The Obama camp has now released Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton. So far, I’ve read the Dedication and the first couple of pages of the Introduction, and that’s plenty. You’ve got to be impressed with how ruthless Senator Obama is — he’ll humiliate his poor wife by releasing her semi-literate college graduation maunderings just so he can say, “Let’s move on.”

DEDICATION

To Mom, Dad, Craig [her brother], and all of my special friends:

Thank-you for loving me and always making me feel good about myself.

And here’s part of her creatively punctuated Introduction:

“The purpose of this study is examine various attitudes of Black Princeton alumni in their present state and as they are perceived by the alumni to have changed over time. …

“These experiences have made it apparent to me that the path I have chosen to follow by attending Princeton will likely lead to my further integration and/or assimilation into a White cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society; never becoming a full participant. This realization has presently, made my goals to actively utilize my resources to benefit the Black community more desirable.”

Uh, to be nitpicky, I don’t think there’s normally a hyphen in “Thank-you,” is there? (I originally figured this 1985 thesis was created on a typewriter, which would have made it harder to fix typos, but the columns are justified, so it was done on some sort of word processor. Still, Princeton grads are supposed to know that there is no hyphen in “thank you” …)

So, it looks like Barack has had his vengeance on Michelle for calling him “stinky” and “snore-y.“

And she sure has some self-esteem issues, doesn’t she? I think that’s part of her appeal to the Oprah audience: her inflated but fragile ego. Oprah’s fans can identify with Mrs. Obama. People were always telling them that they weren’t smart enough either; and, yet, here they are, sitting around watching daytime TV. Who’s laughing now?

For some reason, Mrs. Obama’s psyche always reminds me of Steve Martin’s climactic speech in “Three Amigos:”

“In a way, each of us has an El Guapo to face. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big, dangerous man who wants to kill us. But as sure as my name is Lucky Day, the people of Santa Poco can conquer their own personal El Guapo, who also happens to be *the actual* El Guapo!”

Keep in mind that Mrs. Obama not only got into Princeton, but then got into Harvard Law School, graduated, and even passed the Illinois bar exam. So, maybe, prose just isn’t her strong suit. (Or did she pass the Bar? She worked for two years at a corporate law firm in Chicago, and then got a job working as some kind of fixer for one of Mayor Daley’s henchmen. You can’t work for two years for a law firm without passing the bar exam, can you?)

It’s not exactly a coincidence that for the last 15 years, our Presidents were both born in 1946. The previous birth dearth helped Bill Clinton get elected governor at age 32, and let George W. Bush drink away his 20s and 30s without paying a serious (or any) career cost. There just wasn’t much competition from the ranks of people one to fifteen years older than them.

In contrast, the late baby boomers of, say, 1955-1964 faced a huge number of early baby boom elders clogging the desirable jobs ahead of them. The later boomers are a huge group, well-nourished, well-educated, with lots of talent. They tended to have a chip on theirs shoulders about the early Baby Boomers, their sense of entitlement and their self-mythologizing. (Thus, for example, punk rock was very much a rebellion of late boomers against the hyperhyped music of the early boomers.) I’m not a big fan of generational analysis, but it’s a safe generalization that late boomers tended to feel more constrained, and hence more concerned about their life prospects, than the lucky early boomers.

You seldom hear the quintessential 1980s term “yuppie” anymore, perhaps because the young urban professionals it was first applied to aren’t young anymore. But, by Presidential standards, Barack Obama, who was born late in the baby boom in 1961, is still young. And he’s definitely urban and professional.

Indeed, he came of age, like so many classic yuppies, in the Reagan years in New York. Like many others at the time, he swore off recreational drugs and excessive drinking, took up jogging, developed some big career ambitions, and seriously set about making them happen. (One exception to the stereotype is that he continued chain-smoking, suggesting perhaps a high-strung personality under the surface that requires some self-medicating via nicotine.)

Now, yuppies accomplished a lot, but they were never exactly well-liked: too calculating, too emotionally cold, too ambitious, and too self-interested are the stereotypes. And that’s a problem when your goal has always been to be elected to high office, which is primarily a popularity contest. So, Obama figured out a brilliant way to solve his yuppie problem.

He joined a church in 1988.

He doesn’t seem to have any particular religious belief (by his own detailed account, he gets a warm feeling of racial solidarity out of attending church, but it’s a stretch to call it a faith), but he was very careful about which church he joined. He picked out the most successful proto-megachurch on the South Side of Chicago, which was led by a superstar sermonizer named Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr..

Now, there are lots of preachers on the South Side, but Wright had two essential qualities:

• Wright’s far leftist politics and racial resentment were congenial to Obama;
• Wright was the best, the most successful preacher / organizer around. In the Darwinian dog-eat-dog world of modern Protestantism, Wright is one of the handful of winners who have succeeded in building a megachurch.

So, what was Obama doing in Wright’s church all those years?

Studying. The agnostic preppie from Hawaii learned the tricks of the preaching trade from Wright, which allows Obama to drape over his shoulders the vast moral authority our culture has accorded black preachers ever since Martin Luther King, while claiming to merely be promoting technocratic yuppie reforms that won’t scare white people.

The English essayist Jonathan Raban writes:

“The title of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope is an explicit salute to a sermon by Wright called “The Audacity to Hope,” and his speeches are peppered with Wrightisms, like his repeated claim that “There are more young black men in prison than there are in college,” but his debt to the preacher goes much deeper. While Wright works his magic on enormous congregations, with the basic message of liberation theology, that we are everywhere in chains, but assured of deliverance by the living Christ, Obama, when on form, can entrance largely white audiences with the same essential story, told in secular terms and stripped of its references to specifically black experience. When Wright says “white racists,” Obama says “corporate lobbyists”; when Wright speaks of blacks, Obama says “hard-working Americans,” or “Americans without health care”; when Wright talks in folksy Ebonics, of “hos” and “mojo,” Obama talks in refined Ivy League. But the essential design of the piece follows the same pattern as a Wright sermon, in its nicely timed transition from present injustice and oppression to the great joy coming in the morning.”

This combination of yuppie smarts and black preacher man eloquence has made Obama the state-of-the-art politician, as impossible to pin down as the shape-shifting liquid metal T-1000 in Terminator 2.

This Sunday, a referendum is scheduled, allowing citizens to vote yes or no on the installation of a border fence.

This referendum isn’t being held in the U.S., but in Mexico, in the Monterrey suburb of San Nicolas, whose mayor wants to put up a fence on San Nicolas’ border with its neighbor Guadalupe (see map). Reportedly, thieves are coming over from Guadalupe to steal things in San Nicolas,and the border is a scene of gang activity.

San Nicolas Mayor Zeferino Salgado has proposed a 5-mile long fence, over 6 and a half feet high, along the river La Talaverna, which forms the border between San Nicolas and Guadalupe.

So this Sunday, February 24th, a referendum is scheduled in San Nicolas. Eligible to vote are the residents of the 10 colonias (neighborhoods) adjoining the border. (Voter ID cards are to be checked to prevent outsiders from voting.)

The young mayor, known as “Chefo”, is adamant in the necessity of the fence:

I have to give a solution to whom I owe answers and those are the citizens of San Nicolas, this is a necessary measure that we are going to take.

Go get ‘em, Chefó ! Would that we had more American leaders with your resolve.

As you might imagine, over in Guadalupe they aren’t so supportive. Guadalupe mayor Cristina Diaz thinks the referendum is unnecessary, as she asserts that, while she does respect the decision of the San Nicolas government, both expert opinion and public opinion are against the fence . But isn’t that the very reason San Nicolas is holding the referendum, to see if the border neighborhoods support it?

Aldo Fasci, A Nuevo Leon state official from the Attorney General’s office, came out against it, and brought up the border fence on the U.S.- Mexican border, which he says, “has not stopped the passage of drugs, nor stolen vehicles, nor weapons, nor indocumentados (illegal aliens).” Well no, but it hasn’t really been built yet, has it ?

As of Friday, February 22nd, the referendum was still scheduled, and the Guadalupe mayor was still against the fence.

This should be interesting.

Someone at Politico.com has found and posted  a copy of Michelle Obama’s thesis, which she was (very suspiciously) keeping under wraps until after the election.

Michelle Obama’s senior year thesis at Princeton University, obtained exclusively from the campaign by Politico, shows a document written by a young woman grappling with a society in which a black Princeton alumnus might only be allowed to remain “on the periphery.” Read the full thesis here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

Michelle Obama thesis was on racial divide - Jeffrey Ressner - Politico.com

The terrible bus crash that killed four school kids and injured over a dozen others earlier this week was the fault of an unlicensed illegal alien, Alianiss Nunez Morales. She was driving a van that ran through a stop sign and smashed into the bus. (Computer animation of the crash here.)

Days after the Lakeview School bus crash, the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) joins the investigation.

“We are working closely with the state patrol into the circumstances surrounding the accident, including the legal status of the driver of the van,” said ICE agent Tim Counts.

23-year-old Alianiss Nunez Morales had been driving the van, which investigators say smacked into a Lakeview school bus. That accident sent her to the hospital. When Morales was released Thursday afternoon, the Minnesota State Patrol made a probable cause arrest for criminal vehicular operation. Lyon County Sheriff Joel Dahl said, “They have talked to the prosecutor. They have enough information whatever that has entails at this point to take her into custody.”
[Federal Immigration Officials Now Looking Into Fatal Minnesota Bus Crash, KSFY-ABC News, Sioux Falls South Dakota, Feb 21, 2008]

Shown below are the four children killed (clockwise from top left) Hunter Javens, 9, and his brother Jesse Javens, 13, both of Cottonwood; Emilee Olson, 9, of Cottonwood; and Reed Stevens, 12, of Marshall, MN.

One of Lawrence Auster’s readers was at a Smith Foundation debate on immigration, which featured Tamar Jacoby as the speaker for the pro-immigration side:

Later, during the Q&A, a gentlemen who attends American Renaissance conferences made the point that America is more than just a piggy bank and that the cultural aspects of immigration are being ignored. He stated that we are now receiving more immigrants from Mexico than from all of Europe, which was the foundation of our population, and that as a consequence whites will become a minority by the middle of the century.

It was Tamar Jacoby who first responded. She said, yes, this is the Pat Buchanan argument again and that we have to think about the implications of this question as a nation.Unbelievable: Tamar Jacoby says we need to discuss how immigration is changing our character as a people

This is important if true, but please remember that this is the same Tamar Jacoby who said, in a speech in Brussels, [PDF] that “The point about the American national identity is that it’s minimal.”

Benjamin Franklin pointed out that the way to get somebody to like you is to have them do you a favor. If you do them a favor, that just emphasizes your superiority over them, and they resent you for it.

Ben would have been heartily amused by how Michelle Obama will never forgive white America for what she had to suffer: being admitted to Princeton and Harvard despite being not terribly smart.

From NewsBusters last November:

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: “The polls are showing your husband is trailing Hillary by 46% to 37% in the African-American community. What’s going on here?”

MICHELLE OBAMA: “First of all, I think that that’s not going to hold. I’m completely confident: black America will wake up, and get [it]. But what we’re dealing with in the black community is just the natural fear of possibility. You know, when I look at my life, the stuff that we’re seeing in these polls has played out my whole life. You know, always been told by somebody that I’m not ready, that I can’t do something, my scores weren’t high enough.”

Of course, the only solution is more affirmative action, which will create more resentful Michelle Obama clones, which is the whole point of the exercise …

For some reason, Mrs. Obama’s “rage of a privileged class” always reminds me of the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where Hunter S. Thompson explains to his attorney:

“You Samoans are all the same,” I told him. “You have no faith in the essential decency of the white man’s culture. Jesus, just one hour ago we were sitting over there in that stinking baiginio, stone broke and paralyzed for the weekend, when a call comes through from some total stranger in New York, telling me to go to Las Vegas and expenses be damned — and then he sends me over to some office in Beverly Hills where another total stranger gives me $300 raw cash for no reason at all … I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

“Indeed,” he said. “We must do it.”

The more we find out about Presidential candidates, the more it becomes clear that the secret to the success they’ve enjoyed so far in their careers is that in elections, somebody always has to win. This isn’t like climbing Mt. Everest, where you either do it or you don’t. Politics is graded on the curve, and the competition is only other politicians.

For example, for years we’ve been assured by the press that while Hillary Clinton may not be inspiring, as a manager she is Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Welch, and Stalin rolled into one. And yet, her 2008 campaign has been inept, with it becoming more obvious daily that she didn’t have her staff prepare a realistic, detailed plan for what would need to be done in the later primaries if, perchance, she didn’t knock out the competition on Super Tuesday, February 5.

Of the 16 years I’ve known about the existence of Hillary Clinton, I’ve spent the last 14 trying to ignore her, because she’s a boring person. Has anyone ever heard her say anything interesting?

The more you look into her, the more the myth of her brilliance evaporates. For example, where does the famous description of her as “the smartest woman I’ve ever encountered” come from? Larry Summers? Lee Kuan Yew? Seymour Cray? Nah, it’s a quote from Bill Clinton’s mom, Virginia.

I’m far behind the curve on this, but I didn’t know until now that, after graduating from Yale Law School, she failed the Washington D.C. bar exam. She wrote in her autobiography:

“I had taken both the Arkansas and Washington, D.C., bar exams during the summer, but my heart was pulling me towards Arkansas. When I learned that I had passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought maybe my test scores were telling me something. I spent a lot of my salary on my telephone bills and was so happy when Bill came to see me over Thanksgiving. We spent our time exploring Boston and talking about our future.”

Lots of people fail the bar exam, but Washington D.C.’s isn’t particularly hard, at least not compared to California’s (which the former dean of the Stanford Law School, Kathleen Sullivan, recently flunked). In July 2007, 75.5% of first time test takers passed the D.C. bar exam. The overall pass rate in her year was apparently 67%, so the pass rate for first-time takers (which is usually higher) was probably about the same. And that would put her in the bottom quarter. (Arkansas’ test, which she passed, appears to be pretty easy.)

Failing the bar exam isn’t so bad, except that the media has never explained why she should be President other than that she’s so smart. But if she’s not so smart, then her main claim to being President is the nationally embarrassing one that nobody is supposed to talk about: that she was married to the last President, that she’s Imelda Marcos in sensible shoes.

Apparently the the common phrase “A chip on her shoulder,” referring to Michelle Obama’s speech, (you know, the one where she said “For the first time in my adult lifetime, I am really proud of my country,“) is evidence of some kind of conspiracy, in the fevered brains of David Brock’s employees, at George Soros’s Media Matters:

Media Matters - Tucker Carlson echoed Kaus, VDARE contributor on Michelle Obama: “I think she’s got a chip on her shoulder”
Tucker Carlson echoed Kaus, VDARE contributor on Michelle Obama: “I think she’s got a chip on her shoulder”

Summary: Discussing recent comments by Michelle Obama, Tucker Carlson said: “I have thought from Day One that Michelle Obama, impressive as she is, clearly intelligent, very handsome, self-possessed — I think that she’s got a chip on her shoulder.” Similarly, Slate.com blogger Mickey Kaus wrote of Michelle Obama: “For whatever reason, she sure seems to have a non-trivial chip on her shoulder and it’s not a winning quality.” Additionally, referring to a February 16 Newsweek profile, VDARE.com contributor Steve Sailer wrote that Michelle Obama “sounds like she’s got a log-sized chip on her shoulder from lucking into Princeton due to affirmative action.”

After this they list everything Steve Sailer said that they don’t like, in what I guess is an attempt o hang it on Tucker Carlson.Well, Google shows 746,000 uses of this common phrase, using a wildcard search that will allow for “a chip on his/her/it’s/their” shoulder, which dates back to 1830, and only half of them refer to Michelle Obama. (I’m kidding about the half.)

But really, maybe Tucker, Mickey, and Steve all said the same thing because Michelle Obama gave them all the same impression.

In the wake of the latest campus racism hoax to be exposed, a reader asks:

“Has there EVER been a documented case of an anti-Latino-racism hoax? As far as I can think, the vast majority of the hoaxes involve blacks, though a considerable fraction involve (lesbian?) feminists, gays in general, or Jews.”

In other words, have Hispanics ever been caught faking a racist incident? Good question. Anybody know?