October 14, 2008

So Obama's grandfather brought an adult mentor into his life and, it turns out, the guy wrote a pornographic "autobiography."

So what?

Are the nasty things in the creepy old book -- including sex with children -- fiction or nonfiction? The author, Frank Marshall Davis, seems to claim it was true, but autobiographers lie.

Presumably, the grandfather didn't know terrible things about Davis. We already know that Obama as a child heard some things most of us try to protect children from:
In Dreams from My Father, Obama wrote: "He would read us poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar.

"As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks."

Obama described being counseled by Frank often and recalled drinking whiskey with him.
This is all entirely to Obama's credit. It's interesting to know something more about the Frank character he wrote about, but absolutely nothing here impugns Obama, who survived a difficult childhood and made himself into a formidable, admirable public figure (and solid husband and father).
Since Frank Davis has been identified as the author of Sex Rebel: Black, Obama has been extremely secretive about the true nature of his experience with the self-admitted deviant.
That's a reprehensible way to report silence.

32 comments:

rhhardin said...

It's National Enquirer. They print what their audience will purchase.

Soap opera plotlines favored. It engages the women's interests.

Unknown said...

It's the Enquirer, for crying out loud!

More important is that Frank Davis was another Wright-type who influenced Obama: black nationalism, anti-capitalism, communist, etc.

Anonymous said...

From those wonderful people who brought us Trig, Son of Bristol. And about as deserving of attention.

Trooper York said...

This is a silly smear. We should not dignify it with any attention.

Anonymous said...

That's a reprehensible way to report silence.

But that quote is from the National Enquirer not the National Review.

What do you expect? If it's so reprehensible don't quote it or link to it.

Here's the wiki article on Frank Marshall Davis.

No doubt the "liberal" response will be to say the White Devil Republicans are trying to turn Frank Marshall Davis into "Willie Horton", the demonized "Other".

He boasted that "the number of white babes interested in at least one meeting with a Negro male has been far more than I can handle" and wished “America were as civilised as, say, Scandinavia”. He concluded: “I regret none of my experiences or unusual appetites; for me they are normal.”

Interesting to remember that Obama's mother was only 17 when she was impregnated by the married with child Barack Obama, Sr.

reader_iam said...

It just goes to show, once again: "Things can always get worse."

Ugh.

Peter Hoh said...

Who among us has not been extremely secretive about the true nature of our experience with something with which we have not really been connected?

Let he who has spoken out about all his relationships -- significant, insignificant, and merely tangential -- cast the first stone.

Trooper York said...

Of course the lefty scumbags who post here will be up in arms when they repeated and embellished every rumor or lie thrown against the wall about Sarah Palin.

Its reprehensible when it's about the Chosen One but something that should be disproved by medical records for people that the elitist yuppie scum scorn.

Par for the course.

Same as it ever was.

Rose said...

By itself, not a big deal - in this case you can honestly say you can't judge him by something someone he was related to did many years ago.

But that isn't true of Ayres, where that argument rings hollow, since it isn't being suggested that Obama participated in bombings with Ayres, it's his associations NOW that matter.

It's the stacking of one after another - I sat there in church, but I never heard that Black Liberation Theology and America hate spewing forth, you can't attribute Ayres ideas to me, it's Ayres, it's Wright, it's Farrakhan, it's the Chicago machine. it's ACORN - it's denial after denial after denial...

coupled with stupid thins like not releasing college transcripts and college papers and FIGHTING RELEASE of his BIRTH CERTIFICATE.

Just produce it already. Honestly. Honest - ly.

Just my opinion. I'm getting tired of the refusal to turn stuff over, and the refusal of the media to stay on that - or even get on it.

George M. Spencer said...

Obama's poem "Pop."

The old man and the "green young man" are watching TV and drinking shots of whisky. The old man's cigarette ashes "sprinkle" his pants. He's telling the boy that the boy is unaware of the world's "flim" "flam." Suddenly, the boy erupts and is "cling"[ing] to the old man's t-shirt "yelling in his ears." The old man says he doesn't care anymore about anything. Then something about a mirror, the boy "laughing, laughing loud" possibly drunkenly. Blood rushes from the frightened (?) old man's face to the angry drunk (?) boy's. Then he's "squeezed out" the old man from his mind, just as one squirts something as useless as a watermelon seed between fingertips. More shots of whisky. They both have whisky stains on their "shorts." "Makes me smell his smell." The old man "shouts," wants "a hug." The boy "shink"[s]—an evasive sinking maneuver. Then the boy is hugging the man and can see his laughing face in the glasses of the old man who is also laughing.

What is this about? Getting drunk with an old man while you're both in underwear and then hugging? I'd be curious to learn if Obama addressed his grandfather or Marshall by the name "Pop."

The Enquirer story says "Obama described being counseled by Frank often and recalled drinking whiskey with him."

And, incidentally, the reason there've been no media interviews with Ayers is that he has gone underground again...

"There was no one home when The Times visited Mr Ayers' house in a quiet street three blocks from Mr Obama's mansion in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The Education Department of the University of Illinois, where Mr Ayers works, said that he had gone on sabbatical. In response to an e-mail he stated: “I'm not available right now. Perhaps in the future. Best, Bill.” What The Times did find in Chicago, however, was widespread bemusement that Mr McCain should be putting so much emphasis on Mr Obama's tenuous links with Mr Ayers to revive his campaign."

Chthonic.

(And on what grounds, other than surface appearances, can one conclude Sen. Obama is a "solid husband and father"? One might have said the same of JFK's "solid" marital fidelity in 1960.)

Trooper York said...

You should not stoop to the level of an Andrew Sullivan or Chris Matthews. Senator Obama seem like a wonderful husband and father and his family should be off limits.

Don't fall in the trap of being a worthless scumbag who trashes the family of the candidate like the worthless sacks of shit in the mainstream media and the douche bags who parrot those talking points on the internet.

knox said...

Gross, on almost countless levels.

former law student said...

"Greenleaf Classics" was a well-known producer of pornographic books throughout the 1960s and 70s. Their most famous work was perhaps The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. (The report was in the public domain; Greenleaf's contribution was the illustrations.)

The need for cash drove many famous science fiction writers to write smut for Greenleaf imprints: Robert Silverberg ("Don Elliott," "Loren Beachamp," "David Challon," "V.S. Clark, "Mark Ryan"), Marion Zimmer Bradley ("Brian Morley," "Dee O'Brien," "Marlene Longman," "Morgan Ives," "Miriam Gardner"), Evan Hunter aka Ed McBain ("Dean Hudson") and Harlan Ellison, who wrote Sex Gang (Nightstand, 1959, NB-1503) under the pseudonym Paul Merchant.

Frank Marshall Davis likely wrote his stroke book for the same reason -- cash. But was it fiction or non-fiction?

One way to tell comes from Greenleaf's contemporaneous style guide (1969):

http://www.efanzines.com/EK/eI12/index.htm#style

E. In fiction, we require strong emphasis on plot development and story ideas above all else, with a house taboo on irrelevant padding of any sort. The erotic content must be integral to characterization and story progression; it must be strong, meaningful and real.

In nonfiction (credentialed author or co-author preferred), we expect very specific case materials, with natural speech content, balanced by dignified scholarly commentary or narration.


Was Sex Rebel:Black balanced by dignified scholarly commentary or narration? Or was there strong plot development and story?

Consider that the first book published under the Greenleaf Classics imprint was the seemingly biographical Candy by "Maxwell Kenton"

Roger J. said...

While I disagree entirely with Senator Obama's policies and political affiliations, I appreciate the fact that is is indeed a good husband and father. He had no control over his father who, by all accounts seems to have a dirtbag. But that does not diminish Senator Obama's accomplishments. And I join Trooper's comments about this non-story.

amba said...

Poor kid. A lot of kids, a large minority if not a majority, have these ambiguous relationships with adults of questionable motives. The kid doesn't know what's going on. Or sometimes "forgets."

Likely this Frank character behaved himself, just, with Barry because he wanted to maintain a good front with the grandfather. The kids he preyed on wouldn't have had that protection.

Anyway, it's irrelevant. And in fairness (as one who has decided not to vote for Obama), the right with their obsession with "family values" ought to give Obama credit for living them. In this respect he seems to be pretty much the anti-Bill Clinton, and the anti-"baby daddy," "mack daddy" too. (If there was so much as a rumor to be found about him having a roving eye or any other body part, believe me, it would be out there.) Guess it's just "damned if you do, damned if you don't."

knox said...

amba, it is already out there. I won't dignify it with a link, but it's out there... a supposed affair with an aide or something.

rhhardin said...

Let he who has spoken out about all his relationships -- significant, insignificant, and merely tangential -- cast the first stone.

Let him.

There's actually a rule you don't hear about that's fairly interesting: subjects of non-finite verbs (verbs without tense) are in the objective case.

``Cast'' is a bare infinitive (otherwise it would be casts) with subject ``him.''

I always liked the rule because it was like Latin indirect statement; the subject is in the accusative and its verb an infinitive.

JAL said...

'Tis curious that there are no previous girlfriends (or boy friends or any friends) out there.

Doesn't that seem curious?

As for Davis -- not reading National Enquirer etc (OT --weren't they the ones who ... uh hum ... were willing to confront John Whatshizname -- the former VP candidate about what was it ... some rumor about a baby? Or something?) I do recall falling over a reference about Frank bragging about a little threesome with his wife and a 14 year old girl.

And then there is the point that this guy taught Obama about "race" and how awful America really is, should he ever get there.

Yeah. Come to think about it, I never have felt comfortable having someone who has to write two books to engage us as part of his therapeutic journey to somewhere. I dislike being made to be part of his third book.

George M. Spencer said...

So Sen. Obama's twice divorced mother returns to Indonesia to do "field work" in 1974 when he is 13, taking his half-sister with her. Supposedly, we are to believe that he wants to stay in Hawaii.

Here is how he describes that joyful decision:

"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 trouble out of sight....[I was] “engaged in a fitful interior struggle. I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America.” ..NYT

Translation: Mom wasn't interesting in being my Mom. Her white parents didn't much care for me, and I didn't much care for them, but they had to let me in. We never talked. We had a "pact," you know, like a cold war treaty. They didn't pay much attention to me. I did a lot of stuff behind their backs that was wrong. They either didn't notice or didn't care. I was all messed up. I had to raise myself. These days I hide the pain pretty well. Nobody asks questions. If they do, they know they'll be called racists."

Baron Zemo said...

Come now my dear lady, no one is interested in the existance of a potential Uncle Reamus.

blake said...

OG--

That's actually pretty admirable, don't you think? I mean, if your "translation" is correct.

I don't get what the point of this is. Did Obama say this guy was a big influence on his life? Did he name one of his books after one of the guy's sermons (like Wright) or write a preface to one of his books (like Ayers)?

Are we driving at the possibility that he's been molested, or that he himself is a molester? And if so, holy cow, WTF?

TMink said...

Every family has skeletons. This has no bearing on the fitness of the most liberal Senator to be President.

My triplets are the result of donor embryos. As my wife and I read the genetic background we grew quiet and worried. Heart disease, alcoholism, depression, liberals (just a little joke there) and what not. Our hearts were starting to sink a bit.

Then my wife had a brilliant idea, let's compare the reported background info with our own genetic history. Sexual abuse, glaucoma, depression, KKK (I wish I were kidding.) In the end, we decided that we upgraded!

Choices matter more than history. Albus Dumbledore knew that.

Trey

Daryl said...

I will dignify it with a link.

Barack Obama is an adulterer. He had sex with Vera Baker, while he was married to Michelle, with young children, and then he covered it up, using campaign contributions to buy her silence.

He can't hide this because he used his campaign money to buy her off, and then he filed FEC disclosure forms showing where the money went. The whole world knows that Vera Baker was paid as Obama's "finance director" during his 2004 Senate Run--even though he had a different finance director, who actually did the finance directing. Unlike other members of Obama's campaign, Vera Baker was hidden from the press.

He was giving her the Frank Marshall Davis treatment, and then he used campaign contributions to buy her silence. Now she's in Martinique--and Obama's rich friends are probably paying her to stay there, and keep her mouth shut.

It's on the FEC disclosure forms. There's a written record. A paper trail. Obama can't cover this one up.

Cedarford said...

When one overturns the "rocks" of Obama's past lives in Hawaii, Indonesia, and Chicago..some interesting critters come crawling out.

Now, it is a huge stretch to make Frank Marshall Davis into a sex perv because he wrote some sex novelette for some cash. At the time, lots of poets and authors were doing pulp fiction, writing advertising materials, crappy TV and radio scripting, even racy sex stuff. We don't know what is autobiographical in his "Sex Rebel:Black" contribution, if anything. We don't know if even if parts are true, that young Barry Obama was involved.

But we do know that Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, and Obama described him as a "mentor". Davis and his Leftist white socialite wife were Obama's first link to Chicago, and their 5 children were all "just like Barry" - half black, half white. (Actually whiter than Obama as Davis was light skinned from his "white ancestors").

Davis was a journalist and community organizer for labor and black causes in Chicago. As a poet, a "literary person", and a Communist - Frank Marshall Davis partially lived off the patronage of wealthy Chicago Jews - fellow communists or liberal patrons of the arts.

Obama's early life arc mirrors Davis's. 'Cept the Communist stuff.

More needs to be written about the guy and his influences. His wife's influences. And if "Barry" had some sort of sibling relationship and shared values with Davis's biracial kids.

Davis is dead. So is his former wife. Their 5 kids all all baby boomers and still alive - the 1st being born in 1949. The last, a few years before then-Barry Obama.

It will be interesting to see if the self-imposed media blackout lifts once Obama is President.

What exactly is the arrest record, if any of Obama's mentor? Any vice busts? What exactly did Davis write on all those reams of paper now preserved on microfilm? What are his kid's recollections?

Unknown said...

Barack Obama is an adulterer. He had sex with Vera Baker, while he was married to Michelle, with young children, and then he covered it up, using campaign contributions to buy her silence.

Oh come on. I know this scuttlebutt has been floating around but to pronounce it like it's solid fact is idiotic.

I'll be perfectly honest, I wouldn't mind a genuine bombshell to explode Obama's ambitions. But emphasis on genuine.

George M. Spencer said...

UK Daily Mail says the LA Times, ABC, and the Enquirer have been provided her name.

Jonathan said...

The gist of this story, if true, seems to be that Obama was a victim of a child predator when he was 10 years old. That's certainly an interesting attack line.

Unknown said...

UK Daily Mail says the LA Times, ABC, and the Enquirer have been provided her name.

And that proves... what, exactly?

George M. Spencer said...

If this story goes true to form, the woman will continue to furiously deny everything, Obama's aides will denounce the story. It will be all over the internet, including a gigundo banner on Drudge, and time will pass before any of the dinosaurs print the news. Tom Brokaw will have a pained expression on his face. McCain will say nothing. Sarah and Todd will be seen holding hands, a clear act of racism. A counter story will emerge about McCain: He stole a popsicle when he was six and crashed a bicycle. At some point later, we will indeed learn the mistress pay-off story is true, probably because the Enquirer actually does some reporting for which it will be denounced. Its offices will be bombed; Ayers will release a communique from his unknown sabbatical location. The full revelations may take two weeks, two months, two years, or two decades. We'll learn that lots of news people knew about the story, but they were "working" on it.

The only surprising thing about it is that it's so old-fashioned.

Juba Doobai! said...

The thing about Obama is always this: it is not what he says (that is usually vapid, trivial, and untrue); rather, it is what he leaves unsaid (usually, the truth).

Lillian said...

Rose wrote: "coupled with stupid thins like not releasing college transcripts and college papers and FIGHTING RELEASE of his BIRTH CERTIFICATE.

Just produce it already. Honestly. Honest - ly.

Just my opinion. I'm getting tired of the refusal to turn stuff over, and the refusal of the media to stay on that - or even get on it."

Huh? Tired of the "refusal to turn stuff over" to whom? Who's been asking for it, and where have they been asking? His birth certificate is prominently displayed online at http://fightthesmears.com/articles/5/birthcertificate

As for college records, he's widely known to have graduated from Harvard magna cum laude (which means in the top 10%), as it says in this glowing article in the Harvard Crimson Newspaper article, Obama Left Mark on HLS - Profs fondly recall Law School alum as he launches presidential bid:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=516664

He graduated from Harvard Law School, and was President of the Harvard Law Review. The Boston Globe did an interesting story on that: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/01/28/at_harvard_law_a_unifying_voice/

And he went on to teach Constitutional Law at the University of Chicago Law School for 12 years- do you think the University of Chicago Law School would hire a doofus to teach Constitutional Law?

Yes, you're right - there has been denial after denial, because desperate people have been continually spreading lie after lie about him.

Lillian said...

In regard to the birth certificate:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200810230020?f=h_latest

"Conservative media figures allege Obama's Hawaii trip is about discredited birth-certificate rumors, not his ailing grandmother

Summary: Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, and Jerome Corsi suggested or asserted that the true purpose of Sen. Barack Obama's current trip to Hawaii is not to visit his ailing grandmother, as Obama claims, but rather to address rumors -- widely debunked -- that Obama has failed to produce a valid U.S. birth certificate. However, in addition to FactCheck.org and a Hawaiian Health Department official, even Corsi's employer, the right-wing website WorldNetDaily, has reportedly determined that the birth certificate provided by the Obama campaign is authentic."