Wednesday, July 18, 2012

By John C. Drew
Breitbart.com
July 18, 2012

[Regina] told me about her childhood in Chicago, the absent father and struggling mother, the South Side's six-flat that never seemed warm enough in winter and got so hot in the summer that people went out by the lake to sleep....Her voice evoked a vision of black life in all its possibility, a vision that filled me with longing--a longing for place, and a fixed and definite history. As we were getting up to leave, I told Regina I envied her. "For what?" "I don't know. For your memories, I guess."

That passage, from Obama's (first) autobiography, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (pp. 158-9), describes "Regina," a young black woman at Occidental College who he claimed was crucial to his political awakening. She even encouraged him to drop "Barry" in favor of "Barack." He envied her confidence, and her memories--so much so, in fact, that he made them up. Not only was "Regina" not from the poor South Side of Chicago, but she was not even black. 
I know, because she was my girlfriend at the time.

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