July 14, 2011

The Obamas and the deep state

In the "The Chosen One" in The Claremont Review of Books, Angelo M. Codevilla, professor of international relations at Boston U., tries to flesh out the idea I've been kicking around for a couple of years: that Obama's family background comes out of CIA-supported international leftism.
His mother's parents, who raised him, seem to have been cogs in the U.S. government's well-heeled, well-connected machine for influencing the world, whether openly ("gray influence") or covertly ("black operations"). His mother spent her life and marriages, and birthed her children, working in that machine. For paradigms of young Barack's demeanor, proclivities, opinions, language, and attitudes one need look no further than the persons who ran the institutions that his mother and grandparents served—e.g., the Ford Foundation, the United States Information Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency—as well as his chosen mentors and colleagues. It is here, with these people and institutions, that one should begin to unravel the unknowns surrounding him. 
Two new books deal with Barack Obama's paternal and maternal families. British journalist Peter Firstbrook's The Obamas takes us all the way from the origins of East Africa's Luo tribe to Barack's father's relationship with Barack's mother. Generally fact-filled, it gives vivid portraits especially of Barack, Sr.'s, father, Onyango, who tried to raise a son as upright as he and was deadly disappointed when that son turned out to be a wastrel in the train of Tom Mboya, political leader of Kenya's Luo. The closer the book gets to the present, however, the less trustworthy it becomes. For example, it tells us that Mboya organized the 1959 airlift of 280 Africans to study in America, bypassing the U.S. State Department. Nonsense. This was high U.S. policy and touted as such at the time. The CIA considered Mboya one of its most important covert action agents. The people chosen by him and the CIA to go to America were his flunkies. But the book is irrelevant to understanding the current president of the United States because his African family had only a biological influence on him. Indeed, Barack Obama's African-ness is, as we shall see, strictly the product of his imagination.

No, Obama wrote about how, while he was in Indonesia, his mother emphasized to young Barack his biological father's heroic example. There is a lot of effort by commentators on the President's life to downplay the significance of his having a black father. The chief exceptions to this pattern are myself, David Remnick, and the President.

I would add that Obama Sr.'s bravery in being the anchor witness in the trial of the Kikuyu gunman hired by, no doubt, Kikuyu big men close to the British-affiliated Kenyatta to assassinate the American-affiliated Luo Mboya was likely appreciated by CIA. 
The maternal family that raised Barack Obama, which is highly relevant to our understanding, is the subject of New York Times reporter Janny Scott's A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother. But though this book tells us that grandmother Madelyn Dunham's favorite color was beige, that Stanley Dunham and daughter Ann (Barack, Jr.'s, mother) shared a certain impulsiveness, and contains interviews with and personal information on countless of Ann's high school friends, it sheds no light on what the Dunhams were doing with their lives that led their daughter to take a practical interest in international affairs. 
Magically, Ann Dunham goes from peeking her shy 17-year-old head out of Mercer Island, Washington ("a young virgin," writes Janny Scott), to intimacy with a very foreign person, and a few years later with another, and then to work in one of the Cold War's key battlegrounds. Meanwhile her mother, about whose professional activities the book says nothing, becomes a bank executive. Did Ann speak any foreign language? Had the Dunhams ever taken any trips abroad? The book does not say. A Singular Woman gives the impression that Ann's Indonesian husband, Lolo Soetoro, was just a geographer drafted into the army, a minor, unwitting part of the bloody campaign that wrested Indonesia from the Communists; and that Ann's work in that country was anthropological-humanitarian, as if for her U.S. policy were irrelevant. It certainly was not for her employers—the U.S. government and contractors thereof. 
Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack's mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen's credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its "gray" and "black" activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily "witting" (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next. 
Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack's grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. 
One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut's elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. 

Eh ...

If I tried to make up a conspiracy theory about my own family background and the CIA, I could come up with a bunch of loose ends that Wayne Madsen would find persuasive, but don't add up to much.
Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham's daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii's East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA. 
Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann's second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a "civilian employee of the Army."

In Indonesia and Kenya, the U.S. was not, initially implicated in trying to maintain European colonialism. The Truman administration had been unsympathetic to Holland's attempts to regain control of the Dutch East Indies after WWII. The Brits' anti-Mau-Mau campaign in Kenya in the 1950s was seen by Washington as their problem. With the coming of independence, the U.S. played a dual game of keeping Kenya out of the Soviet orbit and of trying to lessen British neo-colonial economic ties for the advantage of American business.
But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA's most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia's dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible. 
After the overthrow, Ann ran a "micro-financing" project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia's most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late '60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America's official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore's Hilton International. 
Nothing small time, never mind hippyish. 
In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.'s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government's then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

I would add that both Barack Obama Sr. and Lolo Soetoro worked, at some points, for U.S. oil companies operating in their home countries. 
In the 1950s and '60s few cared where, say, the State Department or foundations such as Ford ended and the CIA began. The leading members of the U.S. government's influence network moved easily from public to private stations and vice versa. Here are a few examples. Howard P. Jones, U.S. ambassador to Indonesia between 1958 and 1965—arguably the chief planner of the coup that removed the Sukarno regime—became chancellor of the University of Hawaii's East-West Center. Ann Dunham's second husband, Lolo Soetoro, returned from the East-West Center to Jakarta to help in the struggle that the coup had begun.


Dreams from My Father hints that Lolo was tormented by memories of what he had seen and done during his active service in the Army during the bloody post-coup purges, and that his subsequent alcoholism stemmed from that.
Another of Ann's employers, the Ford Foundation's international affairs division, was led by Stephen Cohen, who had come to Ford from the directorship of the International Association of Cultural Freedom, previously known as the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), which organized countless left-leaning American academics into a corps (lavishly financed by the CIA) to promote social democracy around the world, and to staff many of the councils on foreign relations that spread around America in the 1950s. Among the participants were countless actual and future college presidents, including Richard C. Gilman, who ran Occidental when young Barack Obama enrolled there in 1979. In those years, any number of companies were CIA fronts, including Business International Corporation, which gave young Obama his first job after graduation from college. Perhaps these are only coicidences. More importantly, U.S. international corporations in general had countless officers who were proud cooperators with U.S. covert activities abroad. Any serious attempt to sketch this network would result in something like an x-ray of the American ruling class's skeleton. 
The point here is that this network was formed precisely to help the careers of kindred folk, while ruining those of others, and to move the requisite money and influence unaccountably, erasing evidence that it had done so. Exercising influence abroad on America's behalf—the network's founding purpose—never got in the way of playing a partisan role in American life and, of course, of taking care of its own. 
As I pointed out in my book Informing Statecraft (1992), when Congress first authorized the U.S. government's various influence activities abroad it worried loudly and mostly sincerely that these activities might "blow back" onto American political life: The U.S. government, so went the widely accepted argument, might have to say and do all sorts of things abroad, train and deploy any number of operatives in black arts on the whole country's behalf, knowing that these activities and operatives might well be distasteful to any number of Americans at home. Because the U.S. government must not take a partisan part in U.S. domestic life—so went the argument of an era more honest than our own—it must somehow isolate its foreign influence network from domestic life. But preventing blowback was destined to be a pious, futile wish, especially since many of those in the influence network were at least as interested in pressing their vision of social democracy on America as they were in doing it to other countries. 
Foremost among these was Cord Meyer, who ran CIA's covert activities in "international organizations" beginning in 1954. Between 1962 and 1975 he directed or supervised all CIA covert action. Meyer explained what he was about in his book Facing Reality (1980).
Meyer and his upscale CIA colleagues considered themselves family members of the domestic and international Left. They believed that America's competition with Soviet Communism was to be waged by, for, and among the Left. Their strategy was to fight the Soviet fire by lighting and feeding socio-political counter-fires as close to it as possible. This meant clandestinely giving money and every imaginable form of U.S. government support to persons as far to the political and cultural left as possible, so long as they were outside Soviet operational control. American leftists were best fit to influence their foreign counterparts this way. Paradigmatic was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which spawned and fed many "voluntary" organizations at home and abroad with U.S. influence and money. Its director, Michael Josselson, was so little distinguishable from the Communists, his leftism so anti-American, that the U.S. chapter of CCF disaffiliated in protest. Alas, CIA's fires eventually went out of control and singed American life. 

So, there's some fun stuff here, but it's not overwhelmingly persuasive. Still, it's quite reasonable to say that the milieu that the President emerged from was the pro-American international left that was looked favorably upon by CIA and other American establishment organs.

Similarly, I could make up a list of CIA or generally "deep state"-connected people I or my family had some relations with. It's quite an extensive list now that I think about it. For example, my wife's uncle, an Air Force colonel, spied in East Berlin during the Cold War. My wife has a cousin whose base is in suburban Virginia, but whose career takes her and her husband to extremely odd, but strategic locations around the world. It's understood that you don't ask them direct questions about where they work.

It doesn't really add up to a hill of beans in terms of direct causality. On the other hand, it does suggest a certain milieu I came from -- conservative military-industrial complex. Practically everybody I know with deep state ties is on the right wing side of the deep state. That is informative about me, about my predilections and loyalties, just as understanding that Obama came from a milieu with pervasive connections to the left-wing of the American deep state is informative about him.

And, Obama is a helluva lot more ambitious and manipulative than I am, so it seems plausible that he's gotten more out of his connections than I ever tried to do.

Once again, it's more realistic to look upon CIA less as the master conspiracists pulling the strings of intricate plots than as a big player in the international equivalent of the Municipal Favor Bank dramatized in The Wire and Bonfire of the Vanities.

As for Obama's domestic career after he left Business International, a sometimes CIA front, and moved to Chicago ... My guess is that this was something of a rebellion against the easy path open to him in the international sphere. His three years in Chicago's slums were disappointing to him so he got back into the elite sphere, applying to Harvard, Yale, and Stanford law schools (and no other). But he wanted to return to Chicago and become mayor, a job that exemplified "power," a word that comes up throughout Dreams. That proved unfeasible in 2000 when local black voters decided he wasn't black enough, leading to depression and the realization that his ambitiousness could be satisfied without having to prove his blackness to black voters. 

Still, if you asked a bunch of sophisticated CIA executives in 1961 like Meyer to mock up a model of who they'd like to see elected President in 2008 to maximize their legacy, they couldn't have come up with a more perfect protege for themselves than a thoroughly establishmentarian half-black whose family comes out of the international left. 

40 comments:

  1. 'Ann Dunham, comfort woman.'

    Ick.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Obama is the Neil Tyson of politics.
    Just act okay and 'clean-cut' and be promoted to the highest echelon.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well, it was to be expected. The US in the sixties built a vast international machine to combat the spread of Communism, and developed methods to replace unfriendly foreign governments. Once the mechanism was in place and successful, it was only natural that it would look home and put its own man in charge. Yet the narrative seems to me too neat, real life is messier, I think.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sailer on the topic of high level conspiracy is always the same: lazy, hazy, unconfirmed, maybe.

    Meanwhile the laughable crackpot Alex Jones spent the last decade warning of the emergence of a totalitarian police state control grid.

    Who is facing up to reality, Steve or the crackpot?

    Hey, Steve, is it conspiracy talk that the former head of TSA is making big profits on the sale of bodyscanners to the USgov?

    And one could go on and on with more questions

    ReplyDelete
  5. David Davenport7/14/11, 7:05 PM

    Regarding CIA-sponsored front groups, what do my fellow iSteveniks think about the old rumor that the CIA subsidized National Review magazine in that mag's early days?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great analysis! Just can't get stuff like this anywhere else.

    ReplyDelete
  7. America bought a pig in a poke when it elected Obama.

    ReplyDelete
  8. As a general rule, deep state conservatives are tied to the Pentagon and the deep state liberals are tied to the CIA (Markos Moulitsas turned down a job offer from Langley to focus on his nascent Dailykos webite).

    ReplyDelete
  9. When I was at the Jackson School I once naively wrote a fairly stern denunciation of American anthropologists' activities in SE Asia, suggesting that their work was compromised by the known CIA affiliations of some "researchers" in the Golden Triangle area (embedded with KMT remnants, Shan mercenaries, etc.).

    My professor, a brilliant guy for whom I have a great deal of respect, declined to grade the paper, saying he could not be objective in this matter. I thought that was a bit odd at the time, but in retrospect I think I must have hit a nerve.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Steve Sailer: No, Obama wrote about how, while he was in Indonesia, his mother emphasized to young Barack his biological father's heroic example. There is a lot of effort by commentators on the President's life to downplay the significance of his having a black father. The chief exceptions to this pattern are myself, David Remnick, and the President.

    Uhh, you're leaving out Bill Ayers.


    Angelo Codevilla: As I pointed out in my book Informing Statecraft (1992), when Congress first authorized the U.S. government's various influence activities abroad it worried loudly and mostly sincerely that these activities might "blow back" onto American political life: The U.S. government, so went the widely accepted argument, might have to say and do all sorts of things abroad, train and deploy any number of operatives in black arts on the whole country's behalf, knowing that these activities and operatives might well be distasteful to any number of Americans at home. Because the U.S. government must not take a partisan part in U.S. domestic life—so went the argument of an era more honest than our own—it must somehow isolate its foreign influence network from domestic life. But preventing blowback was destined to be a pious, futile wish, especially since many of those in the influence network were at least as interested in pressing their vision of social democracy on America as they were in doing it to other countries... Meyer and his upscale CIA colleagues considered themselves family members of the domestic and international Left. They believed that America's competition with Soviet Communism was to be waged by, for, and among the Left. Their strategy was to fight the Soviet fire by lighting and feeding socio-political counter-fires as close to it as possible. This meant clandestinely giving money and every imaginable form of U.S. government support to persons as far to the political and cultural left as possible, so long as they were outside Soviet operational control.

    Okay, now here's a scary thought: Were Ayers and the Weather Underground themselves an instance of "Blowback"?

    Bill Ayers's father, Thomas G Ayers, certainly had a resume which read like the resumes of Madelyn Dunham and Peter Geithner.

    And there's that postman, Allen Hulton, who claims that* Obama visited the home of Thomas Ayers, in the mid-1980s, to thank Mr & Mrs Ayers for supporting his education.



    *See also here - for reasons that I don't understand, Steve Diamond removed most of his research from the public internet.

    ReplyDelete
  11. "Regarding CIA-sponsored front groups, what do my fellow iSteveniks think about the old rumor that the CIA subsidized National Review magazine in that mag's early days?"

    LOL

    "I disagree with them; they must be a plant!"

    ReplyDelete
  12. Mike 'Mish' Shedlock is sort of the Steve Sailer of economics. He runs a very popular blog but gets no sanction from the powers that be because he won't sell out. In his case it's Keynesianism mainstream vs Austrian School outcasts. While for Sailer it's Blank Slaters vs HBD.

    Both bloggers employ a strategy of coolness to all conspiracy theories because they are already heretics on the subject they hold dear and joining the fringe on other issues simply chases away potential converts to The Cause.

    ReplyDelete
  13. Wes - following Cass Sunstein's orders7/15/11, 1:30 AM

    This is all fascinating, but what exactly does the US get out of this whole deal? I vaguely understand that the CIA benefits, but how is Obama good for the US (which is ostensibly what the CIA is about)?

    ReplyDelete
  14. "but what exactly does the US get out of this whole deal?"

    Abstract expressionism?

    ReplyDelete
  15. The part that is weird here is that the CIA is considered on the left. Usually many leftists like Chomsky denounce "CIA plots".

    But it makes sense if you think of it in Mencius Moldbug's formulation of an Anglo-Soviet split, like the Sino-Soviet split. It was actually a three way game the whole time, with three different variants of communism: globalist "democracy" vs. Soviet communism vs. Maoism. All of them fixated on world government and increased state control.

    In this formulation Chomskyists are American Trotskyists, left-deviationists. And the McCarthy/Reagan nationalist right taking over the US infrastructure to finally win the Cold War was like the Stalin nationalists taking over the USSR infrastructure to finally win WW2.

    This does not mean any equivalence between Reagan and Stalin, just that both took a golem created by the international left and turned it towards nationalist purposes, just like HUAC was originally anti-Nazi and got turned ibto something anti-Communist. Sometimes leftists singe themselves. The neocons have set up the framework for another such singeing with their post 9/11 valorization of the US military. It will be one of the few remaining institutions with intact reputation after the coming US fiscal collapse.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Okay, now here's a scary thought: Were Ayers and the Weather Underground themselves an instance of "Blowback"?

    Another really obvious point of CIA interest, in the early- to mid-1980s, would have been Pakistan, as a staging area for Mujahideen attacks on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

    And, of course, in 1981, you've got Obama travelling [possibly on an Indonesian passport?] with his homosexual Pakistani lover & patron, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo to visit Pakistan.

    Furthermore, Stanley Ann Dunham was in Pakistan, in 1986 and 1987, immediately after having worked for Peter Geithner, from 1981 to 1984.

    ReplyDelete
  17. Strange coincidences abound, don't they? Everything always ends up being different from what it originally seems to be. Bush Sr. may have been a CIA man all along rather than having been just a one time director.
    Gloria Steinem, for one example, worked on behalf of a CIA front organization in the late 50's to early 60's.
    Who knows, maybe there's some blackmail video of Obama in a vault somewhere available for use in case he gets too full of himself and thinks he can do as he pleases.

    ReplyDelete
  18. Well, I'm calling for the application of Occam's Razor to this one. Why is this anything other than what it appears, namely, the depredations of a third-world primitive in a Western society? Barack Obama Sr. "founded" what, three families in the U.S.? And thereafter, he stuck around for none of them. All the responsible white people in this story tried to do the boring right thing and deal with the consequences, one of which ended up as the President of the United States.

    How is it that we discount, even here in the nether regions of opinion, the power of good old-fashioned atavism? BO Sr. did exactly what any, uh, old-school Southern gentlemen would have predicted in the presence of all those white women. Who needs "deep-state" theories and elaborate CIA connections? I mean, it's fun to talk about and all, but let's keep it real.

    ReplyDelete
  19. "the old rumor that the CIA subsidized National Review magazine in that mag's early days"

    Bill Buckley was a CIA officer after college, however unusually (and impossible now in our credentialism era) he was a US Army officer before college, so he had a foot in both camps.

    Buckley's dad made a fortune in the oil business, so I'm dubious NR needed subsidizing, and certainly not directly. It'd be easier and safer legally (as Cordavilla notes, in the old days people expected the CIA to not operate domestically) to "pay it forward" by assisting Buckley family's oil company, Catawba Corp.
    http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,953171,00.html

    ReplyDelete
  20. No no, Warren Mosler is sort of the Steve Sailer of economics. :o)

    Its to Steve's credit that he sticks to his knitting and focuses on topics he's mastered. I doubt he'd have written so much original and though provoking work if he spent his time offering his thoughts on the passing scene.

    ReplyDelete
  21. "'but what exactly does the US get out of this whole deal?'

    Abstract expressionism?"


    Either that or performance art.

    ReplyDelete
  22. Obama accepted the Presidency as a runner up prize to becoming Mayor of Chicago? I guess it makes sense to Chicagoans.

    ReplyDelete
  23. William F. Buckley was a CIA agent before he founded NR and the CIA was known to subsidize journalists and journals of opinion that supported American foreign policy, so perhaps the shoe fits.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Ann Dunham's quick escalation from a shy virgin to a pregnant teenie carrying an interracial child is
    an uncommon fact of life of that time that might be accounted for in many ways, surely. One scenario seen in high schools of that time was the sudden sexual activity / even promiscuity/ by girls that sought to prove themselves heterosexual when they privately were resisting lesbian inclinations. Relevant to Ann Dunham? I know of no overt indication of any further heterosexual involvements by her after the decay of her second marriage. Neither marriage seemed to retain vitality very long. The known facts of sexual relations ( dating, etc. ) of President Obama are, for the time of his maturation and youth, very common among males that are basically homosexual, with bisexual potentials.

    ReplyDelete
  25. "what do my fellow iSteveniks think about the old rumor that the CIA subsidized National Review magazine in that mag's early days?"

    I have no idea if it is true or not (William F Buckley and a few others at the formation were obviously former CIA), but National Review was among the main organs of influence for supplanting the nationalistic, anti-interventionist conservatism of the post WWII era with the pro-globalization, pro-Israel, war-mongering variety of the Nixon administration and beyond. The reason the John Birch Society is viewed with contempt is because National Review lead a campaign to publicly discredit them (JBS became short-hand for dangerous wing nut) by the mid-1960's. That campaign likely kept Goldwater from ever becoming president.

    Rush Limbaugh has also been reported to have been the AM radio populist version of NR.

    ReplyDelete
  26. David Davenport7/15/11, 8:23 PM

    National review magazine -- important little magazine to "respectable" -- DD said with a sneer -- American conservatives.

    ... but National Review was among the main organs of influence for supplanting the nationalistic, anti-interventionist conservatism ,

    You mean Robert Taft-style isolationism, which I perceive to be Steve S.'s foreign policy also.

    ... of the post WWII era with the pro-globalization, pro-Israel, war-mongering variety of the Nixon administration and beyond.

    National Review magazine was started in 1955. If we go back and look at 1950's issues of NR, I'd bet that its attitude regarding Israel was about the same as Pres. Eisenhower's -- only lukewarm.

    Looking at back isssues of NR from the Nixon years, the magazine probably did become more lovey-dovey about Israel, reflecting Nixon adminstration attitudes toward "America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Middle East."

    See, from the p.o.v. of the American populists right, NR has always brown-nosed the Republican Party powers-that-be.

    The reason the John Birch Society is viewed with contempt is because National Review lead a campaign to publicly discredit them (JBS became short-hand for dangerous wing nut) by the mid-1960's. That campaign likely kept Goldwater from ever becoming president.

    Yes, the way I heard it, the CIA wanted a respectable, Ivey-League-y conservative movement to counter the John Birchers. Maybe we don't disagree here.

    My hunch about the CIA's world view is that it's similar to that of former CIA Director G. Bush Sr.: old money, East Coast Ivy League, well-washed and outwardly bien pensant.

    For all we know, Bush Sr. voted for Obama in the 2008 election, after helping the younger O. out when George Sr. was CIA Director years ago.

    Rush Limbaugh has also been reported to have been the AM radio populist version of NR.

    Rush Limbo isn't past tense yet. And he doesn't quite fit the G. Bush Sr. East Coast Establishment mold.

    I don't agree with Rush's simple-minded total laissez-faire economics, but I'll save that discussion for another post.

    ReplyDelete
  27. Who in their right mind would name their daughter Stanley? THAT should tell you something, right there.

    ReplyDelete
  28. The black creme de la creme. Instructive watching.

    Volume mistaken for values.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzD5ip6_KQE&feature=related

    ReplyDelete
  29. Double-Ho-Seven.

    ReplyDelete
  30. "Ann Dunham's quick escalation from a shy virgin to a pregnant teenie carrying an interracial child is
    an uncommon fact of life of that time that might be accounted for in many ways, surely. One scenario seen in high schools of that time was the sudden sexual activity / even promiscuity/ by girls that sought to prove themselves heterosexual when they privately were resisting lesbian inclinations. Relevant to Ann Dunham?"


    I doubt it. A more common scenario is that of the plain girl who conflates availability with desirability and thus tries to prove her attractiveness via sexual activity. I think this, combined with her father's leftist POV, is a much likelier explanation for Stanley Ann's change from shy virgin to teen mom of a mixed race child.

    I see it all the time today in my rural area with lower-class whites: a exceedingly plain, often pudgy, girl with a mixed-race baby in tow. I seldom, if ever, see an attractive young white girl with a mixed-race baby.

    ReplyDelete
  31. "This is all fascinating, but what exactly does the US get out of this whole deal? I vaguely understand that the CIA benefits, but how is Obama good for the US (which is ostensibly what the CIA is about)? "

    Dude, have you seen how well the upper classes have been doing for the past 30 years?

    I think "Deep State-left" versus "Deep State-right" is a distinction without much difference. Both parties agree on the goal: make as much money as possible for the ruling families of the US. They only disagree on the methods. Figuring out the different methods is an exercise left to the reader, as the old math books say.

    ReplyDelete
  32. CIA/Mossad: It is fairly common knowledge in the US national security apparatus that the Mossad enjoys a very "special latitude" to work within the US. For example, a bombshell item re Bill and Monica and the Oral Office is that Clinton remarked to her not to call him on the Oval Office phone because the Mossad was presumed to have it tapped. It is not presumptuous to have a mental edit so that "CIA" is perceived as
    "CIA/MOSSAD" in the context of this commentary.
    AS to Stanley Ann Dunham---it is quite likely that the intended spelling for gender propriety was
    "STANLEE" and it just didn't get transcribed right. Public schools always correct this sort of matter in practice. In fact, it was tormented wee Stanley/Stanlee herself that was creating static about her name--a gender issue she churned throughout her elementary and middle school years and beyond.
    Also, it is a fairly well-known fact of life in the "gay" community that many homosexuals averse to straight sex can have and enjoy in a muted way "straight" sex if if it is with a person of a different race. There is no information I know of re Ann Dunham ever ever seeking sexual contact with whites when she was in the 15-17 year old antsy phase, nor is there any information about sexual contact after her second marriage ( to an
    Indonesian). She appears to have
    turned off the ero voltage during her 30's as far as straight sex is concerned?? I don't disregard the distinct possibility (not a probability ) that the real "color" question re Ann and
    BHO is L A V E N D E R and that can cry out politically for harness and reins. Relevant? I assume not but I sure as hell don't disregard the possibility.

    ReplyDelete
  33. Ann Durham's Unitarian church held protest in favor of U.N. admission for Red China .. it is her "Little Red Church" on Mercer Island that gave Ann and her family an interest in foreign affairs & international relations.

    This is NOT uncommon in the 1950s -1960s period. "Liberal" churches were very interested in such stuff.

    ReplyDelete
  34. "Rush Limbo isn't past tense yet. And he doesn't quite fit the G. Bush Sr. East Coast Establishment mold."

    Exactly the reason he was supposedly chosen to be a CIA disinfo agent. He is old money Midwestern establishment, but he sells Eastern establishment conservatism to the folks in flyover country that don't relate to credentialed Yale alums from back East. The benefits of globalization and illegal immigration (he's now against it) have been his harder sells to the "rubes".

    ReplyDelete
  35. National Review magazine was started in 1955. If we go back and look at 1950's issues of NR, I'd bet that its attitude regarding Israel was about the same as Pres. Eisenhower's -- only lukewarm.

    Lukewarm at best:
    http://sanseverything.wordpress.com/2008/02/25/when-conservatives-loved-the-palestinians/
    (...)
    On November 19th, 1956, Leo Strauss wrote a letter to Willmoore Kendall complaining that National Review (the flagship conservative magazine Kendall helped found) was too anti-Israel. Strauss was particularly irritated by an article by that ran in November 17th, 1956 issue that contained this astonishing sentence: “Even the Jews, themselves the victims of the most notorious racial discrimination of modern times, did not hesitate to create the first racist state in modern history.”
    (...)
    James Burnham, the most important and influential foreign policy analyst at National Review, was very critical of Israel, constantly berating the state for inflaming Arab passions by mistreating Palestinian refugees and its internal Arab population. As Burnham wrote in the July 28, 1970 issue of National Review, “The United States cannot base a successful long-term Mideast policy on support of Israel.”
    (...)

    It may be significant that both Kendall were-like Buckley-were ex-CIA.

    ReplyDelete
  36. "'Liberal' churches were very interested in such stuff[hard left causes].'

    They still are. I was raised in United Church of Christ. No, not that congregation but yes, that same denomination.

    During the Rev. Wright flap, I read the online monthly bulletin from the church I was forced to attend during my adolescence. The minister wrote a cute little note about how some members of their denomination were being attacked and how hurtful it was and how they must be supportive of their members everywhere--not one word about how hurtful Wright's comments may have been to some.

    I'm not anti-religion the way some are but I think all the meddling in politics should definitely cause all churches--left, right and center--to lose their tax-exempt status.

    ReplyDelete
  37. Ann Dunham's connection to the Unitarians on Mercer Island may need context? She was a schizoid personality from early on and was "devoted" to what had shock value to the social mainstream around her. The late Dr. Hans Eysenck's concept of "the P Factor" in personality functioning probably has heuristic value in understanding her? Her affinity for odd and unsual ideas and ideation was a matter of deep concern, espeically to her mother, Madelyn Payne Dunham. Much of the semi-nomadic hop scotch relocations of Madelyn and Stanley Dunham were for Madelyn's hope that they could find some school in which after several weeks, the kids would not be isolating and picking on Stanlee Ann. She grew up (?) blaming the larger world for her own moral defaults and lack of social sensitivity. Her much emphasized "intellectuality" in her middle school and high school years probably was the all too familiar remoteness of the schizoid pseudointellectual. She tried to "get a life" via neo-Marxism and leftist busy-body activities. Stanlee Ann Dunham's life is a Case Study that has not yet been compiled.

    ReplyDelete
  38. Steve - this discussion took place back in July of 2011, whereas it's now September of 2012 - and this idea of the Dunhams as intelligence operatives is gaining some pretty serious traction with the folks who are getting some boots on the ground and actually investigating the historical record:


    Frank Marshall Davis, Jr.?
    By Jeff Lipkes
    September 20, 2012

    ...Gilbert makes the case that Gramps worked for the CIA. After World War II, Dunham didn't enroll at U.C. Berkeley under the G.I. Bill, as Obama claims, but studied there only for a year, taking intensive French and government classes. Gilbert believes that Gramps was in Air Force intelligence. The various small towns he moved the family to were located next to AF bases. None was noted for its furniture stores.

    The family then went to Lebanon. Gilbert deduced this from the uniform Ann wears in a photo taken from this period. It's from a Beirut Catholic school catering to families of Westerners. Dunham was then sent to Seattle to monitor Communist infiltration of Boeing, Gilbert believes, and was in turn monitored by the FBI, who resented the interlopers. Then he relocated to Hawaii to help indoctrinate African exchange students. Barack Obama was the first of these.

    When Ann realized she was pregnant, early in 1961, she faced some unenviable choices. Abortion was illegal and dangerous. But the fifty-six-year-old Davis was already married with kids and not about to divorce his wife. Besides, he was a well-known Communist and had a thick FBI file. A family link with him would likely end Stanley's career. And a daughter with an illegitimate black baby was not an attractive alternative.

    Gilbert speculates that Davis suggested a sham marriage. Dunham immediately thought of his Kenyan protégé...



    And apparently they're starting to look into the enigma that was Bill Ayers's father, Thomas Ayers: "The coverage of the Ayerses, père and fils, is particularly thorough."

    ReplyDelete
  39. September 2012 here again, with another thought:

    Steve, if Gilbert is correct that Stanley Armour Dunham was loosely affiliated with USAF security [especially at Boeing], then it's entirely possible that your Dad might have known someone who knew someone who knew someone [etc etc etc] who knew Dunham.

    Now just guessing from the geography, I'd say that your Dad was probably more of a Lockheed [or maybe a Hughes] guy, down there in SoCal, so probably he didn't get up to Boeing all that much, but your Dad was born in 1917, and Dunham was born in 1918, so their ages definitely match up.

    Maybe some of the young whippersnappers among your Dad's old colleagues [guys who would now be in their late 80s] might be able to shed some light on this?

    PS: My Dad passed a few years ago - don't you just [channelling Whiskey] HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE IT when there's some question that you knew your Dad would have known the answer to [right off the top of his head] but now he's no longer here to help you out?

    Getting a little wistful now.

    Sorry.

    ReplyDelete
  40. that you knew = that you know

    ReplyDelete

Comments are moderated, at whim.