Monday, November 23, 2009

What's The Historical Significance Here?

Some guy buys a house up in Kempton, Indiana and learns that it was once owned by the grandfather of Barack Hussein Obama's grandmother, Ann Dunham, and suddenly thinks he's found America's next historical landmark. WISH-TV's Jim Shallow fell for the scam:

Shawn Clements loves showing off the Dunham house, a 19th century farmhouse that he purchased in 2004 with the idea of preserving it so that he could live here. When a neighbor told him to research the home's ownership he got big surprise. He found a copy of a land grant that shows the property was settled by Jacob Dunham in 1840. Jacob Dunham was Barack Obama's great-great-great-great grandfather. He is one of 11 Obama ancestors buried in the Kempton Cemetery.

And when word of the research got back to Barack Obama, he came to a potluck dinner at the Dunham home just days before the 2008 May primary election. Clements later got tickets to the Obama Inauguration and to an inaugural ball.

"This stopped being my house a while back," said Clements.
Let's not forget this is on Obama's mother's side of the family. Remember, that would be the mother he hated so much that he wouldn't take the time to visit her in her hospital room when she was dying from cervical cancer. "I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of 12 or 13, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites," Obama wrote in his autobiography, "Dreams From My Father". "I found a solace in nursing a pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against my mother's race," he continued. I guess it's easy enough for Obama to visit the former homes of his dead white relatives when it is politically expedient to do so.

This home has absolutely no significant historical value to Hoosiers or Americans despite Clements' feeble attempt to draw attention to it. Nobody remotely close to Obama lived in that home during his lifetime. We learn nothing about Obama from this home. At least with the James Whitcomb Riley home in my neighborhood of Lockerbie they can claim he occasionally slept in the home owned by a family friend, although Riley never actually owned the home or lived there for any extended period.

Rather than looking for history in some distant relative who lived long before him, some of us would simply settle on learning where Obama was born. His family can't seem to agree on which hospital in Honolulu his mother gave birth to him. If Barry would simply release his original birth certificate, we could put that to rest and we could mount the plaque recognizing his birth place in its appropriate place. You can bet that will continue to remain a mystery just like his school records. How many millions of dollars will Barry spend on attorneys' fees before it's all over to prevent anyone from discovering anything about his life story other than the lies terrorist Bill Ayers wrote for him in his so-called autobiography, "Dreams From My Father." Get that? Dreams from a father who walked out on his life when he was two and never came back.

UPDATE: It looks like the federal government is making Billy Carter's gas station down in Plains, Georgia a historic landmark that will be maintained by federal taxpayers. The cost is expected to be $17 million over the next five years. Unbelievable.

4 comments:

  1. They even contacted our local Historical Society to maybe work together.

    I think pretty much any home 50+ year old has historical significance, but of course the link to distant Obama relatives should only be a footnote.

    Btw, where did you get the information that Riley didn't spend most of his last 23 years at Lockerbie Street? The museum of course website says so....

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  2. Riley was born in Greenfield, Indiana where he owned a home. He only visited the people who owned that home and would occasionally stay with them when he was in town. The website reads, "Set foot into the James Whitcomb Riley Museum Home and step back to the beginning of the 20th century—just as the great Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley experienced it for 23 years of his fascinating life." "Experience it" it says. It doesn't claim he lived there.

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  3. The historical significance of this Dunham house was lost when its owner obviously remodeled it without attention to following historic guidelines.

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  4. Ballard's timing is off. He was slated to run in February, 2007 after he filed to run. He couldn't have made the decision to run in the spring of 2007.

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