What would it have taken for her to feel she belonged? She obviously doesn’t know, thus, one source of her perpetual anger. Another source is affirmative action. It’s a bitch to know that even though you’ve advanced thanks to just the sweetest, kindest, nicest, most well-meaning form of racism evuh, your black skin—not you—is what got you there.

This is nothing more than an accusation of deep-seated racism. It’s cheap and tawdry, especially when you consider that it is directed at liberals!

I live in Dallas, and there are plenty of areas within this city where I feel like a visitor. I just don’t fit in, whether I am speaking of very liberal neighborhoods, ethnic neighborhoods, or even the very high-falutin’, stuck-on-themselves hoity-toity areas. Yet I would never accuse the people living in such areas of engaging in any deep-seated hostility towards me. They simply have different cultural values that don’t match my own. I’m welcome to mine and they’re welcome to theirs.

I’d have to read Mrs. Obama’s entire thesis to be certain, but it seems to me that if she found Princeton to he hostile, she finds all of America to be hostile. It certainly explains her alienation from America, and her belief that we are a mean and nasty nation. It explains the simmering anger that I almost always detect running just beneath the surface of everything she and her husband say and do.

You may be well be correct. The issue is debatable. Certainly her senior thesis is not of the quality of one Harvard senior thesis, which was turned in to a book: JFK’s Why England Slept. But few senior theses are.

One thing in support of your hypothesis is the big chip on her shoulder that she carries around. Had I had risen from a lower middle class /skilled working class background like Michelle’s to a $300k job, my attitude would have been, “what a country,” not the resentment and “mean country” attitude she carries around. She is one angry woman. That picture of her with Sarkozy’s wife shows us her default point of view. Quite literally.

But that is just the thing. That is exactly about race. Or rather, it is exactly what the Leftist idiotards peddle when they talk about “white culture” discriminating against blacks and keeping blacks economically poor. The difference is, they target people in their way, Republicans or conservatives, and those in the South. In reality, of course, the “white culture” that is keeping blacks down are the affirmative action whores, the Planned Parenthood eugenics crowd (let’s kill off the black race by aborting their babies and making them like it, fight for the right to do it even), and the Democrat party.

The response of most people to the Leftist extremists and racists is “don’t talk about race and it will go away”. But they aren’t going to stop and thus, race isn’t going away. And if they aren’t going to stop, us ignoring the issue of race, by not talking about who is to blame, will do us no good in the end because propaganda belongs to the activist and to the loud ones: not to those sitting in a quiet corner going along to get along. The US Marines couldn’t convince any Iraqi to join us by sitting around saying “it isn’t about Islam, inshallah, or terrorists. Don’t worry about em.” That’s not how wars are won, and particularly not how insurgencies or counter-insurgencies are won.

Btw, most of the Leftist indoctrination about race relations started in the elite universities and filtered on down from there to the rest of the nation’s institutions. The number of people that were destroyed or killed due to their ideology is uncountable. This crime will continue to go unavenged so long as people refuse to talk about the real story of racism in America.

To what avail?-Helen

For the same purpose that you go on a crusade to emulate Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi, Helen. Are you so lacking in empathy and the ability to psychologically profile others that you cannot comprehend how the motivations of others can be linked to your own? A serious oversight on the part of Leftist “humanists”.

They should have programmed that conscience redactor of yours never to allow you to ask such questions.

I used to sit in church and find fault with the speaker’s grammar to the point that I tuned out the message. And that is the “beast from whose belly I escaped.”-Helen

Since you weren’t paying attention to the message, obviously you escaped due to sheer boredom. You weren’t ever part of the classical liberal crowd, let alone the conservative Christian Bible Belt. There was no conversion on this score.

None of that matters.

We can be better than that.-J

But you don’t know how to do better. All you can do is to sit around waiting to be hit. Which is not exactly the attitude many Americans are satisfied with any longer.

Elections matter in a democracy. To imply that it doesn’t, that image does not matter in the ultimate consequences of America’s blood and treasure, is to deny human nature. And nothing good came from denying human nature.

The fact that you cannot distinguish between factual disputes about a person’s public record, which a thesis most presumably is, and made up stories about Bush’s “AWOL” from the ANG and attempts to talk about Bush’s alcoholicism relapsing, is why “none of that matters” to you.

Those that can’t see a difference, will not care either way. But they also won’t be able to make an informed decision either way as well. That is the consequence, and no amount of complaint or emotion will change that.

Bush didn’t pay much attention to the personalities of Tenet, Putin, Sandy Berger, Valerie Plame, Wilson Plame, or any other little backstabbers in his branch of government. If you want to repeat his mistakes because you believe, like he believed, that there are other “more important things” to consider, that’s fine.

It’s not fine to drag the entire nation down with you because you wanted the rest of us to not pay attention to the details, for it is the details that has always mattered. Specifically even, the details about people’s true beliefs and true personalities. Those matter far more than any words written on any piece of paper.

You are going to be more than “occupied” if you continue to refuse to study and learn about the opposition. Their weaknesses, their strengths, their likes and dislikes.

You will forever be on the reactive side of reacting to Obama’s “current work”. Never ahead. Never with the initiative.

How that will get things done, I cannot say.

Bait and switch has always been the tools of con men and of the Left.

Cog 1:Come the Revolution, everybody will be equal.

Cog 2: The Revolution has now come, why isn’t everybody equal. Why are some people in the party always the ones in power.

Cog 1: Come the Purge, everybody will be equal.

Cog 2:There has already been 4 purges, everybody still isn’t equal.

Cog1: Keep faith with the Revolution. Everything will be all right in the end. You will have plenty of land. After all, how much land does a man really need when he’s given a plot as his grave?

I will choose, however, to quibble with you on an essentially unverifiable point, namely, conjectures about Michelle’s psychological state as it related to her thesis.

You wrote:
“It was sausage, but we made it. Instead of feeling like a fraud, we felt a great sense of accomplishment. We had been through the wringer, and we made it. Working those hours: frauds, not at all. I am sure Michelle Obama Robinson felt the same way.”

That’s where we disagree.

My evidence:
(1) Princeton makes a big, big deal about its preceptorial system and mandatory senior thesis. (I didn’t go there but know many who did.) Your senior thesis is not supposed to be another piece of sausage. It IS a “big hairy deal” for all those involved.

(2) Michelle has already stated that she felt insecure at Princeton (who didn’t? who wouldn’t at times?). She recently echoed those comments while lauding Judge Sotomayor at a commencement address.

(3) The senior thesis is supposed to be the culmination or your academic career. How could she not feel like a bit of a fraud? Therefore, I conclude that her poor thesis likely exacerbated her feelings of insecurity even as its completion produced relief (whew, made it!).

I too can cut Michelle Robinson Obama some slack, for all the reasons cited above.

Speaking personally, I’ve written my share of panic-stricken hack jobs. I shudder to think of some of the drivel that I submitted in order to get a degree. It didn’t make me proud — just the opposite. Of course, I didn’t have to worry that the color of my skin had anything to do with it — never crossed my mind or my conscience (i.e. nobody gave me a break for my poor work because I was white).

That’s one of the tragedies of affirmative action: it breeds paranoia, two-way resentment, and bad faith.

It enables credentialism but impedes true education, defined memorably by Albert Nock as “the power invariably, in Plato’s phrase, to see things as they are, to survey them and one’s own relations to them with objective disinterestedness, and to apply one’s consciousness to them simply and directly, letting it take its own way over them uncharted by prepossession, unchannelled by prejudice, and above all uncontrolled by routine and formula.”

An unreachable ideal perhaps, but a worthy one.

Instead, we have what Shelby Steele wrote about Sonia Sotomayor, a fellow alumna*:
“…Sotomayor is of the generation of minorities that came of age under the hegemony of this perverse incentive. For this generation, challenging and protesting were careerism itself. This is why middle- and upper middle-class minorities are often more militant than poor and working-class minorities. America’s institutions — universities, government agencies, the media and even corporations — reward their grievance. Minority intellectuals, especially, have been rewarded for theories that justify grievance.”

Tell me again, what was the subject of Michelle’s thesis?

Michelle was ambitious and bright enough to take advantage of her opportunities and game the system. More power to her.

(*a funny compound phrase. And BTW:
Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who’s the wisest of them all?
Latina, Lesbian, or Black: Quite.
The unfairest of all is — Snow White.)

Integration is a benefit to society.
Blacks came to Princeton, became more cliquish, graduated and became less so.
Blacks are religious people.
Blacks become more interested in providing for themselves and families after graduation.
Blacks became more separationist during their time at Princeton and more integrationist after graduating.

Missing is a comparable study of white attitudes.
Suppose the results would have been similar?

She probably would have been happier at a black university. Judging from her thesis, she missed the point of going to Princeton.