{"id":257,"date":"2009-10-04T23:13:05","date_gmt":"2009-10-05T05:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/?p=257"},"modified":"2009-10-04T23:13:05","modified_gmt":"2009-10-05T05:13:05","slug":"the-summer-of-1981","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.orderofephors.com\/?p=257","title":{"rendered":"The Summer of 1981"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Page 118 of Barack Obama\u2019s memoir, Dreams from My Father<\/em>, he tells of his arrival in New York to attend Columbia University and of the events that took place during that summer\u2026 the summer of 1981.<\/p>\n

While still in Los Angeles, before leaving Occidental College, he\u2019d heard of a vacant apartment on 109th<\/sup> Street in the Spanish Harlem section of Upper Manhattan.\u00a0 He arranged to sublet the apartment and he tells of dragging his luggage through the airport, through Times Square and the subways, and along 109th<\/sup> Street, all the way from Broadway to Amsterdam Avenue.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When he arrived at the apartment just after 10:00 PM, there was no one at home.\u00a0 He tells of waiting on the front stoop until well past midnight, and, not having enough money to rent a room in a cheap hotel, he crawled through a hole in a fence across the street, found a garbage-strewn alley, made a pallet with his luggage, and went to sleep.\u00a0 He awakened the next morning with a white hen pecking at some garbage near his feet.<\/p>\n

The only person he knew in New York was an illegal alien named Sadik, a Pakistani he\u2019d met in Los Angeles who had overstayed his tourist visa and who supported himself by waiting tables in restaurants and bars.\u00a0 They met for breakfast, and when Obama explained that he was unable to get into the apartment he\u2019d sublet, Sadik invited him to stay with him until he could work out his housing difficulties.<\/p>\n

Obama was able to sublet another apartment, but when his utilities were turned off he learned that the people who held the lease had failed to pay the rent and had absconded with his deposit money.\u00a0 And since his friend, Sadik, had lost his lease as well, the two of them found an apartment and moved in together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Obama tells us that, in the weeks following his arrival, he was like a large \u201clab rat\u201d exploring the byways of Manhattan, with Sadik as his guide.\u00a0 Experiencing the true flavor of New York, he tells of offering his seat to a middle-aged woman on a subway, and how a burly young man beat the woman to the seat.\u00a0 And he tells of a stroll through Bloomingdale\u2019s where he was impressed by the price tags on the winter coats.\u00a0 He wrote, \u201cLike a tourist, I watched the range of human possibility on display, trying to trace out my future in the lives of the people I saw, looking for some opening through which I could reenter.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then his life took an unexpected turn.\u00a0 He writes, \u201cIt was in this humorless mood that my mother and sister (Maya Soetoro) found me when they came to visit during my first summer in New York,\u201d and that, \u201cThey stayed with Sadik and me for a few nights, then moved to a condominium on Park Avenue that a friend of my mother\u2019s had offered them while she was away.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama explains, \u201cThat summer I had found a job clearing a construction site on the Upper West Side, so my mother and sister spent most of their days exploring the city on their own.\u00a0 When we met for dinner, they would give me a detailed report of their adventures\u2026 I would eat in silence until they were finished and then begin a long discourse on the problems of the city and the politics of the dispossessed.\u201d\u00a0 He says, \u201cI instructed my mother on the various ways that foreign donors and international development organizations like the one she was working for bred dependence in the Third World.\u201d<\/p>\n

It sounds as if Obama was an absolute joy to be around.\u00a0 The \u201cdog-eat-dog\u201d environment of the streets of New York must have been a welcome departure from their evenings with Obama.<\/p>\n

But wait a minute.\u00a0 How can this be?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Although Obama fails to mention it in either of his memoirs\u2026 not in Dreams from My Father<\/em> and not in The Audacity of Hope<\/em>\u2026 he traveled to Indonesia and Pakistan during the summer of 1981.\u00a0 In an April 6, 2008 speech in San Francisco\u2026 the same speech in which he referred to rural Pennsylvanians as \u201cbitter\u201d people who \u201ccling to guns or religion\u2026\u201d he explained, offhand, the value of his trip to Pakistan, vis-\u00e0-vis his knowledge of foreign affairs.\u00a0 He said, \u201cI knew what Sunni and Shia was (sic) before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.\u201d<\/p>\n

When questioned about that trip, Obama\u2019s campaign press secretary, Bill Burton, confirmed to the New York Times<\/em>, and others, that Obama had visited his mother and his sister in Indonesia during the summer of 1981 and that, after leaving Indonesia, he\u2019d spent three weeks in Pakistan, traveling with a Pakistani friend from Occidental College, Wahid Hamid.\u00a0 According to Burton, Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of another Pakistani friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo.\u00a0 Obama has never mentioned the Pakistan trip again.<\/p>\n

So the question arises, which version are we to believe: the version contained in his memoir, Dreams from My Father<\/em>, or the version his press secretary provided following his April 2008 speech in San Francisco?\u00a0 In other words, if Obama arrived in New York, say, during the first week of June, had housing problems, explored Manhattan like a \u201clab rat,\u201d lived for a time with a friend, spent time with his mother and sister during their stay in New York, and worked as a laborer on a construction site on the Upper West Side, how did he find the time or the money to embark on an around-the-world trip to Indonesia and Pakistan by the middle of July?<\/p>\n

The Los Angeles Times<\/em> once referred to Obama as \u201cthe magic Negro.\u201d\u00a0 Is it possible they were right, or is Obama simply challenging Bill Clinton for the title of \u201cunusually good liar?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

By his own admission, it is now well established that Obama did travel to Indonesia and Pakistan during the summer of 1981, but that trip raises some serious questions.\u00a0 Aside from the question of how he went from being flat broke to financing an around-the-world trip in just four weeks, it would be interesting to know how he managed to squeeze so much into such a short period of time.\u00a0 But now it appears we may be one step closer to having definitive answers to part of the mystery.<\/p>\n

Jack Cashill, a recognized authority on intellectual fraud, is the author of numerous books, including Hoodwinked: <\/em>How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture<\/em>, in which he details the 20th<\/sup> century history of American intellectual fraud.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In addition to his own exhaustive examination of Barack Obama\u2019s memoirs, Dreams from My Father<\/em> and The<\/em> Audacity of Hope<\/em>, which have led him to believe that Obama\u2019s terrorist friend, Bill Ayers, is in fact the principal author of Dreams from My Father<\/em>, Cashill reviews a new best-seller by Christopher Andersen, the author of 28 books, including best-sellers on the Clintons; Diana, Princess of Wales; and Caroline Kennedy.\u00a0 <\/em>The latest Andersen book to caught Cashill\u2019s eye is titled Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Writing in the October 1, 2009 edition of WorldNetDaily<\/em>, Cashill tells us, \u201c<\/em>The headline of the USA Today<\/em> review captures the message Andersen hoped to bring to the market, \u2018A glowing Portrait\u2019 of the Obamas’ rock-solid marriage.\u201d \u00a0However, according to Cashill, Andersen then threw the reviewers an \u201cunexpected curve.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cashill tells us, \u201cIn a lengthy and detailed section on the Obama\u2019s financial struggles in the early 1990s, Andersen relates how at the urging of Michelle, a \u2018hopelessly blocked\u2019 Obama turned to \u2018friend and neighbor\u2019 Bill Ayers to help him with his much acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>He continues, <\/em>\u201c<\/em>Andersen\u2019s details are specific. \u00a0The Obamas were convinced of \u2018Ayers\u2019s proven abilities as a writer.\u2019 \u00a0Barack particularly liked the novelistic style of To Teach<\/em>, a 1993 book by Ayers.\u00a0 Obama hoped to use a comparable style for his own family history. \u00a0The problem was that although he had taped interviews with many of his relatives, he could not find it in himself to write the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Cashill, \u201cThe key sentence in Andersen\u2019s account is the one that follows: \u2018These oral histories, along with his partial manuscript and a trunk load of notes were given to Ayers,\u2019 \u201d and, \u2018Thanks to help from veteran writer Ayers, Barack would be able to submit a manuscript to his editors at Times Books.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

What does literary investigator Cashill conclude from all this?\u00a0 He says, \u201cTo a book reviewer or to a political editor, this revelation should matter hugely. \u00a0Throughout the 2008 campaign, Obama insisted that he barely knew Ayers. \u00a0He was just some guy in the neighborhood. \u00a0Obama was lying.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Andersen\u2019s account is correct, that Obama experienced a bad case of writer\u2019s block and was unable to complete his memoir\u2026 after having spent his advance money\u2026 and that he and Michelle dumped his notes, his taped interviews, and his own partially-completed manuscript on Bill Ayers, then it is all but certain that the Dreams from My Father<\/em> account of Obama\u2019s summer of 1981 in New York is pure fiction, a product of his Bill Ayers\u2019 imagination, and that his own inadvertent admission of spending much of the summer of 1981 in Indonesia and Pakistan is the version that is \u201cstraight from the horse\u2019s mouth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whatever the truth of the matter, Obama has an obligation to set the record straight.\u00a0 If his first memoir is not his own work, in spite of his many claims that it is, then the American people deserve to know.\u00a0 They deserve to know who it is that now occupies the Oval Office.\u00a0 And given the destructive nature of his plans for America, the sooner we learn the truth of all this, the better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Obama’s first memoir is not his own work, in spite of his many claims that it is, then the American people deserve to know. They deserve to know who it is that now occupies the Oval Office. And given the destructive nature of his plans for America, the sooner we learn the truth of all this, the better.
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