How The Hell Did Obama Get Into An Ivy League School?
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- "The dean looked over Barack's transcript and college boards and then suggested in a kindly way that he apply to some less competitive colleges in addition to Columbia."
- "There were no class rankings at his high school, but Barack never made honor roll even one term, unlike 110 boys in his class."
- "His SAT scores were 566 for the verbal part and 640 for math. Those were far below the median scores for students admitted to his class at Columbia: 668 verbal and 718 math."
- "At Columbia, Barack Obama distinguished himself primarily as a hard partier, and he managed to be detained by police twice during his university years: once for stealing a Christmas wreath as a fraternity prank and once for trying to tear down the goalposts during a football game at Princeton."
- "Obama's transcript at Columbia shows that he was a solid C student. Although a history major, he sampled widely in the social sciences and did poorly in political science and economics while achieving some of his best grades (the equivalent of a B+) in philosophy and anthropology. The transcript indicates that in Obama's freshman year, the only year for which rankings were available, he was in the twenty-first percentile of his class—meaning that four-fifths of the students were above him. Yet at the same time that he was earning Cs at Columbia, Obama displayed a formidable intelligence in another way. At his induction into the Delta Kappa Epsilon (DKE) fraternity, he and others were asked to name all fifty-four pledges in the room. Most were were able to name only five or six. When it was Obama's turn, he named every single one. Later he rose to become president of DKE, and he was also tapped into Skull and Bones, an elite secret society to which his father had also belonged."
And then he somehow got into Harvard for graduate school.
Oh, wait.
My bad.
I made a mistake.
Please replace the reference to "high school" with "Andover."
Please replace "Columbia" with "Yale."
Please replace "Barack Obama" with "George W. Bush."
Thanks.
I his early years, John Thompson - the former Georgetown coach - parents were told he had a severe learning disability and would be lucky to achieve the equivalent of a 4th grade education. He is now known as Dr. John Thompson.
A good friend of mine was told by his High School Guidance Counselor that he should look into Community Colleges because he 'wasn't college material'. Today he has a Master's Degree and is doing just fine.
Ted Kennedy's family got and kept him in Harvard despite failing grades. He became a Harvard graduate.
My only comment, Vape, is you need to be careful with this stuff.
For the record, I didn't know Vape WASN'T talking about Obama until I looked at the responses. Take my comments for their worth.
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For the record, I didn't know Vape WASN'T talking about Obama until I looked at the responses. Take my comments for their worth.
I agree with your statements. I've had so many people laugh at me when I'd tell them my GPA and that I want to go to medical school, and tell me that I'm not going to make it. At one point I thought I lacked the intelligence necessary for a degree in the sciences. I just got out of my final undergraduate course this year, and in 9 days, I'll have a bachelors of science in physics with a minor in biology (WOOOO!) I've got a summer job doing some chemical engineering research, and I'm pumped to hear back from grad school. I've gotta take the GRE in a few weeks. I'm gonna get into med school, and nothing will stop me.
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Don't let anybody stop you, Vape.
Congratulations and best wishes going forward.
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So why, VT, would it be as issue at all?
Well it was important enough to write that about Bush huh?
Anyway one of the big issues amongst the great unwashed was that Bush was stupid.
Ten when we found his and Kerry's grades were about the same it was a small embarrassment for the left.
Here Obama has been hailed as some kind of great thinker thanks to whoever writes the teleprompter copy.
If it were to come out that the great and powerful legal scholar of our generation was a mediocre student it'd be good for a laugh, especially since beyond that veneer of academia he really has no other qualifications.
That's all.
WSS
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My objection is, the lefties here demanded that they get to know everything about Bush, because he was going to be
the most powerful man in the world, and we had a right to ALL that info, so we can make a solid decision, blah blah blah...
but now, they couldn't care less to know anything about Obamao, and resent and ridicule anyone who wants to know about him.
Funny how that works in opposite land with libs.
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Just look at the indignation from all of you guys about the article I posted. It's fluff, irrelevant bullshit and you guys were all put off by it. I feel the same about this birther shit. And cal, nice straw man, as usual.
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Just look at the indignation from all of you guys about the article I posted. It's fluff, irrelevant bullshit and you guys were all put off by it. I feel the same about this birther shit. And cal, nice straw man, as usual.
Just look at the indignation from all of you guys about the article I posted. It's fluff, irrelevant bullshit and you guys were all put off by it. I feel the same about this birther shit. And cal, nice straw man, as usual.
Looks like the birther bit's the straw man.
I think his college transcripts and grades are worth a look.
Don't you?WSS
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Uh, sure. I could understand this coming up when no one knew who the guy was. As I see it, when you just graduate from college, your GPA accounts for about 40% of your worth. As you get more jobs and more experience, your grades matter less and less, following an exponential decay (I don't have any proof or evidence for this statement, but if you disagree with it, feel free to argue against it). He graduated from Harvard Law in 91. That was 20 years ago. Sure, the grades are "worth a look," but to even consider judging him largely on the grades he earned 20 years ago, whether he got a 4.0 or a 2.0, is a horrible way to measure his qualification for the job of president.
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Our point is that your logic was the opposite,
for the libs on this site years ago. It didn't matter when Bush was in school,
IT MATTERED.
Even the National Guard records. They still had nothin.
Shep was so frightened at the hideous spectre of any lack of information about Bush.
And now? The lack of information is a fine thing, who cares....... yeah, a lot like that.
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I wasn't posting here four years ago, so pardon my ignorance, but my point stands.
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Well, Bush did NOT get into an Ivy League School by being black, and he was NOT financed by a very rich Saudi Prince.
Since you brought it up, wise guy:
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How Obama got into Harvard
Posted: May 27, 2010
1:00 am Eastern
2011 </FONT>Two years ago I inadvertently began my exploration of the authorship of Barack Obama's 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," with an inquiry into how Obama got into Harvard Law School in 1988.
In the summer of 2008, I was tipped to a story that the media were scrupulously ignoring. It involved the venerable African-American entrepreneur and politico Percy Sutton.
A Manhattan borough president for 12 years and a credible candidate for mayor of New York City in 1977, Sutton had appeared in late March 2008 on a local New York City show called "Inside City Hall."
When asked about Obama by the show's host, Dominic Carter, the octogenarian Sutton calmly and lucidly explained that he had been "introduced to [Obama] by a friend."
The friend's name was Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, and the introduction had taken place about 20 years prior. Sutton described al-Mansour as "the principal adviser to one of the world's richest men." The billionaire in question was Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal.
According to Sutton, al-Mansour had asked him to "please write a letter in support of [Obama] ... a young man that has applied to Harvard." Sutton had friends at Harvard and gladly did so.
Three months before the election it should have mattered that a respected black political figure had publicly announced that a crazed anti-Semite like al-Mansour, backed by an equally bonkers Saudi billionaire, had been guiding Obama's career perhaps for the last 20 years, but the story died a quick and unnatural death.
The books that might have shed some light on this incident have not done so. John Heilemann and Mark Halperin's comprehensive look at the 2008 campaign, "Game Change," does not so much as mention Percy Sutton.
Nor does David Remnick. His new book, "The Bridge," stands as the authoritative book on Obama's "life and rise," but he only inadvertently addresses the question of how Obama got into Harvard Law.
The reader learns from Remnick that Obama was an "unspectacular" student in his two years at Columbia and at every stop before that going back to grade school.
A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, "I don't think [Obama] did too well in college." As to Obama's LSAT scores, Jimmy Hoffa's body will be unearthed before those are.
How such an indifferent student got into a law school whose applicants' LSAT scores typically track between 98 to 99 percentile and whose GPAs range between 3.8 and 4.0 is a subject Remnick avoids in the section of his book dealing with Obama's admission.
In his 2007 book, "Obama: From Promise to Power," David Mendell is likewise silent on the mystery admission. This surprises because Mendell, a Chicago Tribune reporter who saw more of Obama than Michelle often did, writes objectively and intimately about Obama's ascendancy.
Mendell traces Obama's sudden itch to become a lawyer to the model of the recently deceased Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, but Washington went to Northwestern's very respectable law school in Evanston, Ill.
The thought doesn't cross Obama's mind. In "Dreams," he limits his choices to "Harvard, Yale, Stanford." Writes Mendell as casually as if the honor were deserved, "Obama would soon be accepted at the most prestigious law school in the nation."
Whether or not Sutton helped Obama get into Harvard, Michelle Obama's experience suggests that he could have gotten in without that help.
"Told by counselors that her SAT scores and her grades weren't good enough for an Ivy League school," writes Christopher Andersen in "Barack and Michelle," "Michelle applied to Princeton and Harvard anyway."
Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, "Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well."
She did not write well, either. Au contraire. One of my correspondents, a college drop-out, found Michelle's senior thesis at Princeton online and concluded, "I could have written it in sophomore English class." Mundy charitably describes it as "dense and turgid."
The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, "To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be 'read' at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language." Hitchens exaggerates only a little. The following summary statement by Michelle captures her unfamiliarity with many of the rules of grammar and most of logic:
The study inquires about the respondents' motivations to benefit him/herself, and the following social groups: the family, the Black community, the White community,God and church, The U.S. society, the non-White races of the world, and the human species as a whole.Michelle even typed badly. Still, she was admitted to and graduated from Harvard Law. One almost feels sorry for her. She was in so far over her head that the anxiety had to have been corrosive.
Obama was sufficiently self-deluding – some would say narcissistic – that he felt little of that anxiety. Later in his book, Remnick lets slip into the record a revealing letter Obama had written while president of the Harvard Law Review:
I must say, however, that as someone who has undoubtedly benefited from affirmative action programs during my academic career, and as someone who may have benefited from the Law Review's affirmative action policy when I was selected to join the Review last year, I I have not felt stigmatized within the broader law school community or as a staff member of the Review.Bottom line: Had Obama's father come from Kentucky not Kenya and been named O'Hara not Obama, there would have been no Harvard Law Review, no Harvard, no Columbia. Barry O'Hara would probably be chasing ambulances in Honolulu and setting his political sights on the Honolulu City Council.
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Jack Cashill is an Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue. His latest book is the blockbuster "Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Love and Letters of America's First Post-Modern President."
Read more: How Obama got into Harvard http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=158901#ixzz1LEnL8V7D
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