickly to mind -- they get trashed on national TV by Oprah.

In the case of composite girl, for instance, Obama tells of how their relationship came to a bitter end over her failure to understand black angst. "We had a big fight, right in front of the theater, writes Obama. "When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said." Cook denies that this ever happened.

As Obama later explained to Maraniss, "I thought that [the anecdote] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends." Frey felt much the same way. "A memoir literally means my story. A memoir is a subjective retelling of events," he protested, adding, "I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has." When Obama used the theater story in Dreams, he never expected this kind of scrutiny, either. At the time, no one beyond his neighborhood knew who Obama was. Nor did Obama expect scrutiny when he shared in Dreams the following racial life lessons, all of which have since been proven false (For a fuller accounting, see Friday's WND):

• As a nine year-old, he saw in Life magazine a story about a black man turned grotesquely white in a desperate chemical effort to lighten his appearance. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed that it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article, either.
• In his first days at his Hawaiian prep school, Obama shamefully rejects "Coretta," the only other black student, lest he be tainted by her blackness. Obama biographer David Remnick found the girl. She had no such memory. "He was my knight in shining armor," she gushed. In his book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells much the same story. He talks of a useful reading assignment about the travails of Clint, one of two black students in an otherwise all-white school, who rudely tries to distance himself from Marvin, the other black boy. Like Obama, Clint feels guilty on reflection.
• After Columbia, Obama worked for what he describes in Dreams as "a consulting house to multinational corporations." He observes, "As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company." In full grievance mode, he considers his unique status "a source of shame." A former coworker (and fan) revealed Obama's account to be a "serious exaggeration." It was not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters." Obama was not the only black. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles.
• In Dreams, "Frank," the real-life Communist Frank Marshall Davis, slams college education. "Understand something, boy," he tells the college-bound Obama. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." Adds Frank, "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit." Davis would never say this. In his memoir, Livin the Blues, he tells of the richly rewarding years he spent at Kansas State University: its "beautiful" campus, its "usually agreeable" students, its "excellent" journalism department. Later, he would see open-minded white college students as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 were huge successes. It was Ayers who had the grudge against orthodox education. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Sound familiar?
• In Dreams, the composite character "Asante Moran" tells Obama, "The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period." Social control -- no surprise here -- is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
• To shore up the black base in a book calculated to get Obama elected mayor of Chicago, Obama suggests that the mystery white woman was the only white woman he dated. "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good," Obama tells his half-sister Auma. This has yet to be proven false, but I doubt if even Maraniss will turn up any of these ladies.

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View the complete article at:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/...out_obama.html

[bsteadman]

Obama Wonders, “Am I An American?” -- My Very Own Point of View, ladysforest

Obama Wonders, “Am I An American?”

My Very Own Point of View
ladysforest
5/8/2012

Excerpt:

"Funny, we’ve all been wondering that for years.

We, the little people, have been gratified to receive the gift of two new books recently written about the “history” of our New Master, the American King. In these books we are treated to revelations about the life, loves, ponderings and the obama family paternal parental perfections.

This newest, written by David Maraniss, will be released in about a month. We were encouraged to read lovely excerpts though, which reveal a portrait of obama carefully obscured from the American people during the 2008 campaign.

Today I came across the following Washington Examiner article, in reading it I was privileged to learn even more about our first American King. Interesting and thought provoking revelations they were. For in this new biography-style book we learn that:

snip

The son of a Kenyan father and an American expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a citizenship sense — Obama was born in the United States and that was that — but in the sense of how he saw the world and wanted to be seen by it.

Obama had a lot of Pakistani friends; Maraniss writes that if Obama and his girlfriend socialized as a couple, “it was almost always with the Pakistanis.” Obama appeared to identify with his friends as fellow non-Americans. “For years when Barack was around them, he seemed to share their attitudes as sophisticated outsiders who looked at politics from an international perspective,” Maraniss writes. “He was one of them, in that sense.”

Fundamentally considered himself an outsider – and a sophisticated one at that! Still does dude.

I can’t help but notice a similarity here – didn’t obama’s mater and pater only socialize as a couple around a very few select people? Isn’t that why Hawaiian Gov. Abercrombie is the ONLY person in the world who recalls hanging out with the young married couple, because he was one of the few in that select small group of very special beings? It’s the same story when he recalls seeing Obama Sr. and Stanley Ann showing off little baby Chicago Jesus. Gov. Abercrombie is the solitary human who has any memory of such a thing.

Ditto situation with this COMPOSITE compressed girlfriend of obama’s youth- only the Paki friends got to witness the sexual warmth between the two of them."
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View the complete post at:

http://myveryownpointofview.wordpres...i-an-american/