The walking catastrophe that was Obama’s father

Here is the most detailed account of the life of Barack Obama’s father that I’ve seen, written by Sharon Churcher in the Daily Mail in January 2007. Barack Obama, Sr. was an out-of-control mess, yet managed to attract lots of women and wives. (What does that say about Darwin by the way?) A heavy drinker, he regularly drove drunk on Kenya’s roads and lost both legs in an accident. They were replaced by iron prosthetics, and he continued to drive drunk until he was killed in another accident. The article concludes:

A family friend said: “He is haunted by his father’s failures. He grew up thinking of his father as a brilliant intellectual and pioneer of African independence only to learn that in Western terms he was basically a drunken lecher.”

Obama Sr. would be a top candidate for a Darwin Award, except that the Award normally goes to individuals who off themselves BEFORE they produce offspring (which is of course the whole point of the Darwin Award), but Obama Sr. had about ten children by about four different wives.

Oh, and by the way, Daddy-O was married to his first, Kenyan wife at the time that he married his second, white wife and sired Baby-O.

And while Baby-O’s maternal grandparents get kudos for taking care of him from age 10 to 17 while his mother was in Indonesia, his grandfather had to be pretty weird too. He was so disappointed when his daughter Ann was born instead of a son that he insisted that she be named Stanley after him. Her legal name was Stanley Ann Dunham. Is that weird or what? And then grandpa Dunham was also something of a crazed liberal, upbraiding his wife in front of their mixed race teenaged grandson for being afraid of a panhandler who had accosted her, because the panhandler was black. Presumably if the panhandler was white, it would have been ok for her to be scared of him..

A great nation that elected as its leader a man of such questionable and marginal background and upbringing as Barack Obama, Jr., a man who has no real identity, but who, like a mixed-race Zelig, is constrained to go through life manufacturing new identities for each situation, would be a country that had lost its way. Of course, a country that elected as its leader a brainless embittered 72 year old wreck of a man whose only two ideas were to open America’s borders to the Third World and keep our troops in Iraq for a thousand years would also have lost its way.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 20, 2008 01:25 AM | Send