This conspiracy stretches back to the Revolution. Not the American Revolution. The 60's Revolution. The suburban middle/upper-class student commie revolution. The one fought by Weatherpeople Bill Ayers and his dear wife Bernadette Loonytunes. The revolution that never ended in this country's institutions of higher education. The ones where Barack Obama spent his youth. The universities where the revolutionaries became ensconced and have wrecked havoc on young minds ever since.
Many interested people have tried to paint an accurate picture of just what the hell Barack Obama was doing, if anything, while attending (or not) the prestigious Columbia University? By all lights, at least according to his own biographies (!), he was avoiding establishment types (e.g., white men) and hanging out with every sort of counter-cultural poseur, hangers-on, socialist, anarchist, Euro-trash, activist, cigarette smoking, black turtleneck wearing Third Worldism loving scholarship hound. It all sounds so innocuous and youthful and reminds us of our days in college. Well, no it doesn't, really. But it does sound like a fabulous amount of time was wasted on USDA Prime Certified Bullshit. These conspiracies ask not just what he was doing, but who was doing it with on whose behalf he was doing it, whatever it was he doing. Remember - nobody knows. There isn't even a transcript to review.
Oh, Sydney Brillo Duodenum, why does it matter, you may ask?
Because we are talking about what the next President of the United States was up to in his college years. Nobody can tell you that the events, places and people described in these posts are complete fabrications and misalignments and curiosities of happenstance. There has been no definitive treatment of Sen. Obama's college years, save what he himself has offered in his two biograpahies (!). Isn't college where the first coat of paint is applied - the one that always manages to bleed through no matter what color you choose later on? That is one of the many outrageous scandals marking "the media's" behavior this election cycle. When has a candidate for President ever been as unknown as Barack Obama? How is it possible that at the height of the information age, we know less about Barack Obama than we do about George Washington?
Or is it possible that we know a great deal about Barack Obama? Sydney Brillo Duodenum believes that everything we need to know is in plain sight, but it is too incongruous for us to grasp at the moment. There is such a large, compounding debt of liabilities associated with Barack Obama that it can not all be processed at once. The bits and pieces are still perceived as such and are swept away when considered in the context of healing and national reconciliation and moving on and coping and change and all the other dross of the professional confabulators. Some headway was made this past week with the spot on designation of Barack Obama as an unreconstructed socialist. His first coat of paint, bleeding through. Some were reported to rush in to defend this, history be damned. But who applied the paint? It's possible that Sydney Brillo Duodenum is old-fashioned for wanting to know these things in this supposed age of privacy and the protection thereof.
The nub of this conspiracy, as set out in two parts, one best described as the Manchurian Candidate thesis and the other Manchurian Candidate lite, by Mencius Moldbug at Unqualified Reservations, is thus:
Manchurian Candidate Thesis:
My guess - not because I have any reason to believe that this specifically is what happened, but just because every other explanation I can think of strikes me as less probable - is that Obama, as a young black radical with SDS credentials and obvious talent and potential, found it relatively trivial to earn quick admission to the inner circle, spent two years as a gofer, intern, catamite, or what have you for the Ayers crime family, and was rewarded by the gift of a Columbia degree and a ticket to Harvard Law.
Did Bill Ayers have connections in the administrative staff at Columbia? It would be remarkable if he didn’t. Folks, the Movement was the center of the universe in 1968. If you were one of the top hundred people in it, let alone Bill Ayers, you were the giant glowing sun in the core of your social galaxy. You were a stud beyond studs. You had friends everywhere.
And would someone who blows up police stations blanch at planting a file? Honestly, can we even be confident that the staff at Columbia looked at the file? Who are they, and how do we know them? Again: why do we believe that Barack Obama attended classes at Columbia.
Manchurian Candidate Thesis lite, e.g., Wallflower:
Perhaps Obama, as an activist at Columbia, was a little like a football player on scholarship. He is not ever seen in class, because he is not ever in class. It is generally understood, at least among the staff, that he has other things to be doing. And it might even be that someone else is doing his homework. In other words, he might have been an intern/catamite/etc in some parallel, opaque world of activist politics. The goal is to have a capable young man for a couple of years who will do all kinds of odd jobs for you, while in exchange receiving a Columbia degree.
Also of note and eliding nicely with Mencius' work is this post at Zombietimes:
Barack Obama would have you believe that the bombings by the radical domestic terrorists known as The Weather Underground were something that happened when I was eight years old" and with which he had absolutely no connection. And while it is true that their bombings started when Obama was eight years old, they actually continued until he was twenty years old. And, incredibly, the life of Barack Obama and the terror campaign of the Weather Underground nearly intersected on the evening of September 26, 1981 at an anti-Apartheid protest which turned violent at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York.
Delicious, spicy stuff. Read it all, if not as a fun diversion on this dark eve, than at least as a piece of hard tack to stow away for the long, arduous journey ahead. Let it represent your bit of hope that this quintessential enigma will be called out, exposed, uncovered, deposed, what have you.
