The Opaque Presidency One of the central themes of the Obama Administration is the notion of “openness” and “transparency.” Anyone who believes that the Obama Administration will be any more open than the Bush Administration, the standard by which most liberals and Democrats measure their intentions (not actions… intentions) is smoking something far stronger than Marlboros.
In the years immediately following his Harvard Law School days, Obama wrote a memoir, titled, Dreams from My Father. It reads like a biography written by a man with high ambitions who tries to reveal just enough to keep interested partings from digging any deeper.
For example, Obama writes of his arrival in New York in the summer of 1981 while transferring from Occidental College in Los Angeles to Columbia University. On page 113 of Dreams from My Father, he tells of arriving at the door of an apartment on the upper west side that he had agreed to sublet. Finding no one home, and without enough money in his wallet to rent a hotel room, he made his way to an alley across the street. As Obama described it, “It was well past midnight by the time I crawled through a fence that led to an alleyway. I found a dry spot, propped my luggage beneath me, and fell asleep. I woke up to find a white hen pecking at the garbage near my feet. Across the street a homeless man was washing himself at an open hydrant and didn’t object when I joined him.”
Unable to gain access to the apartment, Obama called a young Pakistani, named Sadik, whom he’d met briefly in Los Angeles. Obama described him as “a short, well built Pakistani who had come to New York from London two years earlier… He had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant workforce, waiting on tables.”
Sadik invited Obama to stay with him and Obama moved in with his meager belongings.
But what Obama fails to mention in either of his memoirs is what he did during the remainder of the summer of 1981. After arriving in New York with not even the price of a fleabag hotel room in his pocket, and moving in with a Pakistani illegal alien who worked for tips in a restaurant, Obama decided to take a trip to Indonesia and Pakistan… visiting first his mother and a half-sister in Indonesia before spending three weeks in Pakistan. So how could the mainstream media not know about that trip before drinking the Obama Kool-Aid?
In an April 6, 2008 speech in San Francisco, the same speech in which he referred to rural Pennsylvanians as “bitter” people who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them,” Obama recalled his 1981 visit to Pakistan. In that speech, Obama explained the value of that trip, vis-à-vis his knowledge of foreign affairs, saying, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was (sic) before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations committee.”
When questioned about that trip, Obama’s campaign press secretary, Bill Burton, confirmed to the New York Times, and others, that Obama had visited Pakistan in 1981 on his return from Indonesia, traveling there with another Pakistani friend from Occidental College, Wahid Hamid. According to Burton, Obama stayed in Karachi with the family of another Pakistani friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo. Obama has never mentioned the Pakistani trip again.
However, the question arises, how did a young man without the price of a hotel room suddenly come up with the price of a round-the-world trip? Who financed it? But far more importantly, the trip raises anew serious questions about his citizenship. Obama almost certainly became an Indonesian citizen in 1967, at age 6, when he moved to Indonesia with his expatriate mother. And since there is no evidence that he repatriated himself or took the oath of allegiance at age 18, after returning to Hawaii, was he traveling on 1981 on an Indonesian passport? Under the circumstances, would it have even been possible for him to acquire a U.S. passport?
Since Pakistan was under martial law in 1981 and on the U.S. State Department’s no-travel list, Obama had to have traveled there on an Indonesian passport. The American people deserve to have answers to these questions, but Obama refuses to respond. That’s not transparency.
Then, of course, there is the issue of his campaign fundraising. Just days before the November election, the Obama campaign announced that they had increased their contributor base from 1.5 million to 2.5 million, and that the total amount raised approached $600 million. Assuming that 25% of their contributions still came from individuals giving $2,000 to $2,300, as previously reported, that major contributor base had grown from 33,200 individuals to 65,000 in a time span of just three months, and the number of individuals contributing modest amounts… “$5, $10, $20, or whatever they could afford,” as Obama characterized it… was up from 1.47 million to 2.43 million, each contributing, on average, $185.
These numbers are so far outside the realm of possibility as to be laughable. It has never happened before in American politics and we can be absolutely certain that it did not happen in 2008… regardless of Obama’s public assurances.
In studying Obama’s Federal Election Commission reports, writer Kenneth Timmerman of NewsMax.com discovered some 66,393 contributions in odd amounts, such as $553.29; $876.13; $1,177.19; $710.99, etc., etc. These are obviously foreign currency conversions which Obama would likely describe as contributions from overseas U.S. military personnel. But that argument won’t hold water. American servicemen overseas have the ability to make contributions in U.S. dollars, in even dollar amounts… leaving us to conclude that the vast majority of those 66,393 contributions originated with foreign nationals and are, therefore, illegal.
So, if Obama reported more than 66,000 such contributions in amounts greater than $200, how many illegal contributors did he have who contributed less than $200?
Consider the millions of dollars in contributions that, by law, did not have to be reported to the FEC because the individual contributor did not reach the $200 threshold. One of my readers in Florida described a visit to his local post office where the customer at the window in front of him was the local Imam. After the Imam purchased a large quantity of $10 money orders, the next man in line… a young man of apparent Middle Eastern descent… proceeded to purchase seventy more $10 money orders.
When my reader questioned the young man about the purchase of so many small-denomination money orders, the young man replied, proudly, “We give them to our poor Muslim brothers who want to help Obama get elected.”
And when the witness later questioned the postal clerk, asking if the post office experienced a lot of such purchases, the clerk replied, “Oh yeah. That’s been going on all over the country for months.” It’s all illegal money and Obama refuses to divulge the identity of those contributors. .
Although it was not necessary for him to do so, John McCain made public the names of all of his less-than-$200 contributors. Now that Obama is elected he must be challenged, in a spirit of “openness and transparency,” of course, to do the same. What does he have to lose… other than what remains of his credibility? He claims to want a “transparent” presidency. Instead, he turns out to be the “opaque” president… less transparent even than Richard Nixon. Is it possible that millions of Americans simply don’t care if Obama is a “natural born” citizen, as required by the U.S. Constitution, or that some unknown person or persons of foreign origin may have purchased the presidency for him? Yes. There are millions of them, both black and white. But I’m not one of them. I care. |
