‘Barack Obama: A Composite Kenyan’
Well, so much for Obama’s former agent falling on her sword: “A ‘Fact Checking Error’? Dystel & Goderich Ask Writers to Submit Their Own Bios.” Which has always been the case with every magazine article I’ve written — it’s the author’s job.
At Red State, Erick Erickson writes that the legacy media have yet again been caught flat-footed on the Obama literary bio story that Breitbart.com (with a powerful assist from Matt Drudge) broke yesterday. Naturally, in response, Erickson writes, the MSM is “claiming the story is no big deal, irrelevant, or that somehow the Breitbart Crew is in the wrong and peddling Birtherism.” And we’ve all heard this story before, as yet another beloved far left figure is caught cooking the books:
They are not peddling Birtherism. The Breitbart Crew are kind of like illegal immigrants — doing reporting Columbia journalism grads won’t do. And doing it quite well. In 2008, the New York Times ran a big story on John McCain having an affair with a lobbyist. It got picked up all over the place. Reporters were on the trail. There was no *there* there.
It took most of the month of August in 2004 for the media to pay attention to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth — men who served with John Kerry and had real problems with both his conduct in Vietnam and his conduct after he left Vietnam. The media did not want to cover the story. For a while, it was just Fox News. The clear demonstration of bias finally forced the New York Times and the big three nightly newscasts to play catch up as dismissively as possible.
This story has been out there since Barack Obama ran for the United States Senate. Even now the media is dismissing it as frivolous. If it turned out Mitt Romney had not actually been a missionary in France, it would be headline news.
Barack Obama embellishing his biography to make himself look unique? Hardly worthy of press attention. In fact, nothing Barack Obama has done suggesting serious character flaws — and that’s what this is about — is ever worth the media’s collective attention. Why? Because some people think Barack Obama was born in Kenya, but much of the press corps is pretty damn sure he was born in Bethlehem.
Moe Lane, where I found Erickson’s post, files it under the “[Quote of the Day,] It Explains So Much Edition.” But at this point, does the MSM still think Obama walks on water, or as in the 2004 and 2000 elections (and when they were pedaling Dean, Edwards, Hillary, etc.), any Democrat in a storm is better in the MSM’s jaundiced eyes than the alternative? That would also explain the enormous amounts of fear the MSM, and the Obama administration (and the two are deeply intertwined of course) have been pushing since the start of the year.
Erickson goes on to speculate that perhaps Obama claiming to be a Kenyan during his salad days in academia is why today, “the campaign screams bloody murder about racists and birthers every time someone asks about Barack Obama’s college transcripts?” Which takes us to Roger L. Simon’s latest post here at PJM:
Well, he might have wanted to glamorize his past, but if that’s so, it’s pathetic. I suspected there was a more substantive reason, one that would cause him to leave his African birth place in place in the bio. But to take the risk of being found out, it would have to be strong.
My wife Sheryl and I, like Nick and Nora Charles, discussed it over gimlets this evening. We both agreed the mystery lay somewhere in Obama’s college and university years at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard. We knew, as you do, there must be an explanation for why the court eunuchs of the mainstream media have never bothered even to investigate the scholastic career of the most powerful person in the world.
Because Obama got bad grades? Yawn — so did Bush, Kerry, Biden, Ted Kennedy, and dozens of others who later found themselves making life or death decisions over our lives.
No, it had to be something more significant, more potentially dangerous. What if, we thought, as others have suggested, the reason Obama’s school records have not surfaced is that he enrolled, at one of those institutions at least, as a foreign student — a Kenyan?
But why would he choose to do that? Well, maybe for a grant, a subvention, a scholarship that was available uniquely to students from Africa or similar locales.
Yes, I know that’s not “fair,” in the lexicon of the Lord of Fairness, to have adopted a phony identity and deprived others of an opportunity they may have more richly deserved. But it would certainly fit with Obama’s early need to be recognized as a Kenyan by his agent and, presumably, his publisher. As we all know, it’s not the crime, but the cover-up. (In this case, actually, it’s both.)
As time went on, of course, college drifted away and politics reared its head. The Kenyan identity became less necessary, even a liability, so it was dropped.
I don’t know about you — but this makes sense to me. It also fits with the tomb-like silence around his college years.
Moe Lane adds:
This is just like the Elizabeth Warren affair, in two ways. First off: the reason why Obama and Warren lied about their backgrounds is because the environment that they were in – liberal academia – wanted them to lie, and encouraged them to lie. It made them more diverse, which made liberal institutions more diverse in hiring them, and in this particular case ‘diverse’ is semantically equivalent to ‘exotic.’ Second: if Obama or Warren had ever decided not to seek higher office – if they had decided that they were comfortable in their academic cocoon – they STILL would be claiming their faux-exotic status.
See also: Churchill, Ward.
Oh, and speaking of Elizabeth Warren, this is just pathetic if it’s true: “Did Elizabeth Warren Plagiarize Her ‘Pow Wow Chow’ Recipes?”
What also ties all of these stories together is something that I wrote about in 2004 — John Kerry assumed the MSM would bury his radical chic 1970s days; Obama assumed the MSM would bury Rev. Wright and his own radical chic years in academia, and Warren never thought anybody would check on her background. It’s infinitely easier to adjust the chocolate ration when the Ministry of Information is a closed shop (and there was much less information to go around, back when the news consisted of a half of local TV news, a half hour of national TV news, and a couple of wire services). Neither Warren nor Obama’s narratives were built to withstand serious scrutiny, which is what they’re now facing. But considering the left loved (and loves) the notion of the October Surprise to knock out their GOP opponents at the last minute, having turned von Clausewitz’s maxim on its head and transformed politics into an extension of warfare, they can’t complain much about the new media world they inadvertently helped to build.
Related: Bookworm asks, “Is Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case rejecting academic racial quotas, the smoking gun behind Obama’s Kenyan identity?” Read the whole thing.™
Keeping track of facts is so….menial, when there is a narrative to be maintained — http://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=206169
I wonder how much of Obama’s anti-American views also played into this.
http://bluecollarphilosophy.com/2012/05/obama-should-admit-he-started-the-lie-that-he-was-born-in-kenya-so-we-can-move-on/
Was he so ashamed about being an American that it help feed his fake Kenyan birth narrative? It seems the academic and political advantages such a narrative brought Obama are also likely explanations.
I think the answer goes a little deeper. Remember a few weeks ago when previews of the forthcoming Obama biograpy by David Maraniss came out? http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/new-biography-obama-asks-am-i-american/526196 The book went in to how Obama, in the years after college, saw himself: “The son of a Kenyan father and an American expatriate mother, Obama emerges as a man questioning whether he viewed himself, or wanted to be viewed by others, as an American. Not in a citizenship sense — Obama was born in the United States and that was that — but in the sense of how he saw the world and wanted to be seen by it.”
But as he grew older and decided he needed to “fix” America, a change was forced in this outlook: “But Obama was ambitious. Appalled by the ‘dirty deeds’ of ‘Reagan and his minions’ (as he wrote in ‘Dreams from My Father’), Obama became increasingly interested in, as Maraniss writes, ‘gaining power in order to change things.’ He couldn’t do that as an international guy hanging around with his Pakistani friends; he needed to become an American.”
Dollars to donuts if Obama were to tell the truth, he still sees himself as that outsider. He only pretended to jettison the persona in order to gain power. Fancy that.
There are two important things to consider about this.
The first, the one no one will like, is that people in fact may owe the Birthers an apology, at some level. Right now, that is unthinkable, but the mature mind will, upon reflection, agree that they might in fact be due one–because the *idea* of Barack not being born in he United States is not outlandish anymore. Period, full stop. One doesn’t have to believe it, and I personally think the law at question that would say he is not a citizen is one to look askance at, and one can also feel a desire to roll one’s eyes at the “exuberance” of some Birthers–but at the end of the day they, the Birthers, said something was not right with Obama’s birth story, and what do you know…something is not right with Obama’s birth story. He either was born overseas or claimed the mantle of being such at one point in time. Truth is an absolute defense, no matter how fringy the proponents of a belief might seem. You can’t snark at this bio and then with the next breath think “but man, those birthers…where did they ever get the crazy to think such things?…”. They’ve earned/regained some credibility, because they were at least correct in believing something was amiss. Period, full stop.
I myself, while not caring so much as to the place of birth, was always curious as to how the rumor/movement got started. I thought it might be a Axelrod trap, among other things–i.e., a planted rumor, ala the Major who never was–but now realize it probably had its genesis in a.) this bio, if nothing else, or b.) he actually wasn’t born here. In other words, I knew there was a fire somewhere, it was just the nature of the embers that caused it I could not determine.
The second thing to consider is that this bio should put to rest any doubts that Barack Obama is a manipulator. The man dissembles. I’m curious if he has any Elizabeth Warren-type baggage from his college years, where he made maximum use of his background. Did his college apps/essays say he was born in Kenya? Based upon evidence available, I say yes.
I could care less if he ever releases those applications. It doesn’t matter whether he did or didn’t, what matters is that no great leap of imagination is needed now to think he not just might have, but probably did. This is what happens when you don’t try to be diligently honest to the best of your ability to the maximum extent possible. Once you’ve lied or dissembled to gain an advantage, you are a liar or a dissembler till you show how you are not. And Composite Obama is a dissembler. He himself admitted it, on the girlfriend issue. Thus, even if born in the U.S., it is not unreasonable to think the man lied. Either about being born in Kenya, or being born in the U.S.
Choose and perish., Obama fans.
As an addendum…there was something about the birth certificate thing…a “spidey-sense” tingle, if you will, that made me think that even as I, yes, rolled my eyes at the birthers, neither did I have any desire to exonerate the President as somehow being unfairly and unreasonably attacked. Now I understand why.
Logicus you and the other weak sisters @PJ, RedState, Michelle Malkin, FOX Nuz, Levin, Rush and most of the other ‘conservative’ outlets have been huge disappointments in your cowering to the Left on the issue of Natural Born eligibility. We will remember where you cast your eyes on the one of the major issues!