michelle

Michelle Obama: The President’s Bitter Half

By HERB DENENBERG, For The Bulletin
Published:
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

I never thought I’d find as big a fraud, phony, faker, fibber and hypocrite in high places as President Barack Hussein Obama. But I found one. The president is married to her.

Of course, I know that if you criticize the First Lady, the Obamas immediately go into their standard mode, claiming victimhood and racism. Recall when Mrs. Obama made her infamous remark about being proud of America but did so only after her husband was running for president. After getting hit with criticism, the Obamas went on ABC’s “Good Morning America” to denounce “low class” and “detestable” criticism. Mr. Obama declared his wife to be a “civilian” and exempt from such criticism, as she “didn’t sign up for this.” Of course, those that closely follow the Obamas, get the feeling that they think they are above criticism, and any criticism is illegitimate and quickly branded as part of the “old politics” or “playing games."

Here’s the way Michelle Malkin put it in her masterpiece on team Obama, entitled Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies: “Mrs. Obama most certainly signed up for heightened public scrutiny of her public words and deeds. She signed for it the minute she voluntarily stepped on the campaign trail to sell her husband as America’s soul-fixer. She signed up for it when she made herself a public spokesman for working mothers and chief public surrogate for her husband’s legislative agenda. She signed up for it when she consciously and continuously milked liberal bitterness on the campaign trail to drum up votes for her husband. If she couldn’t stand what little heat she was exposed to during the presidential election season, she should have refrained from grabbing the closest microphone to complain repeatedly about America’s health care, lack of compassion and the evil lure of corporate America.”

And, I might add, she also signed up for criticism when she speaks to her husband about personnel decisions and White House management and when she is her “husband’s chief interpreter of public sentiment” – as reported in the Obama campaign organ and lapdog also known as the New York Times, now noted for its biased, dishonest and fraudulent journalism (Magazine, Nov 1).

Another standard Obama maneuver is to claim racism. There is an example of this as far back as Mrs. Obama’s days as a student at Princeton. As brilliantly documented by Ms. Malkin, Mrs. Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton, titled Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community, showed her bemoaning “her racial otherness." “The aggrieved Ivy Leaguer accused her university of pushing her down the dreaded path toward ‘further integration and/or assimilation into a white cultural and social structure that will only allow me to remain on the periphery of society, never becoming a full participant.”

She was offered every advantage America can offer, but she still endlessly complained about her victimhood. Of course, she was wrong about the white culture and social structure, which almost immediately after her graduation from Princeton and then Harvard Law School, gave her every insider advantage possible, and a veritable flood of high-level opportunity. Even after she and her husband had become millionaires, she was still complaining about her old student loans and budgetary limitations.

Mr. Obama is also adept at playing the race card, as he did during the campaign, when he falsely and fraudulently said that his opponents would call attention to his color and strange name. In fact, John McCain did not to do that and should have criticized Mr. Obama for playing the race card in a most unseemly and disgusting fashion. He also played the race card in the famous incident in Cambridge, Mass., by assuming that the policeman somehow was a racist when he was simply doing his job.

But Mrs. Obama’s hypocrisy also knows no bounds. During the campaign, she constantly complained about her student loans and the difficulties in trying to save for her children’s education on her limited budget. She often seems to be deeply immersed in her self-image of the victim, bringing Ms. Malkin to label her Barack Obama’s “bitter half.” In the year prior to the presidential campaign, she was making $500,000 herself, not to mention the income of Mr. Obama. Doesn’t that sound like income enough to handle a few student loans? But in all her phoniness, she tried to play the martyr sounding as if she had made great sacrifices along with her husband by going into public service.

She said, “We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do. Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But, if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.”

Why should anyone suggest going into business or corporate America isn’t a perfectly reasonable choice? But, like her husband, Mrs. Obama seems to resent America’s great business enterprises and perhaps favor socialism over capitalism.

Mrs. Obama never went for a career with such traditional low or modest pay as what she recommended for others – teaching, social work, nursing, etc. She had a job at the University of Chicago as “Vice President for Community and External Affairs,” a phony job invented for her by one of her influential cronies, at $120,000 a year, which went up to $317,000 right after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate – pure coincidence, of course, just as it was coincidence that she got the job right after her husband was elected to the Illinois state senate. Her whole career, like that of her husband’s, was using her connections to advance her career and enhance her resume, while doing little of value. But the Obamas played the system perfectly. As a senator, Mr. Obama, for example, requested a one million dollar earmark from taxpayers for his wife’s employer, the University of Chicago. That looks strangely like a payback for the raise Mrs. Obama was awarded when Mr. Obama became a senator. It also sounds like egregious conflict of interest. Her phony job, apparently created by the University of Chicago to curry favor, earmarks and other government favors, was abolished shortly after she left it for the presidential campaign.

Even after she went on leave to help with her husband’s campaign, the University of Chicago paid her $62,709, to which Ms. Malkin reports one skeptic said, “We know this is Chicago, but isn’t $62,709 quite a lot for a no-show job?”

Mrs. Obama is just as phony and hypocritical as her husband, as illustrated by her performance during her professional life. She still likes to hold herself out as a defender of the poor and downtrodden. But time again, she worked on behalf of her employer to disadvantage the poor and downtrodden, and to make tainted profits and ill-gotten gain for the University of Chicago Medical System. For example, she set up a program for the University of Chicago Medical Center called the “Urban Health Initiative.” It was advertised as a way to provide better health care for the poor being served by that medical center. In fact, it was a thinly disguised plan to dump poor patients from the University of Chicago Medical Center and transport them to some distant clinic.

The results of Mrs. Obama’s patient dumping scheme have been documented in the Culture of Corruption: “In February 2009, outrage in the community Mrs. Obama was supposedly so in tune with exploded after a young boy covered by Medicaid was turned away from the University of Chicago Medical Center. Dontae Adam’s mother, Angela, had sought emergency treatment for him after a pit bull tore off his upper lip. Mrs. Obama’s hospital gave the boy a tetanus shot, antibiotics, and Tylenol and shoved him out the door. The mother and son took an hour-long bus ride to another hospital for surgery.”

For a full account of Mrs. Obama as the same kind of phony, fraud, and hypocrite as her husband, see Chapter 2 of Ms. Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. But there’s a perfect little addition to that chapter in two recent news stories: The first, titled First Lady Now Requires 26 Servants, appeared in the Canada Free Press and the second, titled Michelle Obama’s Personal, Million-Dollar Staff appeared on Tampa Bay Online – www.tbo.com. The articles, which do use statistics called into question by some fact-checkers, did put into perspective Ms. Obama’s theme that she made great sacrifices to be in public service. The latter article put it this way: “When you combine this apparent disgraceful and arrogant waste of tax dollars with what the president and his family have already lavished on such frivolity as date nights in cities far from Washington or family vacations in Europe and Africa, a picture of an unprecedented imperial presidency emerges from the obscuring cloak of optimism that has surrounded President Barack Obama since he first won his party’s nomination to run for the White House.”

Now perhaps we know why Mrs. Obama left the corporate world for a career in public service. As a full-fledged member of the corrupt Chicago Cook County political machine, she perhaps learned that the public trough provides a delicious and plentiful brew. But, at the very least, she should tell Mr. Obama to stop complaining about corporate extravagance and high executive pay because the Obama extravagance exceeds that of any corporate executive. But all this only scratches the surface of the phony, fraudulent, faking, fibbing, hypocritical Obamas. To get a bit beyond the tip of the iceberg, I urge you to read Ms. Malkin’s Culture of Corruption. The book should be a must-read for every American because it gives a view of the Obamas, which the biased, dishonest, and fraudulent mainstream media have refused to report on.

If the truth were known, America would never have elected Mr. Obama president, but the mainstream media succeeded in the greatest fraud in American history – electing this inexperienced, untested, far-out radical who actually hates America. And, to use a phrase used heavily by Bill Clinton, we got two for the price of one. And what a price we’re paying for that transaction!

Herb Denenberg can be reached at advocate@thebulletin.us

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