…with Will Wilkinson:

I don’t believe it’s possible to be a Libertarian and support Democrats. Ever.

But that I agree with. I’m not a Republican, but I’m really, really not a Democrat.

Was Barack Obama “chosen” by the CIA?

Self-styled investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that Madelyn Dunham, the mother of Barack’s mother, Ann Dunham, who became vice president of the Bank of Hawaii soon after her arrival there, was in charge of escrow accounts. Madsen’s credibility is certainly checkered. But if he is correct about which department she headed, Madelyn Dunham must have supervised the accounts that the U.S. government used to funnel money to its “gray” and “black” activities throughout Asia. Among the conduits of the CIA money through these accounts to secret CIA proprietaries was a company—Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham & Wong—some of whose officers were serving CIA officers. This is a company whose 1983 IRS audit the CIA stopped. Vice President Madelyn Dunham, in charge of these very matters and hence necessarily “witting” (as they say at Langley), would have had to be more than a small cog in the machine. People do not rise to such stations from one day to the next.

Again, if Madsen is correct, two photos belie the portrait of her husband Stanley Dunham, Barack’s grandfather, whom young Barry called father, as an insignificant furniture salesman. One, in the early 1950s, shows Stanley with his daughter, Ann, wearing the insignia of Beirut’s elite French language school, Notre Dame de Jamhour. Was the family ever in Lebanon? How did Dad get the sweater? U.S. government influence operations are a likelier explanation than the furniture business for any Lebanese connection in the 1950s. Another photo, published in a Honolulu newspaper in 1959, shows Stanley Dunham escorted by uniformed U.S. Navy officers, greeting Barack Obama, Sr., as he arrived in Hawaii from Kenya. Because Obama was among 80 other Kenyans whom CIA had chosen for sojourns in the U.S. to influence them, it is logical that he and others like him would have been placed around the country in the hands of trusted handlers. The greeting photo suggests that Dunham may well have been one of these, and hence that the Kenyan did not meet Dunham’s daughter, Ann, in a classroom. This would fit the chronology: Classes started on September 26. Ann was pregnant by early November. Obama was housed at the University of Hawaii’s East-West Center facility funded by the Asia Foundation, itself funded by CIA.

Anyone and everyone knew that Barack Obama, Sr., and others like him had been brought to America to be influenced. How big a part of his attractiveness to her, and hence how big a reason for the pregnancy that produced Barack, Jr., was the foreign affairs angle? The hagiographies, including A Singular Woman, suggest that foreign affairs were the farthest thing from her mind. Yet Ann’s second child was born in a marriage to another such person at the East-West Center. The Indonesian government had sent Lolo Soetoro to the East-West Center as a “civilian employee of the Army.” But when the shooting started, Soetoro went on active duty, it seems as a colonel. This was arguably the CIA’s most significant covert operation, the replacement (between 1965 and 1967) of Indonesia’s dictator Sukarno with the Suharto regime that lasted until 1999. Few people on the face of the earth did not realize how important a struggle this was. Suggesting as does A Singular Woman that a very intelligent, very married Ann Soetoro was innocent of and indifferent to the political implications of the struggle she was involved in is incredible.

After the overthrow, Ann ran a “micro-financing” project, financed by the Ford Foundation, in Indonesia’s most vulnerable areas. Supervising the funding at Ford in the late ’60s was Peter Geithner, whose son would eventually serve hers as U.S. secretary of the treasury. In addition to the Ford Foundation, the list of her employers is a directory of America’s official, semi-official, and clandestine organs of influence: the United States Information Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank. While running a project for five years in Pakistan, she lived in Lahore’s Hilton International. Nothing small time, never mind hippyish.

In sum, though the only evidence available is circumstantial, Barack Obama, Jr.’s mother, father, stepfather, grandmother, and grandfather seem to have been well connected, body and soul, with the U.S. government’s then extensive and well-financed trans-public-private influence operations.

People are convicted on circumstantial evidence all the time. A fascinating, and disturbing essay by Angelo Codevilla.

At what point do you recognize that you’ve been supporting an incompetent ninny?

At another point in Obama’s presidency, such a minor skirmish would not have mattered all that much. But this is, in fact, a key point in Obama’s presidency. As I explain in this week’s issue of TIME magazine, now available online to subscribers, the Obama White House is preparing a major shift in tone and substance in the hopes of reasserting Obama’s leadership abilities heading into the next election. Recent months, of course, have not been kind to Obama’s polls, which have registered roughly 10-point declines in Obama’s reputation for being a “strong leader” and for being “able to get things done.”

You don’t say.

The nation is of course fortunate in that the president with the most leftist agenda in decades, if not in history, is incompetent at implementing it.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related somehow:

It’s reported that the new jobs plan that you will unveil next week will, once again, focus in substantial measure on “green job” creation.

What, specifically, are “green jobs” and why do their creation merit more of your attention than other jobs?

Precisely how many “green jobs” have been created in the last two and a half years? At what price per job?

How many “green jobs” need to be created over the next 14 months to fulfill your promise of lowering the unemployment rate to 5.5 percent by November 2012?

What qualifies you, or any other politician, to determine which jobs are worthy of creating?

What evidence do you have that government can create jobs for which there is little or no current market demand?

Why do you believe your government-command approach to job creation will be any more successful than had been that of, say, the Industry Secretariat of the Odessa oblast?

We have a president who knows nothing about business, nothing about economics, nothing about technology, yet deludes himself (and many of his followers) that he’s a genius at all of the above. It’s a devastating combination for the nation.

[Update a while later]

“There is no secret, brilliant strategy. This White House is in a bubble.” Considering the personnel involved, how could there be a brilliant strategy?

[Update a few minuts later]

The Obama-thon continues:

Two years ago this week, President Obama came back from his summer vacation and asked to speak to a joint session of Congress. It was the fifth prime-time sales pitch for ObamaCare in his seven-month-old presidency. ObamaCare eventually passed, but the address did essentially nothing to make the plan more popular. Indeed, it remains unpopular.

Why? Surely the substance of the legislation amounts to its essential flaw. But it’s also worth noting that, measured by effectiveness, President Obama (unlike candidate Obama) simply isn’t a very good speaker. Indeed, with the possible exception of his post-Arizona shooting speech, it’s very difficult to think of a single instance where Obama has delivered a politically successful address on domestic issues during his presidency.

Such statements stun some of his biggest fans — though fewer and fewer these days — because they think he talks the way a president should. It seems they pay little heed to the possibility that they like what they hear because the president tells them what they want to hear, or because their fondness for Obama clouds their judgment. The fact remains that the president is very bad at persuading people who don’t already agree with him.

It’s not 2008 any more.