Odd connection
Caution: This is a half-formed thought, rather vague ...

Reading Steve Sailer's excellent and scholarly series on Obama's Communist heritage, and thinking about Buckley's recent death, converged to a memory that I'd halfway forgotten.

In the late '70s I worked briefly as evening-shift clerk in the Sooner Inn, a low-budget motel in OKC. (Briefly because I was also trying to attend OU in Norman, and the commuting to OKC had to stop when my car broke down. I quickly found a much better night job within the university, so the breakdown turned out to be a good thing.) The overnight clerk was a somewhat older man named Tom, who had an extremely interesting biography. Tom's mother had been part of the Beat Generation at its peak, closely associated with leftist luminaries like Kerouac, Ginsberg, and dos Passos. [This was verified by a mention of his mother in a biography of dos Passos.] Tom remembered those men as "uncle figures", though they were actually his mother's lovers. As an adult, Tom had worked in NY investment banks; he had some kind of breakdown or burnout, and ended up in OKC for reasons that were never quite specified. He had also spent some time in Eastern Europe, and had interesting stories from that period.

Much later, I read WFB's spy novels, and was amazed to find Tom's life story, exactly as he had told it to me, serving as the 'cover story' for one of Buckley's CIA spy characters.

Since then I've wondered: did WFB know Tom? Was Tom's story real or a CIA standard cover story? Was Tom just an interesting leftist or a spy? Or a double agent? If double agent, did that account for his sudden 'burnout' and removal to a low-level motel job? Hall of mirrors for sure.

Obama's mother would have been about the same age as Tom. Her story, as Sailer tells it, reminds me of Tom's mother, and of Tom himself. Not verbatim, but has the same flavor and many of the same elements. So I find myself asking the same questions about her.

= = = = =

Later: If I wanted to dial my Paranoia Boost up to 1000%, I could have fun with this theme. At that time I was an active though unimportant anti-nuke campaigner. Assume Tom was an undercover CIA agent, and the motel's owner was also in on the game. They would have been happy to hire me so Tom could casually interrogate me each night to gather info on the anti-nuke efforts against Kerr-McGee. Now assume the motel continued to serve as a 'watchtower' through the years.... Jayna Davis's book about McVeigh's OKC contacts with Arabs centers on a motel, identity concealed, which sounds an awful lot like the Sooner Inn. This unnamed motel had a large population of Allah's Army types, and both McVeigh and Moussaoui spent some training time there according to Davis. This connection would help to account for the idiotic Federal insistence that McVeigh and Nichols had no associates or training. First rule of the Feds, ever and always, is never reveal a blown sting, never reveal sources and methods, even if you have to leave most of the bad guys untouched.
  ¶ 3:11 PM