Don’t Ask Don’t Tell

 

 

Quite a few comments recently on the ‘Fast and Furious’ debacle in the US. I haven’t been following the BBC’s coverage of it too closely but having had a quick look here are some thoughts.

The BBC as a whole has reported the story, the latest being on the 20th June, both unattributed as to the author:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18524414

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-18528798

　

However as noted in the comments the BBC’s U.S correspondents seem unusually quiet on the subject despite Mardell’s banner headline on his blog:

Come here for America in all its glory – my take on the twist and turns of the presidency, electoral races and life beyond Washington

Looking back a couple of months and there is still nothing.

Ironically when I googled ‘Mark Mardell Fast and Furious’ the latest result came from..yes..Biased BBC!

Here are the latest stories of note apparently: 

@BBCMarkMardell via TwitterRomney fails to answer his own question about illegal immigration

(Nothing on Obama failing to reveal documents on gun running to drug cartels) 

@BBCMarkMardell via TwitterThe Real Story Of Barack Obama http://t.co/js5ccLbl 

@BBCMarkMardell via TwitterAll the President’s women – fantastic piece on four women caught up in Watergate, in their own words http://t.co/11d9IACr

 And Katty Kay doesn’t do any better looking at football and women’s issues:

@KattyKayBBC via TwitterThe best bit of ESPN’s #Euro2012 coverage of the #GER #GRE game is when they switch to the shot of Merkel watching.

　

Astonishing really when you consider not only the highly sensitive nature of the subject with the U.S arming the highly violent and murderous Mexican drug cartels however ‘inadvertently but also the possible political fall out…and all with an election coming.

Not on the scale of the ‘Iran-Contra’ scandal but along similar lines….and the American Press seem to think the story merits some attention…calling it the next ‘Watergate’.

Perhaps Mardell is too busy polishing the Liberal Progressive narrative of Obama…. 

Obama supports same-sex marriage

President Barack Obama has been forced out of the closet. Few doubted that he was in favour of gay marriage but “don’t ask, don’t tell” had worked well enough up until now.

The media didn’t ask him. And he certainly wasn’t going to tell

　

One thing looks certain Mardell isn’t going to ask and Obama doesn’t want to tell.　

This is interesting though…a link that Mardell puts on his blog…presumably he only read the headline…It isn’t too flattering for Obama revealing him to be a man who invented his background in order to polish his credentials as a victim of the ‘Establishment’ and racism to pull in votes….

The Real Story Of Barack Obama

A new biography finally challenges Obama’s famous memoir.And the truth might not be quite as interesting as the president, and his enemies, have imagined.

The two strands of falsehood run together, in that they often serve the same narrative goal: To tell a familiar, simple, and ultimately optimistic story about race and identity in the 20th Century. The false notes in Obama’s family lore include his mother’s claimed experience of racism in Kansas, and incidents of colonial brutality toward his Kenyan grandfather and Indonesian step-grandfather. Obama’s deliberate distortions more clearly serve a single narrative: Race. Obama presents himself through the book as “blacker and more disaffected” than he really was, Maraniss writes, and the narrative “accentuates characters drawn from black acquaintances who played lesser roles his real life but could be used to advance a line of thought, while leaving out or distorting the actions of friends who happened to be white.”

His memoir evokes an angry, misspent youth; a deep and lifelong obsession with race; foreign and strongly Muslim heritage; and roots in the 20th Century’s self-consciously leftist anti-colonial struggle.

The New York Times’s Serge Kovaleski reported dryly in February of 2008, speculating that Obama had “added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.”

Race, central to Obama’s later thought and included in the subtitle of his memoir, wasn’t a central factor in his Hawaii youth or the existential struggles of his young adulthood. And he concludes that attempts, which Obama encouraged in his memoir, to view him through the prism of race “can lead to a misinterpretation” of the sense of “outsiderness” that Maraniss puts at the core of Obama’s identity and ambition.

Across the ocean, the family story that Hussein Onyango, Obama’s paternal grandfather, had been whipped and tortured by the British is “unlikely”: “five people who had close connections to Hussein Onyango said they doubted the story or were certain that it did not happen,” Maraniss writes. The memory that the father of his Indonesian stepfather, Soewarno Martodihardjo, was killed by Dutch soldiers in the fight for independence is “a concocted myth in almost all respects.” In fact, Martodihardjo “fell off a chair at his home while trying to hang drapes, presumable suffering a heart attack.”

Dick Opar, a distant Obama relative who served as a senior Kenyan police official, and who was among the sources dismissing legends of anti-colonial heroism, put it more bluntly.

“People make up stories,” he told Maraniss.

 

 

I imagine that Mardell thought that the piece would draw the sting from the Obama critics if it was revealed Obama was an entirely unremarkable person in his youth….however it is what he has grown up into that most are interested in…and part of him is quite prepared to rewrite history for political gain…..’Hope and Change’?  He hoped you wouldn’t notice the changes to his life story!