Like Father Like Son?

Prayer Flags and Tibetan Stream - photo by JoAnn Sturman

Scott Sturman

fliesinyoureyes.com

When one reads a 12 lead EKG, it is difficult to discern the relevance of an isolated abnormality in a single lead.  However, if the irregularities occur in groups or patterns, then certain inferences can be concluded about the state of the heart.  Such it is with the company we keep, particularly if the relationships are long standing and intensive.  What company has Barrack Obama kept?

When this past week I sat in a crowded movie theater to watch Dinesh D’Souza’s 2016, it was those who influenced the President from youth to adulthood which caught my attention.  Barrack Obama Sr., an anti colonialist and socialist, spent virtually no time with his son, and it is doubtful whether Barrack Jr. would have mirrored his father’s passions if it were not for a cohort of encouraging, like minded individuals. 

Throughout the President’s life he has either been schooled or influenced by personalities with extreme political views.  After his mother’s second marriage ended in divorce, she moved to Hawaii to live with her parents.  The family originally may have hailed from Kansas, but they had more in common with Vladimir Lenin than native sons Alf Landon and Dwight Eisenhower.  Barrack discovered his grandfather was no ordinary grandfather but one engrossed in an intimate friendship with the registered Communist Frank Marshall Davis.  And what did this loving grandfather do to forge his grandson’s vision of the world?  He enlisted Davis to serve as his personal mentor. 

Following high school Barack attended college at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard, where if he chose, he was free to to escape the philosophical orbit of mom, granny, gramps, and Frank, but he did not.  To the contrary, he actively sought out those of similar mindset.  Despite his cryptic academic record, his social circles are not quite so obscure, as he pursued and developed intense relationships with socialists, anti Zionists, anarchists, and the likes of radical professors Roberto Unger and Edward Said.  (I’ve always wondered how liberal arts majors, and I’m just guessing that was his field, have all that time to shoot the breeze, smoke cigarettes, and drink rum and cokes with the faculty, while science and engineering majors have at best only peripheral  relationships with their professors outside of the classroom.)

After Harvard, Barrack moved to Chicago and once again was at liberty to choose his company, but the allure of the Chamber of Commerce and Kiwanis Club could not compete with the likes of former Weatherman Bill Ayers and the vitriolic Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  We are lead to believe that the Ivy League graduate, community organizer, and future President must have slept through twenty years of Wright’s demagogic sermons and later was nonplused when he became aware of their content.  Yet until this epiphany, what’s wrong with asking your cantankerous preacher to preside over your marriage and baptize your children?

No one but a trial attorney could argue that the friendships and professional associations we cultivate have no impact on our philosophy or view of the world.  The Left would have us believe that despite the complete immersion into radical politics, Barrack Obama miraculously shed his entire life’s experience and underwent a sudden but total metamorphosis.  

What’s the name of the book written by Richard Condon in 1959 which three years later was made into a movie starring Frank Sinatra?