[Sixth weekly oratorial exposition on Broad View, KBZZ 1270 AM Reno.  Click on the microphone to listen.]

Last Wednesday, President Obama’s Uncle Omar, who goes by the name Obama Onyango, was arrested for drunk driving in Framingham, Massachusetts.  That’s in the Boston area.  He was arrested after running a stop sign and nearly hitting a police car, and then he told the policeman to stop complaining because he, Obama Onyango, didn’t hear the screeching of brakes so there couldn’t have been a real problem.

If that’s not comedic enough, the belligerent arrestee, when asked if he wanted to make a phone call, said, quote, “I think I will call the White House.”

Barack Obama isn’t the first president to have embarrassing relatives—remember Billy Carter and his Billy Beer or Clinton’s half-brother Roger who needed a presidential pardon for his drug felony?—but there is something twisted and frightening about Obama’s family connections and background.

The only living relatives he has in the continental U.S. are Uncle Omar and his Aunt Zeituni, both of whom have been living on the edge of poverty in the Boston area as illegal aliens, neither of them receiving any help from their wealthy, powerful, lawyer nephew.

Okay, I take that back.  In 2010 the Obama Administration granted Aunt Zeituni legal residency, in direct violation of all the rules of immigration, so at least she’s no longer a fugitive from justice.  Good job on that at least, Nephew Barack.

Remember when Barack and Michelle Obama flew to New York for their two hundred thousand dollar date?  I wonder if Air Force One passed over Uncle Omar and Aunt Zeituni in the South Boston public housing project where she’s been living since 2003 on government welfare.  What kind of man, rich and powerful, leader of the most powerful nation in the world, would leave his nearest relatives in a public housing project?

As his presidency disintegrates around him and the pressure mounts, the question we need to be asking is:

Who is this man in the Oval Office?

I don’t think any of us really know, and I think more and more Americans are having doubts, not just about his policies as president but about the man himself.  Sold to us as a brilliant Harvard scholar who would heal whatever lingering racial divide existed, we instead got a man who needs a teleprompter to talk to elementary schoolchildren and plays the race card every chance he gets.  When his teleprompter stops working he can barely squeeze out an intelligible sentence and YouTube is full to bursting with examples of our hemming-’n’-hawing president stalling for time until the teleprompter is fixed.

I’m one of the few people willing to say publicly what more and more of us are thinking: the president is not that bright and there’s something deeply flawed about his personality.

In 1990, when Obama was president of the Harvard Law Review, he wrote a letter to the Harvard Law Record about affirmative action and we now have a copy of that letter.  It’s stunning how rare this is, to have an example of anything relating to his past.  He won’t release any of his school records, or medical records, or even his passport records so we can find out where he’s been.  There are no examples of his scholarship whatsoever.  For all we know he never attended a single class at any of the three different colleges he attended.  So this letter to the Harvard Law Record is unique in giving us a glimpse of his ability to communicate in the English language.  And people, it’s really bad.  As columnist Jack Cashill said, Obama’s letter is, “… patronizing, dishonest, syntactically muddled, and grammatically challenged.”

I’ve seen this before because I read some quizzes that Obama wrote for students when he was teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago.  I was appalled.  The quiz questions were so poorly worded and grammatically confused that it’s a wonder anybody could answer them.

He never manages to match the tenses of his verbs and subjects, for one thing, and he has a weird habit of leaving irrelevant phrases dangling at the end of his sentences where they exhibit no discernible relationship to the sentence proper.  Here’s an example from that 1990 letter:

“No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind.”

See what I mean?  Talk about a war of words—not even Henry Kissinger could broker peace between the beginning of that sentence and the final phrase.

Obama has two autobiographies on his writing resume, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance and The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, but most experts now believe he wrote neither of them.  They were ghost-written for him because he can’t write.  Which is not the only dishonest aspect of those books—much of their content is factually inaccurate.  The president’s childhood was nothing like the childhood he describes.  His parents never lived together, nor was there ever any kind of relationship between him and his father, who abandoned him at birth.  Then his mother abandoned him at age ten and the result seems to be a cold antipathy toward relatives in general.

Uncle Omar and Aunt Zeituni aren’t the only ones who get the cold shoulder.  According to witnesses, when Barack Obama was living in Indonesia in the late 1960s, when his name was Barry Soetoro (and sometimes Barry Soebarkah), he was very close to his half-sister Maya Soetoro.  They even shared a bedroom.  But somehow she was left out of both of his autobiographies.

Two relatives in Boston living in poverty, a sister he barely acknowledges, what kind of man is this?

Barry, the name he used for most of his formative years, is an emotionally distant man whose past is shrouded in mystery, who has no inclination to help his aunt and uncle living in poverty, who writes autobiographies without mentioning the sister he shared a bedroom with, who was sold to us as brilliant but cannot express himself in proper English, and for whom so much information about his childhood and young adulthood is missing or intentionally hidden.

Who is this guy?

“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell, or an extremely wretched life as paradise.” —Adolf Hitler

From Reno, Nevada, USA        Tweet

September 5, 2011 - Your timing sucks! Your lead question should have been asked by every American 3 or 4 years ago!!! - Herbie R., New Jersey

J.P. replies: Truer words were never written.

September 3, 2011 - [Addressed to Southern Wolf] Sorry, incorrect. English is his first (and only) language. He has admitted on various occasions that he doesn't speak any foreign languages. I think you're remembering that he can recite the Shahada, the single verse that is the Muslim profession of faith and is included in the Muslim call to prayer. That's because he spent his formative years from age 5 or so to age 10 in Indonesia, a Muslim country, with a Muslim stepfather. But one verse, which EVERY Muslim knows, recited "with a perfect accent" supposedly, does not mean he's fluent in Arabic. - Kathy from Kansas

September 3, 2011 - JPAttitude... [is] silly, stupid stuff. Un-subscribe me now. - L.S., Seattle

September 3, 2011 - You don't even mention the biggest question mark about Obama: is he Christian? Every other question pales next to that one. He claims he is, but Reverend Wright's church was only dubiously Christian. And after Obama stopped going to Wright's church he stopped going to church completely. - Dougie, Indiana

September 3, 2011 - Is this a joke? Was it actually printed anywhere with all of these typos? It's difficult for me to believe that anyone completing law school (anywhere) could write so poorly. - Helene, Baltimore

September 3, 2011 - Obama does not speak English as his first language, thus his syntactic and grammar errors, but he is fluent in Arabic. This is why he uses teleprompters and rarely speaks extemporaneously. - Southern Wolf, Georgia