Here’s a link to that NYT article on Obama’s mom, Stanley: “Obama’s mother - an unconventional life: Anthropologist disliked ethnic barriers, sought to aid world’s poor.” Funny how they can write thousands of words about a politician’s mom without ever getting around to mentioning the currently most relevant thing about her, her politics.

I don’t think anybody on the left will have trouble figuring her ideology out, though. As Mona Charen would say, her politics aren’t articulated, they’re presumed. The rest of the electorate, however, doesn’t need to be clued in, now do they? It might just confuse the poor saps.

Mama Obama should be in the Stuff White People Like Hall of Fame (Dangerously Naive Wing).

It took her a long time to figure out that if you are a White People (female variety), you are supposed to act like you’ve gotten into the Third World, not let Third Worlders get into you.

Having a boyfriend from Africa at the U. of Hawaii in the early 1960s was very fashion forward. Letting the already-married bastard get you pregnant and then wedding him bigamously, and then having him abandon you and your two-year-old because his scholarship offer from the New School of Social Research that would have paid for the three of you to live in Manhattan wasn’t as prestigious as his scholarship offer from Harvard that would pay only for him, well, that’s just kind of tacky and sad.

And then marrying a laid-back nice-guy Indonesian student in Hawaii, and following him back to Indonesia, where, surrounded by your new in-laws he starts acting — what do you know? –more like a traditional Indonesian paterfamilias who won’t take any guff from his feminist wife. I guess majoring in anthropology didn’t prepare you to see that one coming?

One sign that Obama never succeeded in becoming the fully authentic African-American that he spent all those hours in Honolulu watching “Soul Train” to achieve is that his attitude toward his mom for much of his life was straight out of Stuff White People Like: “#17 Hating Their Parents.” He ended up apologizing to his late mother in the 2004 Preface for what he had written in his 1995 autobiography. Real black guys do not diss their mamas. (Also, to digress, as one commenter pointed out, a real black guy named “Barack” would not call himself “Barry” or “Barack,” he would call himself “Rock.” Rock Obama.)

As a child, he deeply resented her dumping him twice on her grandparents in Hawaii so she could be in Indonesia working on the 1,067 page Ph.D. dissertation on peasant blacksmithing that she completed in 1992.

So, it’s a mistake to assume that Obama’s leftism is of his mom’s Kumbaya variety. He later imbibed a much more cynical, pragmatic radicalism, which I will describe in my VDARE.com article tonight.

The hits just keep on coming from the New York Times. Today’s swill describes how immigrant Muslims in a small Spanish town are suffering because they don’t have a proper mosque [Spain’s Many Muslims Face Dearth of Mosques]

In Lleida, located in northern Spain, the make-do prayer hall’s Islamic congregation has exploded from 50 to 1,000 in just five years, but they want a real mosque and make it snappy. However, the cultural stresses on the town’s citizens are intense.

“The tension has grown as the numbers have grown,” Ms. Roigé said. “They’ve set up shops, butchers, long-distance call centers and restaurants.” These businesses, catering to Muslim immigrants, line the surrounding streets.

She added: “They are radicals, fundamentalists. They don’t want to integrate.”

Muslim leaders, however, say the lack of proper mosques is one barrier to integration. And Spanish authorities and Muslim leaders say the potential for extremism would be easier to monitor at fewer, larger mosques than at the 600 or so prayer halls scattered throughout the country.

Ri-i-i-ght — better architecture will prevent those impressionable boys from embracing jihad. Al Times accepts that ludicrous idea with no question and marches along to more appeasement journalism.

The weekly magazine continues in the same vein with a puff piece about Islamic law: Why Sharia?

In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. By contrast, who today remembers that the much-loved English common law called for execution as punishment for hundreds of crimes, including theft of any object worth five shillings or more? How many know that until the 18th century, the laws of most European countries authorized torture as an official component of the criminal-justice system? As for sexism, the common law long denied married women any property rights or indeed legal personality apart from their husbands. When the British applied their law to Muslims in place of Shariah, as they did in some colonies, the result was to strip married women of the property that Islamic law had always granted them — hardly progress toward equality of the sexes.

In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world.

Of course the difference is that the bad old days of English law are long past, while the horrors of sharia continue daily. Men are executed for being accused of homosexuality, women are murdered in honor killings for the smallest social infractions and public beheadings continue in places like Saudi Arabia. In addition, alleged sorcery is also frowned upon in The Kingdom (Saudis Cracking Down on Witchcraft) and slavery is accepted and practiced in several Islamic nations.

Another swell job, New York Times, in defending Islam’s 8th-century brutality and denigrating western progress in law and justice!

The New York Times Magazine has an article by Matt Bai on race and the race:

The assumption has always been that a black candidate should perform worse among white voters in states with less racial diversity because those voters are supposedly less enlightened. In fact, the reverse has been true for Obama: in the overwhelmingly white states of Wisconsin and Vermont, for instance, he carried 54 and 60 percent of the white voters respectively, according to exit polls, while in New Jersey he won 31 percent and in Tennessee he won 26 percent. As some bloggers have shrewdly pointed out, Obama does best in areas that have either a large concentration of African-American voters or hardly any at all, but he struggles in places where the population is decidedly mixed.

What this suggests, perhaps, is that living in close proximity to other races — sharing industries and schools and sports arenas — actually makes Americans less sanguine about racial harmony rather than more so.

Half Sigma responds:

Steve Sailer was the first shrewd blogger that I know of to point this out.

Perhaps, although I think it’s more likely that one or more of my commenters and emailers, or some of the bloggers I regularly read suggested the idea to me first. Here, for example, is Audacious Epigone’s statistical analysis of this question from Feb. 6, 2008.

Collectively, however, the NYT’s designation of us as “shrewd” is something I think we can live with.