NEW YORK TIMES JOINS CONTRARIANCOMMENTARY'S OBAMA PARADE—AND STUMBLES

BARRY OBAMA'S STRANGE FAMILY CONTINUES TO FASCINATE WITH ITS BIZARRE WAYS

(CHICAGO)(March 19, 2007) On the day that Barack Obama announced his campaign for president ContrarianCommentary.com ("CCC") published the first psychological profile of the candidate. "The Mask of Barack Obama: A Psychological Profile" remains the most analytical study of Obama's strange persona. http://www.contrariancommentary.com/community/Home/tabid/36/mid/363/newsid363/79/Default.aspx

We received the usual pro-Obama attacks on our motives. The Democratic National Committee has a deranged woman who writes a blog largely directed at trashing our coverage of Obama and pillorying me as a "racist." The poor ignorant DNC creature doesn’t know I have been a civil rights activist for over forty years. My opposition to Obama has nothing to do with "civil rights."

We have continued to be especially energized because CNN sent a "correspondent" to Jakarta to "put an end" to questions about Obama's "Madrassa" madness. Notably, CCC has never used the term "madrassa" in any of its Jakarta coverage of Obama. Obama's media manipulators demanded that CNN's cover-up be the last word. It was not and it will not be.

Recently the Los Angeles Times sent an excellent reporter to Jakarta to plow the same Jakarta furrows in Obama's life. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/la-na-obama15mar15,1,26632.story

The L. A. Times essentially corroborated what we had started reporting 2-1/2 years ago, namely that Obama's Muslim history was far more extensive than he had ever admitted. The L. A. Times prompted Obama to change his stock denial from "never having been a Muslim" to the more nuanced "never having been a practicing Muslim." As I have pointed out repeatedly, Obama's childhood would be of little interest if he did not work so hard to suppress the facts and to paint a false picture of his family's religious history.

Saturday, the New York Times felt constrained to join the Obama's-family-history parade, and sent Jennifer Steinhauer to Hawaii to speak with Barry's sister. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/17/us/politics/17hawaii.html

Steinhauer got one of the key points in her story wrong. She wrote "When he was 10, the family returned to Oahu.." My understanding of the facts is quite different. Obama's mother and half-sister Maya remained in Jakarta; at the age of 10 Barry/Barack was separated from his mother and sent to live with his grandparents.

Steinhauer thus missed one of the key psychological elements in what we called the "Mask of Barack Obama," his constant familial loss. First he lost his father, and had to invent a father in his "Dreams." Then his mother sent him away and he was forced to join a "new" family, living full-time with his grandparents who were white. All of these episodes of loss are critical to understanding Obama's psyche. Unfortunately, Steinhauer confused the facts and misreported the reality of Obama's lifelong feelings of alienation.

Nevertheless, the fact that Ms. Steinhauer tries to relate Obama's fictional account of his early life in his book "Dreams" to the reality of what he endured at a prestigious private school in Honolulu shows that we were absolutely right when we first focused attention on Obama's early life many months ago. The Times' return to that topic with a front-page story validates out own continuing news judgment.

Although we have been urged to "drop Obama" we won’t do so. His candidacy says a lot of about the vacuousness of American politics, and the vulnerability of this nation to yet another bunkum artist in the White House.

What of the Dunham/Obama/Soetoro family? Obama continues to live in a fantasyland about "family," and he continues to shield the truth in order to perpetuate the myth of his "Africanness."

So what' so strange about Obama's family? Well, his sister refuses to be photographed. She has claimed in past that she is an "adviser." When has a presidential adviser or family member refused to be photographed? It's weird. Do Obama's presidential advisors/relatives walk around wearing grocery bags on their heads? What do they have to hide?

Likewise, Obama's white grandmother is apparently forced to maintain the fiction that she is "not well enough" to be photographed or interviewed. It would be politically embarrassing for Mr. Obama, trying to portray himself as the first "Black president" in the words of his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng, to produce a white grandmother. So granny stays locked in the closet. Obama perpetuates the myth of his "blackness" at the cost of his closest family. What kind of a person would do that? Not someone we would want to be president, for sure.

Indeed, the "granny locked-in-the-closet" figure of speech says it all about Obama's campaign and the way he is likely to ultimately damage the Democratic Party and disappoint his followers.

Sunday in the New York Post Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic published a column in which he admitted "skepticism is sedulously arriving" about Obama. Thus it is particularly unfortunate that the New York Times sent a reporter to Hawaii and missed both the forest and the trees about Obama's early years.

In the meantime, as the L. A. Times' and N. Y. Times' belated attempts to profile Obama reflect, our own psychological profile remains the gold standard by which all other media analysis will be compared. From 2004 to 2007, we have been the first, and the best and, unfortunately, often the only Obama media analysts willing to write the truth about this seriously confused candidate.

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Chicago-based Internet journalist, broadcaster and critic Andy Martin is the Executive Editor and publisher of ContrarianCommentary.com. © Copyright by Andy Martin 2007. Martin covers national and world politics with forty years of personal experience. Columns also posted at ContrarianCommentary.blogspot.com; contrariancommentary.wordpress.com. Comments? E-mail: AndyMart20@aol.com. Media contact: (866) 706-2639.