Since hitting the mainland Obama has surrounded himself with leftists well versed in the knowledge too big to handle. "I chose my friends carefully," he writes in his 1995 memoir, Dreams From My Father, "The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets." With his new friends, Obama discussed "neocolonialism, Franz (sic) Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy" and flaunted his alienation.
The literary influences Obama cites include radical anti-imperialists like Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois. "Joseph Stalin was a great man," DuBois wrote upon Stalin's death in 1953. "Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."
In Dreams, Obama gives no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moves on to no new school, embraces no new worldview. At least five of the authors he cites -- Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin -- Bill Ayers cites in his writings as well. (As an aside, both Obama and Ayers misspell Fanon's name in the same way as "Franz.")
For mentors, Obama chose men like Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the fraudulent Palestinian wannabe Edward Said, and the radical PLO groupie Rashid Khalidi. These are the men he turned to for wisdom. In 2003, for instance, Obama publicly thanked Khalidi for providing "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.
The literary influences Obama cites include radical anti-imperialists like Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, communists like Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, and tyrant-loving fellow travelers like W.E.B. DuBois. "Joseph Stalin was a great man," DuBois wrote upon Stalin's death in 1953. "Few other men of the 20th century approach his stature."
In Dreams, Obama gives no suggestion that this reading was in any way problematic or a mere phase in his development. He moves on to no new school, embraces no new worldview. At least five of the authors he cites -- Wright, Fanon, Hughes, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin -- Bill Ayers cites in his writings as well. (As an aside, both Obama and Ayers misspell Fanon's name in the same way as "Franz.")
For mentors, Obama chose men like Ayers, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the fraudulent Palestinian wannabe Edward Said, and the radical PLO groupie Rashid Khalidi. These are the men he turned to for wisdom. In 2003, for instance, Obama publicly thanked Khalidi for providing "consistent reminders to me of my own blind spots and my own biases.
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