Skeeterism' and Obama's Columbia Years -- American Thinker, Jason Kissner

[bsteadman]

Skeeterism' and Obama's Columbia Years

American Thinker
Jason Kissner
2/7/2013

Excerpt:

Can you believe it?

Even the (ahem) news outlets the Washington Post and the New York Times are questioning the veracity of Barack Obama's claim that he skeet-shoots "all the time."

Happily, the propagandists' hard-hitting, integrity-filled attempts to shift the political presentation of the gun debate have unwittingly opened the door to very serious scrutiny of a great deal of Mr. Obama's assertions pertaining to his own biography.

This is because the exact same standards the propagandists themselves have decided to use as justification for questioning Obama's claim that he skeet-shoots all the time can also be applied to generate very serious suspicion about plenty of other things that we are to suppose are true about Obama.

A Feb. 2 New York Times article is clearly suspicious of Obama's skeet claim, even though Obama has released a picture depicting himself skeet-shooting:

The skeet-shooting comment caught many off guard because it is not something the president has talked about. While other presidents have used the skeet shooting range at Camp David, database searches of Mr. Obama's speeches and interviews turned up no prior mention of participating. No friend or guest has come forward in recent days to publicly describe shooting with the president.

Upon release of the photo, the Washington Post remarked on February 2:

The White House released this photograph of the president at the Camp David skeet range on Aug. 4, 2012. We are pleased the White House has become more forthcoming about this matter, though it does not quite answer the questions concerning the president's "all the time" language. What do readers think?

Prior to the release of the photo, the Post had this to say:

But it is also curious that the White House refuses to provide any documentary evidence that he actually used the shooting range at Camp David, since he claims he uses it "all the time," or that a presidential friend has not come forward to confirm the president's comments.

We are now going to apply the above evidentiary standards to a consideration of the period in which Obama is said to have attended Columbia University -- in particular, to the spring 1982 time frame.

It turns out that there is no evidence -- documentary, testimonial, or otherwise -- that can show that Obama was attending classes at Columbia (or even in New York) in Spring 1982, even though there is evidence of his attendance with respect to every other semester he is said to have attended Columbia.

Mr. Obama's two autobiographies have no pictures, period. However, David Remnick's biography of Mr. Obama contains many dated pictures (including, of course, pictures taken before and after Columbia -- for example, pictures of him at Harvard in 1990), but no dated pictures from the Columbia years. Ditto David Mendell's biography. The same is true of David Maraniss's recent biography of Mr. Obama, as well as of the Chicago Tribune's collection of 106 Obama pictures.

A Google search with the terms "Obama pictures Columbia" and variants discloses the same.

With regard to the post-Columbia New York period, though, Mr. Maraniss does include a picture of Mr. Obama and Genevieve Cook dated as having been taken after Mr. Obama's graduation from Columbia (at p. 29 of the photographic plates).

In an article entitled "Recollections of Obama's Ex-Roommate," we get two more undated pictures of Obama the supposed Columbia attendee, but in addition, we get a picture of Mr. Obama together with Sohale Siddiqi dated fall of 1981. The article also includes student directory addresses for the 1981-1982 as well as 1982-1983 school years.

Would a Spring 1982 change of address have been reflected in the Columbia 1981-1982 directory (academic directories are released in fall and cover the whole academic year)? The answer, almost certainly, is "no."

If not, Mr. Obama could easily have maintained, according to the student directory, a spring 1982 Columbia address even though his true address was nowhere to be found in New York in the spring of 1982.

In fact, we know that Obama departed his fall 1981 location, but nobody has said, and there is no documentary evidence at all, as to precisely where he went. Obama's fall 1981 roommate, Phil Boerner, himself (whom Obama had known since his Occidental days) notes that "[a]fter that first semester, we had to move. Barack tried to find an apartment for both of us, but was only able to find a studio for himself."

Maraniss, at p. 442-3, notes on this issue something seemingly rather different:

Long before Thanksgiving, Obama had concocted a desperate plan. Their lease was to expire on December 7, but rather than pick it up themselves (they were subletting), he suggested they let it run out, not pay the last month's rent, and stay until they were evicted or found another place. "All of November we looked for another apartment, but to no avail," Boerner reported later in a letter to his grandmother. When phone service was cut and the heat went off for good, Boerner fled to the house of family friends in Brooklyn Heights and Obama slept on the floor at a friend's place on the Upper East Side until he finished exams and escaped to Los Angeles.

So Mr. Obama's own mother (Ann) had a hand in arranging for the fall '81 apartment, and yet Mr. Obama, no more than four months later, had to concoct a "desparate plan" to arrange alternative living arrangements?

There really is no evidence at all that shows where Obama moved right after his spell in Los Angeles.

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http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/...bia_years.html

[bsteadman]

Reconstructing Obama's Columbia Transcript

American Thinker
Michael Iachetta
2/11/2013

Excerpt:

Jason Kissner recently questioned President Obama's whereabouts in spring 1982, and also discussed in passing some of the courses Obama took while at Columbia. In response, I would like to try my hand at reconstructing the Columbia part of Obama's college transcript based on the published record and my own knowledge of Columbia's requirements as an '84 graduate of the college. This reconstruction may be of interest to those who are curious about this part of Obama's undergraduate education, and it may also shed light on where Obama must have been in spring 1982.

Columbia College is well known for its rigorous core curriculum. Students must not only study masterpieces of literature, philosophy, music, and art, but also take courses in science, a foreign language, and even physical education. These requirements add up to a total of 48 credit hours. Based on a typical student load of 16 credit hours per semester, a student would need to spend three semesters taking nothing but core courses in order to complete the requirement. (In practice, students typically take most of these courses in the first two years of study, perhaps getting to a few of them over the course of the next two years.) As will be seen below, as a transfer student with only two years to complete the core requirements, most of Obama's coursework must have been devoted to taking courses in the core.

The Political Science major at Columbia requires 21 credit hours in Political Science plus two 4-credit hour seminar classes. A maximum of 12 credit hours in Political Science are accepted from transfer students, and since Obama is on record as having taken a lot of Political Science at Occidental, it is reasonable to assume that he received the maximum amount of transfer credit. Obama thus would only have needed to take three Political Science classes at Columbia, in addition to the two required seminars, in order to graduate as a Political Science major.

Finally, a student needs 124 credit hours to graduate from Columbia with a B.A. If my guess is correct that Obama would have taken 70 credit hours in his four semesters at Columbia, Columbia must have accepted a total of 54 credit hours from Occidental (including the 12 credit hours in Political Science).

As one reconstructs Obama's Columbia transcript, perhaps the most striking thing is how few Political Science classes Obama must have taken while studying there. In addition to required classes in the core and in Political Science, the published record of Obama's coursework (based on recollections from former classmates and professors), indicates that he took an English class, a class in Comparative Literature, and a Sociology class. As will be seen below, this does not leave room for much more than the minimum requirement of three additional classes in Political Science plus the two seminars.

I made several assumptions as I reconstructed the transcript. First, I assume that Obama must have taken the maximum four semesters of a foreign language, in his case Spanish. Columbia required me to take all four semesters of the language requirement, even though I had taken a decent amount of French before I got there. Obama has admitted that he does not speak any foreign languages, so I am assuming that he did not place out of the requirement. Second, I assume that Obama took between 16-19 credit hours per semester. This would be a typical and reasonably heavy load for a motivated student, and Obama is described as having been serious about his studies. He is also remembered as playing plenty of pickup basketball and soccer, attending student group meetings, and spending time at local hangouts, so I do not assume that he took more courses than that. Classes that Obama must have taken as requirements, but for which there is no written record, are placed in brackets. Where there is a written record, I indicate the sources in parentheses or by hyperlink. Finally, where there is no written record of when Obama took a certain required course, I placed it where it made most sense to me based on my own experience at Columbia.

A few concluding thoughts. I was in one of the classes that Obama took at Columbia, the course in Modern Fiction with Edward Said. It is worth noting that my recollection of that class does not square with some of the details recounted by Obama's friend and roommate Phil Boerner in Maraniss (449-450) and elsewhere. It is true that the class was held in a large lecture hall, without much opportunity for interaction with Said, and that Said never spoke in class about his political views. But Said's lectures in this course were not devoted to discussions about literary theory, as Boerner claims: "We didn't have a good reaction to the class. Said seemed to be really into literary theory. And I'm more into, and Obama, too, into judging works by themselves and not getting caught up in various feminist-leftist-whatever interpretations. And Said seemed to be really into that" (Maraniss, 449). Very much to the contrary, Said's lectures (as I recall) were devoted to a careful analysis of the texts we were studying, without any reference to literary theory that I can recall. When Said lectured about Conrad's Nostromo, he dwelled on the meaning of the cracks in a vase. When he lectured on Kafka's Metamorphosis, he explained that the word that Kafka uses was the same word used in the gospels to describe Christ's transfiguration.
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http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/...president.html