Mr Obama is the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya.
He has recently been identified as a tenth cousin of George W Bush. He was previously identified as a distant cousin of US Vice-President Dick Cheney.
His political lineage includes not just President Bush but also Gerald Ford, Lyndon Johnson, Harry S Truman, Dick Cheney and Winston Churchill.
The connection made with Hollywood star Brad Pitt adds a welcome splash of glamour to his family tree.
But Mrs Clinton's kin has much more of an exotic feel.
Her distant cousins include the singers Madonna, Celine Dion and Alanis Morisette, as well as the beatnik author Jack Kerouac and Prince Charles's wife, Camilla Parker-Bowles.
She and Angelina Jolie are ninth cousins, twice removed. They are both related to one Jean Cusson, who died in St Sulpice, Quebec, in 1718.
If the Hollywood couple, collectively known as "Brangelina", decide on a very extended family gathering, it could provide the perfect opportunity for the two Democratic presidential rivals to get together.
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Unrelatedly, I think that Hillary's "mistake" about her arrival under sniper fire in Bosnia in 1996 is one of the worst lies in politics. Most lies are campaign promises; everyone expects those.
"I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia, and as Togo said, there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base." --HRC, 17 March 2008
"I did make a mistake in talking about it, you know, the last time and recently. So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which, you know, for some people, is a revelation." --HRC, 25 March 2008
But she insulted the careful intelligence and efforts of the US military to keep her safe (the Secret Service would *never* put the First Lady and her daughter in a situation of danger), in order to make herself look more experienced and more willing to face danger.
I mean, come on, how desperate is she getting? There is NOTHING WRONG with admitting that you were the First Lady, and thus everyone was making every effort to keep you safe at every moment. And they succeeded; there was no sniper fire. This is a *compliment* to the troops, Hillary, use it, like you use everything else, you deceitful bitch.
Very rarely am I ever actually offended by lies that politicians make. And I've been unnaturally sympathetic towards Hillary in recent weeks. However, she is insulting those who did everything they could to keep her safe, and that's not okay. I've seen first-hand how hard these guys work, I can't let that insult stand. Repent, Hillary, and give the nomination to Obama (...I can dream).
Plato once said that the rulers of states are the only ones who should have the privilege of lying. And Hillary, you're just not there yet.
posted by Parijata Mackey @ 7:42 PM
2 Comments:
Of course the US has rich and powerful families, but tenth cousin?
2^10 = 1024. So one billion is about 2^30. Which means that just thirty generations back, the ostensible number of your ancestors already exceeds the total human population of the day. Which would imply that today we are all "thirtieth cousins" at most.
That calculation is bogus for a few reasons, but it makes the point. You can be sure that George W Bush has tens of millions of tenth cousins. Connections at that distance mean nothing.
In fact, just to completely make the point, every organism on Earth will be Nth cousin to every other, for some suitably large value of N. Since a bacterial generation can be pretty short, N might be rather large (how many hours is a billion years?). But then inter-species gene transfer will bring it down a little (e.g. Wolbachia in the Drosophila genome).
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