“Not all campaign books are treated equally. Just look at Edward Klein and J.H. Hatfield,” Byron York writes in the Washington Examiner: 

“Reporters for The New York Times, which received an advance copy of Mr. Hatfield’s book last week, spent several days looking for evidence that might corroborate his account,” wrote Times reporter Frank Bruni, now a liberal columnist for the paper, on October 22, 1999. “But they did not find any, and the newspaper did not publish anything about the claim.”

Lots of other news organizations did. When both Bushes denied the story, the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Post, Los Angeles Times, and many others reported Hatfield’s revelation.

The New York Times also found a way to pass on the accusation without passing on the accusation; the paper published several articles about the controversy over the book, even if it did not directly quote the book itself. Times readers certainly got the idea.

The party ended when the Dallas Morning News reported Hatfield was “a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987.” The publisher of “Fortunate Son,” St. Martin’s Press, quickly withdrew the book.

But nobody could withdraw the story. For a while, the tale that Bush had been arrested for cocaine possession, even though it was told by an unknown author who was also a felon who apparently made the whole thing up — that tale was the talk of the 2000 presidential race. (Hatfield committed suicide in 2001.)

Read the whole thing. As far as Edward Klein, don’t miss Bill Whittle’s PJTV interview with Klein, embedded above from YouTube.

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“Nobody is challenging Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries this year–and is doing surprisingly well,” James Taranto writes in his Best of the Web column:

One of the reasons some commentators thought Obama would be a shoo-in for re-election is that like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, he drew no serious primary opposition as an incumbent president. By contrast, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Bush père were challenged by Reagan, Ted Kennedy and Pat Buchanan respectively. Lyndon Johnson abandoned his 1968 re-election bid after Eugene McCarthy’s surprisingly strong showing in New Hampshire and Robert F. Kennedy’s late entry.

The theory goes that presidents lose re-election when they have a strong primary opponent and win when they don’t. This requires treating Buchanan as a “serious” opponent, even though he didn’t win a single primary in 1992 and his best showing, in New Hampshire, was 37%.

Writing at RealClearPolitics, the delightfully named Sean Trende reformulates the rule and carries it back a century: “There are only seven sitting presidents who have ever received less than 60 percent of the vote in any primary: Taft in ’12; Coolidge, ’24; Hoover, ’32; LBJ, ’68; Ford ’76; Carter, ’80; and Bush ’92. All of these presidents, with the exception of Coolidge, were not re-elected.” One of Coolidge’s challengers, Robert LaFollette, ran a third-party challenge. He ended up with 16.5% of the nationwide popular vote and carried his home state, Wisconsin.

Actually, there’s an eighth sitting president who received less than 60% in a primary–in more than one, in fact. That would be Obama in ’12, who, as Trende points out, received just 58.4% in Arkansas, 57.9% in Kentucky, 57.1% in Oklahoma and 59.4% in West Virginia. In Kentucky, his main opponent was “Uncommitted,” another name for Nobody.

If the Trende trend is predictive–admittedly, a big if–Obama is much likelier than not to lose in November. “I think we can reasonably begin to view this as a sort of organic primary challenge to Obama,” Trende writes. “Obama’s not likely to lose any states outright in the primaries; think of this more like Buchanan’s run against George H.W. Bush in 1992.”

At Big Journalism, John Nolte adds:

I’m old enough to remember the weeks-long narrative the media created around Pat Buchanan’s 37% showing in New Hampshire against then-President George H.W. Bush in 1992. The media used this result to tag Bush as a loser, an incumbent in trouble and unable to hold on to his base. This was all part of a bigger narrative the media was crafting to peg Bush as out-of-touch. Perot eventually won the election for Bill Clinton, but this certainly didn’t help.

Though today’s media won’t admit it, the difference between 1992 and 2012 is a big one and not good news for Obama.  Buchanan was a legitimate insurgent candidate; after years as a columnist and television commenter, Buchanan was  a known quantity with a serious campaign platform and access to all kinds of media coverage. Meanwhile, Obama is losing a larger percentage of the vote to inmates and relatively unknown attorneys. Moreover, Obama is losing nearly one in five votes to the likes of  “uncommitted.”

In 1992, many Republicans voted for Buchanan. In 2012, a whole lot of Democrats are voting against Barack Obama. The closest the Post comes to acknowledging Obama’s troubles is with this:

Regardless of the reasoning, it’s clear that there is a bloc of Democratic voters in every state who want to register their opposition to Obama. … even a minor abandonment of Obama by self-identified Democrats could make a difference this time around.

It’s pretty obvious that the media is desperate to avoid narratives surrounding Obama’s glaring problems with his base. After all, with the economy going in the wrong direction and all of the very public Bain Capital rebellion (the centerpiece of Obama’s re-election strategy), Obama has enough problems.

As a result, Roger L. Simon asks today, “Is Liberalism Dead?”

They will literally do anything or say anything to maintain control.  They will even contradict everything they stand for to survive.

You can really see this in action at CNN. In February of 2010, the network literally baked a cake (surprisingly, Michelle Obama never scolded them about this high-calorie sugary treat) to celebrate the spending binge of the first year of Obama’s “Stimulus” program. Today they’re simply cooking the books.  Just as they did in 2008 by building the Wright Free Zone, “CNN Fails to Refute Bogus Numbers Claiming ‘Obama Spending Binge Never Happened,’” Newsbusters reports.

Which is why, as Doug Ross writes we can watch in real time as “Old Media Is Bleeding Out Right Before Our Eyes.”

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“For years we’ve wondered what dark secrets might lurk in The One’s shadowy past. I knew we’d find out one day and I knew it’d be bad, but I never imagined quite how bad,” Allahpundit writes at Hot Air. “Apparently, we elected Pauly Shore.”

Read the whole thing — and then do not miss this post at Buzzfeed, “A User’s Guide To Smoking Pot With Barack Obama.”

Related: Commentary’s Alana Goodman on Conor Friedersdorf, palace guard concern troll. (See also: Frum, David.)

More: Scroll down the Buzzfeed item for this tidbit, spotted by Matt Drudge:

In another section of the [senior] yearbook, students were given a block of space to express thanks and define their high school experience. … Nestled below [Obama's] photographs was one odd line of gratitude: “Thanks Tut, Gramps, Choom Gang, and Ray for all the good times.” … A hippie drug-dealer made his acknowledgments; his own mother did not.

Classy. And Jim Treacher adds:

Why did Obama put his dog on the roof of the car? So it wouldn’t get stoned.

Speaking only for myself, I’m fine with having a president who used to get blazed out of his mind. It’s just funny that the same people who are scrambling to defend him were, shall we say, somewhat less accepting of Bush’s youthful indiscretions.

As Treacher writes, “Question: What’s the sound of David Axelrod’s weekend getting ruined? Answer: Choom.”

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Having just declared Mr. Obama “The First Gay President,” Tina Brown’s Daily Beastweek is now angrily envisioning the GOP’s emotionally manipulative campaign “to tell women they shamelessly indulged in Obama in ’08:”

According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week, Romney is gaining on Obama’s favorability amongst women at a surprisingly rapid pace. The report indicates that the 19-point lead that the president enjoyed last month has diminished to a mere 7-point advantage in recent weeks.

What gives?

How about an emotionally manipulative, unapologetically condescending, Karl-Rove-concocted messaging strategy that preys on women’s weakness for instantly gratifying experiences coupled with their propensity for self-blame?

In effect, the right is framing Barack Obama as a guilty pleasure, saying to women—or, at the very least, implying—that the fairer sex indulged in his campaign with shameless abandon in 2008 and now they should be atoning in equal proportion.

It’s as if the president were a heedlessly devoured tub of triple-caramel-chunk cookie-dough ice cream that has left a bad taste in your mouth, not to mention a few extra inches on your waistline, and needs to be traded for the presidential equivalent of a rice cake (Romney).

Obama as a guilty pleasure? Where on earth would women have gotten that idea?

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

The other day a friend of mine confided that in the weeks leading up to the election, the Obamas’ apparent joy as a couple had made her just miserable. Their marriage looked so much happier than hers. Their life seemed so perfect. “I was at a place where I was tempted daily to throttle my husband,” she said. “This coincided with Michelle saying the most beautiful things about Barack. Each time I heard her speak about him I got tears in my eyes — because I felt so far away from that kind of bliss in my own life and perhaps even more, because I was so moved by her expressions of devotion to him. And unlike previous presidential couples, they are our age, have children the same age and (just imagine the stress of daily life on the campaign) by all accounts should have been fighting even more than we were.”

As we all know, in journalism, two anecdotes are just one short of a national trend. I figured that my friend and I couldn’t possibly be the only ones dreaming, brooding or otherwise obsessing about the Obamas. Were other people, I wondered, being possessed by our new first family?

I launched an e-mail inquiry. And learned that they were. Often, in strikingly similar ways.

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

– “Sometimes a President Is Just a President,” Judith Warner, February 5th, 2009, the New York Times.

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In the latest issue of City Journal, Rudy Giuliani looks back at the career of James Q. Wilson and explores the enormous dept that New York City owes the late sociologist:

In the early days of Rudy University, we met with George Kelling, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, who, with James Q. Wilson, had written an article called “Broken Windows” in the March 1982 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. I had worked closely with Wilson in 1981, when he was cochair of the Task Force on Violent Crime and I was the associate attorney general. In New York, during the 1980s and 1990s, local government seemed to have conceded defeat. The city would actually put up stickers of plants and venetian blinds in the windows of abandoned buildings to disguise the decay. But Wilson had a revelation about crime: focus on the small crimes, such as littering, and keep neighborhoods clean and free of signs of disorder, such as broken windows in a building. The big idea was this: if the neighborhood looks as if someone is watching and maintaining order, it is far more likely that order will prevail. A neighborhood that is clean and well-ordered sends a signal to criminals and citizens alike.

Contrast the above with the video in a new post from Jim Treacher at the Daily Caller: “Watch Occupiers smash up San Francisco’s Mission District as the cops look on helplessly:”

Keep in mind that this video was uploaded by one of the irrepressible scamps involved. They’re proud of this.Yeah, man, don’t mess with the SFPD, or they’ll… um… drive away slowly. Has Internal Affairs investigated the officer who dared to turn on his siren, thus impinging on these children’s right to free speech?

And I was ready to congratulate the one kid who tried to talk some sense into the rest of him, until I realized he was okay with smashing up other people’s property as long as they’re above a certain income level.

These idiots did more property damage in one night than the Tea Party has done to date. Remember, though: Occupy is “mostly peaceful.” Just look at all the windows they didn’t smash. Look at all the walls they didn’t spray-paint. Look at all the police stations they didn’t vandalize.

And Mr. Obama, the once and future community organizer, still has their back. You never know when you need to supply the pitchforks.

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On Sunday, I flashed back to the Morgenthau Plan. As I wrote, it was a scheme for post-World War II Germany that was viciously punitive, if understandably so, and crafted by Henry Morgenthau, Jr., FDR’s  Treasury secretary, around 1944, designed to de-industrialize Germany, to prevent another outbreak of war:

The memorandum concluded “is looking forward to converting Germany into a country primarily agricultural and pastoral in its character.”

As that Wikipedia page goes on to note, cooler heads eventually prevailed after the war. Otherwise, just as East Germany traded one totalitarian regime for another, West Germany would have traded the nightmare of Hitler’s scorched earth policy when he knew the war was lost for the Allies’ own scorched earth policy afterwards. Wikipedia quotes former president Herbert Hoover, who reminded advocates of the Morgenthau Plan in 1947 that “There is the illusion that the New Germany left after the annexations can be reduced to a ‘pastoral state’. It cannot be done unless we exterminate or move 25,000,000 people out of it.” West Germany would go on to become an industrial powerhouse, albeit one with a US military base located within it, just in case…

At the Climate Policy Network today, “Green Energy Transition: Germany Fears De-Industrialisation,” translates a page from Handelsblatt, a German business newspaper:

As a result of Germany’s green energy transition, electricity prices are exploding. Consumers and businesses are paying the price while Germany faces gradual de-industrialisation. Economists estimate that the cost of the green energy transition will total 170 billion Euros by 2020. This is more than double of what Germany would have to write off if Greece were to withdraw from the monetary union. “The de-industrialization has already begun,” the EU Energy Commissioner Guenther Oettinger has warned.

Meanwhile, those on the left who enjoy Earth Hour, an annual celebratory preview of the joys of de-industrialization cooked up in 2007 by the World Wildlife Fund and Australia’s Fairfax Media Limited, should hightail it to Detroit, where the lamps will be going off all over the town, according to Bloomberg News: “Half of Detroit’s Streetlights May Go Out as City Shrinks.” And Detroit isn’t the only failed Blue city where this is occurring:

Detroit, whose 139 square miles contain 60 percent fewer residents than in 1950, will try to nudge them into a smaller living space by eliminating almost half its streetlights.

As it is, 40 percent of the 88,000 streetlights are broken and the city, whose finances are to be overseen by an appointed board, can’t afford to fix them. Mayor Dave Bing’s plan would create an authority to borrow $160 million to upgrade and reduce the number of streetlights to 46,000. Maintenance would be contracted out, saving the city $10 million a year.

Other U.S. cities have gone partially dark to save money, among them Colorado Springs; Santa Rosa, California; and Rockford, Illinois. Detroit’s plan goes further: It would leave sparsely populated swaths unlit in a community of 713,000 that covers more area than Boston, Buffalo and San Francisco combined. Vacant property and parks account for 37 square miles (96 square kilometers), according to city planners.

“You have to identify those neighborhoods where you want to concentrate your population,” said Chris Brown, Detroit’s chief operating officer. “We’re not going to light distressed areas like we light other areas.”

Detroit’s dwindling income and property-tax revenue have required residents to endure unreliable buses and strained police services throughout the city. Because streetlights are basic to urban life, deciding what areas to illuminate will reshape the city, said Kirk Cheyfitz, co-founder of a project called Detroit143 — named for the 139 square miles of land, plus water — that publicizes neighborhood issues.

Naturally, the Obama administration views both the 21st century Morganthau Plan in Germany and Detroit’s lights-out policy as how-to guides, not warnings.

Because he’s so real world, you know.

Update: At the Tatler, Bryan Preston writes, “If a private enterprise decided on its own not to service certain parts of a city, we would never hear the end of it. But government doing it is ok. The victims of all this will just keep voting the same people back into office decade after decade.”

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Bryan Preston, last night at the Tatler: “They’re Going to Blame This on Racism:”

In Kentucky, “uncommitted” kept things interesting in the Democratic primary tonight. Obama won, 57-42. But he was running against air.

The results come on the heels of West Virginia’s Democratic primary earlier this monthwhere a felon incarcerated in Texas took 41 percent of the vote from the president.

In Kentucky, Obama did get more total votes than presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who won the GOP primary with almost 67 percent of the vote.

Obama had more than 118,600 votes to Romney’s approximately 117,100.

“They’ll blame the Arkansas result on racism, too,” Bryan concluded, in an update to his post.”

Headline today at the Washington Post, “Kentucky, Arkansas primaries: Is it racism?”

No, none of these Democrats are willing to put their name to that allegation — either generally or for this story. But, it is, without question the prevalent viewpoint they hold privately.

They argue that conservative white Democrats — particularly those in the South and Appalachia — don’t want to vote for an African American for president and, therefore, are willing to cast a ballot for almost anyone else up to and including an incarcerated felon. (Keith Judd, we are looking at you.)

The problem with that theory is that it’s almost entirely unprovable because it relies on assuming knowledge about voter motivations that — without being a mindreader — no one can know.

“There’s no easy or simple answer,” said Cornell Belcher, president of Brilliant Corners, a Democratic polling firm. “One man’s racial differences is another man’s cultural differences.”

What we know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that Appalachia and portions of the South — particularly those states without large African American populations — have long been hostile to President Obama.

Why seems kind of an odd thing to say, as Bryan notes in a See I Told You So post today, linking to a Politico article today with the same JournoList-style leftwing spin on last night’s results:

You Christian wingnuts just can’t stand a black man. We have a troll here who trots that argument out in comments with mind-numbing routine. And they’re right of course, unless you count Allen West, who is a conservative hero. And Clarence Thomas. And Thomas Sowell, and once upon a time, Colin Powell and Alan Keyes etc and etc. Except for them, and J. C. Watts, the former Oklahoma congressman, southerners can’t stand a black man holding office.

At the Wizbang blog, Michael Laprarie describes the WaPo’s headline as a classic example of the “have you stopped beating your wife yet?” style of argument:

Naturally the article brings up the infamous “Bigot Belt” graphic that showed Redneckland to be the only area of the nation that rejected Barack Obama outright in 2008.  Certainly it wasn’t Obama’s elitism, or his anti-Americanism, or his sleazy Chicago cronies, or his youthful infatuation with cocaine and Marxist professors, or his long-time association with a radical domestic terrorist, or his membership in a church led by one of the most inflammatory Black separatist pastors in the country.  Nah, it couldn’t possibly be any of those things that disinterested voters in the South.  It must be because he is half African.  Because that’s all we ever think about down here.

You know what?  I’m actually kinda proud of that map.  Seems we Okies ain’t as dumb as they think we is.

Not surprisingly, Ace has lots of fun with the WaPo story:

A former House member named Tom Cole has an explanation that doesn’t seem to have occurred to the Washington Post’s Racism Decision Desk.

“Obama fares poorly in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arkansas because he has nothing in common with them. They are rural, he is urban. They are populist, he is elitist. And in case anyone hadn’t noticed, they are conservative while he is liberal. That isn’t just true of Republicans in these states. It is true of Democrats as well.”

That’s just silly.

On the other hand, Donna Brazie finally strikes on the answer. Or, rather, all three of them.

“Race, resentment [and] fear[.]“

There you go.

So, if those are the reasons, why does this moron then continue…

“Democrats have not had any messaging in those states for more than a decade. It’s hard to get voters to like you or even know you when all they hear is negative stuff.”

Ah. So the Democrats have no messaging there. (It’s always about their messaging, never about their policy and agenda.)

But even that last item isn’t true as Newsbusters notes, deconstructing a CNN contributor’s remarks, apparently built upon the same talking points:

CNN contributor Maria Cardona may have forgotten some history as she tried to spin away President Obama’s troubles in the Arkansas and Kentucky Democratic primaries. Cardona, speaking during the 10 a.m. hour of Wednesday’s Newsroom, argued that “Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party.”

President Obama only picked up 58 percent of the vote in the Kentucky Democratic primary, and 60 percent in Arkansas. “Look, Arkansas and Kentucky have never been hotbeds of the Democratic Party. There’s no real infrastructure there. There’s no organization by the Obama campaign there,” Cardona insisted.

Cardona’s first statement ignores some quite recent history, that former President Bill Clinton was the Democratic governor of Arkansas before he ran for president – and that both Arkansas and Kentucky voted for him in the 1992 and 1996 presidential elections.

As far as infrastructure goes, both states might be far from solid red as they have had Democratic governors since 2007. Arkansas had two Democratic senators as late as 2011 when former Senator Blanche Lincoln finished out her second term after replacing another Democrat, Senator Dale Bumpers. Meanwhile, Arkansas Democratic Senator Mark Pryor is still serving his second term in the U.S. Senate.

Both states have a Democratic history as well. Since 1950, 11 different Democrats served in Arkansas as governor or acting governor, compared to just three Republican governors. Kentucky has seen 13 Democratic governors since 1950, and only two Republican governors.

Both Kentucky and Arkansas voted for Jimmy Carter in 1976, and Arkansas voted Democratic in every presidential election year from 1920 through 1964. Kentucky, meanwhile, voted Democratic every presidential election from 1932 through 1952, and went for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964.

Cardona’s spin is right up there with Obama’s own, when he ludicrously claimed a year ago that “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” That would be news to the aforementioned Lyndon Johnson.

But as always with Obama’s palace guard, it has to be the voters — even if they’re Democrats just like the president and the journalists at the WaPo; the president’s faults are never his own, nor are they ever the fault of his ideology and his oikophobia.

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“In Memoriam: The Old Obama, Who Wanted to Bring People Together:”

The 2004 version of Barack Obama, who captured the nation with a dazzling speech about unity and went on to win the presidency on a message of hope, died on Monday. He was 8 years old.

The cause of death appeared to be a bitter realization that he needed to win reelection in an increasingly partisan political environment, a cancer that he had been battling for months if not years.

Obama’s illness got the best of him late Monday, as he announced that his campaign for four more years in the White House would be based not on optimism, but rather the shady corporate record of his opponent, Mitt Romney, who ran a private-equity firm that few Americans knew about before this year.

Obama’s announcement was a stark contrast to the speech that catapulted him into his party’s sights eight years ago, when he electrified Democrats at their quadrennial convention.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America,” Obama declared to cheers at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. “There is the United States of America.

“We are one people,” Obama roared, perhaps envisioning his political future as the crowd rose to its feet. “All of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

And strangely enough, it was in that very speech that Obama predicted his own demise. Just before his climactic applause line, the future president issued a stark warning.

“Even as we speak,” he said, “there are those who are preparing to divide us — the spin masters, the negative ad peddlers, who embrace the politics of anything goes.”

In other words, typical hack Cook County politicians, one of whom managed to temporarily persuade the suckers in the networks who should know better:

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The Washington Post regrets to inform its readers that the presidential candidate it was deep in the tank for in 2008 may be in trouble this time around:

[I]t is a rearview-mirror assessment that could hurt Obama’s chances for a second term. One key indicator has hardly budged this year: Asked where they stand financially compared with when Obama took office in January 2009, 30 percent say they are worse off, and only 16 percent say they are better off. There is not a widespread sense that things would be better had Romney been president for the past three-plus years, but for the incumbent it is a critical measure. On this question, Obama’s numbers continue to resemble those of George H.W. Bush, who lost his bid for reelection in 1992 amid a flagging economy.

At the moment, his campaign is giving off a similar tone as well, isn’t it? Meanwhile, Bush #43-era Secretary of State Colin Powell is having second thoughts about supporting Obama again as he did in 2008, leading Glenn Reynolds to write, “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing: Not when you can watch a weathervane like Colin Powell, anyway.”

Oh, and let us recall “Obama’s Bush #41 Scanner Moment,” from April of last year:

“If he were a Republican, this would be his ‘Bush (41) meets a grocery scanner moment.’ But he’s not, so it is quietly buried.”

– A commenter at Ann Althouse’s blog responding to Obama’s punitive tone yesterday in the latter half of the above video, when confronted with questions over his Carteresque gas policy, found via Glenn Reynolds. Yes, I know (as does Snopes) that the first President Bush wasn’t surprised by a supermarket scanner — as the former head of the CIA, and a man who these days routinely skydives in his 80s, one would assume he’s well acquainted with technology.

* * * * *

But at the Tatler, Bryan Preston has a nifty suggestion to drive its viewership much higher:

Note to the RNC: Download this video and mash it up with the Obama “under my plan energy prices will necessarily skyrocket” clip. Together they prove that this president cares much more about social engineering than about the economy or how his own policies are hurting Americans every single day. This video is President Obama’s Marie Antoinette moment: He tells a man who complains about high gas prices to buy a new car. Think about that for a second. The man is worried that gas prices are eating him alive. Obama’s response is to needle him to spend more money. That’s the response of an elitist jerk, not a leader who understands or even cares about the damage his policies are doing to the country. If that’s not indicative of this president’s arrogant and out-of-touch mindset, I don’t know what is. Hat tip to InstaPundit, who also has a screen shot of the AP story about this remarks, a story that AP eventually scrubbed to remove the remarks. So there’s a story about media bias in the mix as well.

In 2008, the media were happy to let Obama walk on water, to borrow a line from then-Newsweek editor Jon Meacham. But back then, all of anger from Obama, the MSM and the left could be channeled into a single direction: BUSH SUX.

In 2012, Obama will have to defend his own record as president — a challenge made all the more difficult by having to live up to the canonization the media performed on him before he took office. Can he win? Sure. But it’s going to be a much uglier process no matter what happens. And as with yesterday, we’re going to see many more examples highlighting that his bitter clingers rhetoric in 2008 was no accident — he really is that contemptuous of the people he’s deigned to govern.

Similarly, while all of Obama’s promises come with expiration dates (sort of like the key moments in his life story), Obama has his own “read my lips” moment to live down, a la GHWB:

Steve Green has had lots of fun with this pledge over the past three years. Or to put it another way — “Pay up, suckers.”

(WaPo article found via Orrin Judd, who adds, “And it didn’t matter for GHWB that the economy was improving” in ’92.)

Related: And then there are all of the down-ticket races in November.

More:  “Uhhh….Uhhh…Uhhhh….Uhhhh…”

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

Today is a red-letter day for the New York Times. For the first time, the paper has reported in its news section that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright once uttered the phrase “God damn America.” Wright’s comments were widely reported and widely discussed beginning with an ABC News report six months ago. Barack Obama even had to give a much-publicized speech because of those words, and others. But the newspaper of record has never seen fit to publish Wright’s quote in its news pages. Until today.

– Byron York, National Review Online, September 24th, 2008.

“NYT Reporter Goes To Romney’s Church, Seeks Dirt From Worshipers.”

– Headine at Big Journalism, yesterday.

No word yet if she actually has the right church — you never know when it comes to the New York Times and a politician’s religious affiliation — or if Romney’s fellow churchgoers discussed this previous editorial comment regarding Mr. Romney’s faith from a fellow Timesperson:

Speaking of Blow, his is a cautionary tale (in more ways than one) reminding us that at the Gray Lady, the liberal cocoon works both ways — keeping the papers’ readers — and its journalists — blind to the larger world around them.

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Shorter Cory Booker on Sunday: Team Obama’s attacks on Romney and Bain are ‘crap.’

Shorter Cory Booker on Monday: Barack Obama is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Shorter Obama administration flack: No, we did not have conversational relations with that man, Cory Booker.

Shorter Obama administration supporters on Twitter: Go #&#@&@* yourself, Cory!

Related: “Ten ways you know the Bain attack is bombing.”

More: “Guess who got the most private-equity money in 2008?“

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As spotted by RD Brewer, one of Ace of Spades’ co-bloggers, who reads the Politico and the New York Times, so you don’t have to. As Brewer writes, “Emmy winner Campbell Brown, former CNN host and former co-anchor at of NBC’s Weekend Today, rapped President Obama for being condescending toward women:”

WHEN I listen to President Obama speak to and about women, he sometimes sounds too paternalistic for my taste. In numerous appearances over the years — most recently at the Barnard graduation — he has made reference to how women are smarter than men. It’s all so tired, the kind of fake praise showered upon those one views as easy to impress. As I listen, I am always bracing for the old go-to cliché: “Behind every great man is a great woman.”

. . .

The women I know who are struggling in this economy couldn’t be further from the fictional character of Julia, presented in Mr. Obama’s Web ad, “The Life of Julia,” a silly and embarrassing caricature based on the assumption that women look to government at every meaningful phase of their lives for help.

. . .

In an effort to win them back, Mr. Obama is trying too hard. He’s employing a tone that can come across as grating and even condescending. He really ought to drop it. Most women don’t want to be patted on the head or treated as wards of the state. They simply want to be given a chance to succeed based on their talent and skills. To borrow a phrase from our president’s favorite president, Abraham Lincoln, they want “an open field and a fair chance.”

At Ace of Spades, Brewer adds:

More and more high profile personalities are speaking out. It’s starting to look like an Abilene paradox is breaking down, and we’re at the beginning of a full-blown preference cascade, described by Glenn Reynolds here:

This works until something breaks the spell, and the discontented realize that their feelings are widely shared, at which point the collapse of the regime may seem very sudden to outside observers – or even to the citizens themselves. Claims after the fact that many people who seemed like loyal apparatchiks really loathed the regime are often self-serving, of course. But they’re also often true . . . .

(Emphasis added.) If it starts to look like Obama is likely to lose, the left will turn on him fast. He lied to them, and they’re not happy. It’ll be the president’s problem or the messaging or the packaging, not the philosophy. They will turn on him to preserve their worldview.

No matter what happens in November, even more will be speaking out in the coming years; lots of rubes will want to come clean.

Such as this one: “Wapo’s Kathleen Parker: Republican’s aren’t wrong that we never vetted Obama sufficiently:”

The subject on the Chris Matthews show was the right wanting to emphasis Obama’s relationship with Jeremiah Wright, which they all agreed was playing the ‘race card’ which is idiotic. Matthews brought up the fact that while Romney doesn’t want to talk about Wright, Hannity certainly wants him to as he said so this week. Parker responded:

Well yeah Sean Hannity wants him to, a lot of Republicans do, a lot of the sorta further right people feel like ‘look we never vetted Obama sufficiently’, talking about us the media, and to some extent they’re not wrong about that. They do feel that we pulled back on Rev. Wright…

Gee, Kathleen, what on earth would give them that idea?

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We’ve already seen network TV newscasters, who make seven figure annual incomes taking shots at Mitt Romney’s weath, but late night entertainers earn much more, especially David Letterman, whose network career stretches back to the early 1980s, first with NBC, later with CBS. As Noel Sheppard writes at Newsbusters, “David Letterman Mocks Romney’s Wealth Despite Being Worth $400 Million:”

You want to see a perfect demonstration of almost unimaginable media hypocrisy?

On Friday, CBS Late Show host David Letterman mocked Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s wealth despite being worth $400 million embedded by Embedded Video
Download Video :

DAVID LETTERMAN: I was talking to Mitt Romney earlier today, and he and his family got a big two day weekend planned. They’re going to hike to the top of his money.

Excuse me, but who the heck is Letterman to ridicule anyone for how much money they have?

According to our friends at Celebrity Net Worth, the Late Show host makes $50 million a year with an estate valued at $400 million.

As Forbes estimated Romney’s net worth at $230 million Wednesday, Letterman’s worth almost twice the target of his derision.

How’s THAT for hypocrisy?

Sometimes Dave’s just not all that thoughtful, it seems.

Related: Bain or Bane?

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As you may already know, The Amateur, Edward Klein’s great new book, gets its title from this exchange involving Bill and Hillary Clinton, debating in August of last year in Chappaqua, New York, whether or not Hillary should run against Obama:

Bill and Hillary were going at it again, fighting tooth and nail over their favorite subject: themselves.

It was a warm summer Sunday—a full year away from the 2012 Democratic National Convention—and Bill Clinton was urging Hillary to think the unthinkable. He wanted her to challenge Barack Obama for their party’s presidential nomination. No American politician had attempted to usurp a sitting president of his own party since Ted Kennedy failed to unseat Jimmy Carter more than thirty years before.

“Why risk everything now?” Hillary demanded to know.

“Because,” Bill replied, “the country needs you!”

* * * * * * * *

“I’m the highest-ranking member in Obama’s cabinet,” she pointed out. “I eat breakfast with the guy every Thursday morning. What about loyalty, Bill? What about loyalty?” “Loyalty is a joke,” Bill said. “Loyalty doesn’t exist in politics. There’s no such word in the political rulebook. I’ve had two successors since I left the White House—Bush and Obama—and I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president—none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s… he’s… ”

Bill’s voice was growing hoarse—he was speaking in a rough whisper—but he looked as though he could go on forever bashing Obama. And then, all at once and without warning, he stopped cold.

He bit his lower lip and scanned the faces in the room. He was plainly gratified to see that his audience was spellbound. They were waiting for the politician par excellence to deliver his final judgment on the forty-fourth president of the United States.

“Barack Obama,” said Bill Clinton, “is an amateur!”

Right now, Bill Clinton’s legacy is unique (well, besides being the only president impeached in the 20th century) in that he’s the first Democratic president to serve out a full second term since FDR. Truman’s time in office consisted of serving out the remainder of Roosevelt’s last term, followed by a first term of his own; he could have run again for office in ’52 had he not squandered his reputation in the interim years. (Going full Godwin on Thomas Dewey didn’t help matters.) JFK’s first term was tragically cut short, LBJ chose not to run again, Carter wasn’t reelected. Given the bad blood that exists between Bill and Barry, think the former and his elephantine ego is all that keen on the latter getting reelected? Which helps to explain “Bubba’s Hot Mic Moment,” as captured by the Washington Free Beacon on Tuesday:

Former president Bill Clinton told attendees at the Peter G. Peterson Fiscal Summit in Washington, D.C., today that President Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on the rich will not be enough to close the deficit and that middle-class taxes may also have to be raised.

“This is just me now, I’m not speaking for the White House—I think you could tax me at 100 percent and you wouldn’t balance the budget,” Clinton said, according to Politico’s account. “We are all going to have to contribute to this, and if middle class people’s wages were going up again, and we had some growth to the economy, I don’t think they would object to going back to tax rates when I was president.”

Clinton’s comments are sure to provoke a response from Republicans who argue that President Obama may increase taxes for all or even propose a value-added tax in a more flexible second term.

Similarly, this moment from Hillary, captured by CNS News the following day in a story titled “Hillary: ‘Government Cannot and Should Not Control Any Individual’s Life,’” is also a dual-edged sword of a statement:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told an assemblage of human rights and “civil society” activists gathered at the State Department Wednesday that “government cannot and should not” control the lives of individuals.

“(T)o make the case for civil society is really quite simple because government cannot and should not control any individual’s life – tell you what to do, what not to do,” Clinton said, taking part in a “Global Dialogue of Civil Society.”

That seems like quite a change from the woman behind her namesake HillaryCare, who once said, “We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.” Her statement this week, coupled with her husband does seem curious in light of their dissatisfaction — shared by seemingly just about all but the Professional Left, as Robert Gibbs* would say — with The Amateur.

* Who would also grow increasingly exasperated by the Amateur-Hour atmosphere in the Obama White House by the end of his tenure there, according to Klein.

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In his latest column, Mark Steyn navigates through “Eternally shifting sands of Obama’s biography,” along with a soupçon of the  crab with tomato mayonnaise from Elizabeth Warren’s Pow Wow Chow cookbook:

“I suppose he’d had the name ready for a long time, even then,” says Nick Carraway in “The Great Gatsby.” “His parents were shiftless and unsuccessful farm people – his imagination had never really accepted them as his parents at all. The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his Platonic conception of himself… . So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seventeen-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.”

In a post-modern America, the things that Gatsby attempted to fake – an elite schooling – Obama actually had; the things that Gatsby attempted to obscure – the impoverished roots – merely add to Obama’s luster. Gatsby claimed to have gone to Oxford, but nobody knew him there because he never went; Obama had a million bucks’ worth of elite education at Occidental, Columbia and Harvard Law, and still nobody knew him (“Fox News contacted some 400 of his classmates and found no one who remembered him”). In that sense, Obama out-Gatsbys Gatsby: His “shiftless and unsuccessful” relatives – the deportation-dodging aunt on public housing in Boston, the DWI undocumented uncle, the $12-a-year brother back in Nairobi – are useful props in his story, the ever more vivid bit-players as the central character swims ever more out of focus, but they don’t seem to know him either. The more autobiographies he writes, the less anybody knows.

Like Gatsby presiding over his wild, lavish parties, Obama is aloof and remote: let everyone else rave deliriously; he just has to be. He is, in his way, the apotheosis of the Age of American Incredibility. When just being who you are anyway is an incredible accomplishment, Obama managed to run and win on biography almost entirely unmoored from life. But then, like Gatsby, he knew a thing or two about “the unreality of reality.”

Man Men’s Don Draper is a sort Gatsby-as-everyman; he’s not quite as wealthy as Jay Gatsby, and while his duplex Manhattan apartment in the new season is certainly swank, it’s not exactly a mansion on Long Island’s North Shore. But the idea that one can be born dirt poor in the heartland and reinvent yourself to reach the top of New York society is certainly similar. As I wrote in July of 2008, Obama is the very personification of Mad Men’s identikit philosophy, espoused in the show’s first season by Robert Morse’s Bert Cooper character:

“A man is whatever room he is in” — that’s a remarkably timely phrase right about now, isn’t it?

It’s even more so, seeing the Ministry of Truth-level airbrushing that Obama has done to his biography over the years. In 2008, like Don Draper, Obama at his best was a master salesman, and both are handsome men who know their way around a Lucky, a Brooks Brothers suit, and a skinny tie. But in real-life, the best ad men know that the product has to be equal to the ad campaign, or customer disappointment will be palpable. Or as Mad Men series advisor Jerry Della Femina wrote over 40 years ago in his classic book on advertising, From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front-Line Dispatches from the Advertising War:

There is a great deal of advertising that’s better than the product. When that happens, all that the good advertising will do is put you out of business faster. There have been cases where the product had to come up to the advertising but when the product fails to do that, the advertiser will eventually run into a lot of trouble.

A few years later, Cavett Robert, the founder of the National Speaker’s Association would advise clients in his profession, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.” That’s the story of Edward Klein’s new book, The Amateur. Each chapter is features a different liberal clique (such as black and Jewish voters) or elitists (Oprah and the Kennedy clan) who embraced Obama in 2008, only to find out that they were sold a bill of goods, that Obama was only in it for himself, and that Obama either didn’t understand how Washington worked, or thought that through sheer force of ego, he could bend it to his will. Here’s a representative sample, early on in Klein’s book:

Shortly after Obama entered the White House, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner warned him, “Your legacy is going to be preventing the second Great Depression.” To which Obama boasted, “That’s not enough for me.”

* * * * * * * *

On the evening of Tuesday, June 30, 2009, Barack Obama invited nine like-minded liberal historians to have dinner with him in the Family Quarters of the White House. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, personally delivered the invitations to each historian with a word of caution: the dinner was to remain private and off the record….At the time of this dinner, Barack Obama was still enjoying a honeymoon period with the American people. According to the most recent Gallup Poll, 63 percent of Americans approved of the job he was doing. Not surprisingly, he was in an expansive mood as he tucked into his lamb chops and went around the table questioning each historian by name—Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek, David Brinkley, H. W. Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack, and Gary Wills.

* * * * * * * *

Tonight, in front of nine prominent American historians, Obama wasn’t shy about flaunting his famous self-confidence. He intended to bring the Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table and create a permanent peace in the Middle East. He would open a constructive dialogue with America’s enemies in Iran and North Korea and, through his powers of persuasion, help them see the error of their ways. He’d pass legislation in Washington to revolutionize the country’s healthcare system and energy policy. And he’d inject the regulatory hand of the federal government into the American economy in an effort to create “a more just and equitable society.” When several of the historians brought up the difficulties that Lyndon Johnson had faced trying to wage a foreign war while implementing an ambitious domestic agenda, Obama grew testy. He knew better. He could prevail by the force of his personality. He could solve the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, put millions of people back to work, redistribute wealth, withdraw from Iraq, and reconcile the United States to a less dominant role in the world.

It was, by any measure, a breathtaking display of narcissistic grandiosity from a man whose entire political curriculum vitae consisted of seven undistinguished years in the Illinois Senate, two mostly absent years in the United States Senate, and five months and ten days in the White House. Unintentionally, Obama revealed the characteristics that made him totally unsuited for the presidency and that would doom him to failure: his extreme haughtiness and excessive pride; his ideological bent as a far-left corporatist; and his astounding amateurism.

Compare that Hindenburg-sized level of hubris to the ad that Mitt Romney’s campaign rolled out today, to broach the idea of President Romney’s first day in office (as Mollie Hemingway asks at Ricochet, “Did You Just Say ‘President Romney?’”) No Styrofoam columns and lowering of the Red Sea here, in contrast, doable initial achievements:

Beyond the laundry list, there’s the tone of the ad. Perhaps Hugh Hewitt should reissue his 2007 book which invites us to imagine A Mormon in the White House under a new title: A Grown-Up in the White House.

It would make for a refreshing change. But do the American people want one there again?

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Obviously, this clears it all up — Obama was clearly born in San Clemente, not Hawaii or Kenya. At Power Line, Thomas Lipscomb writes:

After all where do the bios come from? We don’t make them up. And neither did Dystel & Goederich. They come from the authors, like Obama. No one has ever invented a detail like that, and the authors usually review them and scream like hell if we get them wrong.

Can Dystel and Goedrich show us the correction appeal letter they got from Obama about the Kenya birth in over 10 years of using this bio? Or any other incident from any other publisher or agent that is similar to this “error?”

I really don’t care where Obama was born. The continued degeneration of the press in passing on hilarious nonsense as fact is a lot more serious problem. Give Dystel & Goederich the Rose Mary Woods Memorial Award for the Most Absurd Lie to Protect a President of the Year.

Thomas Lipscomb
Senior Fellow
Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC)

Read the whole thing.

And note that this is far from the first time Obama and his handlers have been compared to Nixon and his staff.

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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.™

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In case you haven’t seen it, here’s a screencap of the top of the Drudge Report as of the time of this post.  The link on the headline takes you to a post at Breitbart.com written by Joel B. Pollack and titled “The Vetting — Exclusive — Obama’s Literary Agent in 1991 Booklet: ‘Born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’” The article itself begins with a “Note from Senior Management” that cautions the reader, “Andrew Breitbart was never a ‘Birther,’ and Breitbart News is a site that has never advocated the narrative of ‘Birtherism:’”

In fact, Andrew believed, as we do, that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.

Yet Andrew also believed that the complicit mainstream media had refused to examine President Obama’s ideological past, or the carefully crafted persona he and his advisers had constructed for him.

It is for that reason that we launched “The Vetting,” an ongoing series in which we explore the ideological background of President Obama (and other presidential candidates)–not to re-litigate 2008, but because ideas and actions have consequences.

It is also in that spirit that we discovered, and now present, the booklet described below–one that includes a marketing pitch for a forthcoming book by a then-young, otherwise unknown former president of the Harvard Law Review.

It is evidence–not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.

The article goes on to note that “Breitbart News has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as ‘born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’”

Ace (who also reminds readers that he’s not a birther, either. For the record, neither are we) notes that Obama himself was likely the source of the copy in the screencap above, which is also presented in numerous other scans in the Brietbart.com article.

While it’s true that bios are often not written by the subject, the information in the bio must come from somewhere — and the obvious place to get such information is the subject himself.

I’ve been asked to write these myself — and in fact I owe someone one right now — and while they may be rewritten and edited, the guy asking you for the bio wants the basic information. He doesn’t want to go researching stuff which you can provide for him in 40 seconds.

So it seems very likely this came from Obama. Where else would Obama’s birthplace have come from? In 1991, Obama had not yet written his two (ahem) memoirs. He was not a famous man.

So, why did Obama say this?

Hey, it probably played well at the time, an early example of Jim Geraghty’s recurring theme that all of Obama’s statements have expiration dates on them. And so do Obama’s previous names, another way that he has altered the way he presented himself to the world at various times.

All of which dovetails into the question that Roger L. Simon asks at the Tatler: “Is Obama a Pathological Liar?”

We have always branded Bill Clinton a liar, at least about sex, and probably other things. But the amazing scoop by Breitbart.com today makes Obama one up on Bill. In all likelihood, the president will say that he never saw the information from his literary agents claiming he was born in Kenya. But as the author of 11 books, I can say that in EVERY instance that I have been published, I have seen such material in advance. It could be that Obama is the exception, but that is highly unlikely.

In other words, we have in the White House a man willing to bend his national identity for profit. Pretty cool! (He’s supposed to be cool, isn’t he? Well that’s as cool as it gets.)

Speaking of playing well during his college days, placing that 1991 bio into context also helps to explain what drives the Birthers, something that Mark Steyn discussed last year in his book After America:

With hindsight, this is what drove both the birthers and the countering cries of racism. Detractors and supporters alike were trying to explain something that was at first vaguely palpable and then became embarrassingly obvious: it’s not so much that he’s foreign to America, but that America is foreign to him. Outside the cloisters of Hyde Park and a few other enclaves, he doesn’t seem to get America. Not because he was born in Kenya or wherever, but because he’s the first president to be marinated his entire life in a post-modern, post-American cultural relativism. What’s worrying about Obama is not that he’s weird but that he’s so typical of much of the Eloi [Steyn's recurring H.G. Wells-inspired leitmotif in After America for the pampered elite -- Ed]; in that sense, his post-Americanness is all too American.

In both Chicago’s Ward Four, where the Obamas lived, and Ward Five, where they worked, 95 percent of electors voted Democrat in 2004. You would be hard put to find another constituency so committed to celebrating lack of diversity. Like most professional multiculturalists, Obama has passed his entire adulthood in a very narrow unicultural environment where your ideological worldview doesn’t depend on anything so tedious as actually viewing the world. The aforementioned Michael Ignatieff, who actually has viewed the world, gets close to the psychology in his response to criticisms of him for spending so much time abroad. Deploring such “provincialism,” he replied: “They say it makes me less of a Canadian. It makes me more of a Canadian.”

And how better to sound cool and exotic to Harvard’s professors (many of whom likely share the same punitive liberal worldview of America that Obama has marinated in much of his life) than to claim you weren’t born in America?

Related: At the Tatler, Myra Adams links to the Breitbart post and asks, “It is only May. Can you imagine what the October presidential campaign will look like?”

I hope for their sake that the Romney camp has.

Update: At Hot Air, Allahpundit adds:

An author born in colonial Kenya sounds more worldly at first blush than one born in Honolulu, just as a law professor who’s 1/32 Cherokee sounds more in tune with the minority experience in America than a white woman from Oklahoma. Beyond that, though, this is a story about the media: I’d bet cash money that some reporter somewhere stumbled upon this booklet in years past and politely suppressed the info rather than do the journalist’s job of asking questions and finding out why the mistake in the booklet was made. The alternative, that the media was so uninterested in O’s background that they never checked his professional listings, is grimly possible, but I’m skeptical. I think this is a case where someone probably heard about the booklet and ignored it in order to play gatekeeper so that the Birthers couldn’t exploit the information. That’s what the press has come to when the subject is Obama’s background.

Read the whole thing. And then click back over to Breitbart.com, where Ben Shapiro notes, “Obama’s Lit Agency Used ‘Born in Kenya’ Bio Until 2007″:

According to archive.org, a website that caches websites on a regular basis, [AKA The Internet Archieve Wayback Machine -- Ed] the Dystel.com website – the official website for Dystel & Goderich, Obama’s literary agents – was using the Barack Obama “born in Kenya” language until April 2007, just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency.

Here’s a screencap we made of the Dystel.com client list that the Wayback machine captured in April of 2007 lest it disappears; we’ve scrolled down to the relevant entry; click to enlarge:

Shapiro writes that apparently, sometime later in April of 2007, Obama’s bio at Dystel was revised to state that he was born in Hawaii. Speaking of the Wayback Machine, a commenter at Hot Air links to a 2004 Associated Press article archived there from the Nairobi-Kenya Standard and notes, “This has been around for a long time. But most people assumed it was a one-off error: Kenyan-born Obama all set for US Senate.” Here’s its lede:

Kenyan-born US Senate hopeful, Barrack Obama, appeared set to take over the Illinois Senate seat after his main rival, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race on Friday night amid a furor over lurid sex club allegations.

Snopes, the left-leaning veteran fact-checking Website has a 2009 article debunking this article; one can only imagine how crazy they’re going there today.

Similarly, Obama’s former literary agent has decided to do one last bit of damage control today for her old client:

Miriam Goderich issued the following statement to Political Wire:

“You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya.  This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time.  There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii.  I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.”

But one they kept making for 16 years. Still though, nice of Goderich to take the fall herself. As Mark Steyn likes to quip:

When the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan dumped some of his closest cabinet colleagues to extricate himself from a political crisis, the Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe responded: “Greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life.”

And the wheels of the bus go ’round and ’round.

More: Vindication for Jack Cashill, who believes that Bill Ayers wrote Dreams From My Father? Roger adds his his video interview today with Cashill to discuss these latest revelations to his Tatler post:

Related: Jim Treacher squares the circle: “Obama wasn’t born in Kenya, except when he claims he was born in Kenya:”

Either Obama was born in Kenya or he wasn’t. I remain skeptical that he was. The question is, then: Why did he claim to be? What advantage did he think it gave him at the time?

Maybe Elizabeth Warren can tell us…

To coin a popular Blogospheric phrase, heh.

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As John Hinderaker writes at Power Line, “Senate Democrats Achieve a New Standard of Irresponsibility:”

The Senate voted on five budgets today, at the insistence of Republican senators. The result was revealing: no Senate Democrat voted in favor of any budget. This is consistent, of course, with the fact that the Democrat-led Senate has refused to adopt a budget, in violation of federal law, for the last three years. Still, it is a little shocking to see that not a single Democrat was willing to vote in favor of anybudget, even the most irresponsible.

President Obama’s budget fared the worst; it lost, 99-0. This means that the presidents FY 2013 budget has now been rejected by the House and Senate by a combined vote of 513-0. Earlier today, as Paul noted in a post a little while ago, Obama demanded a “serious bipartisan approach” to the nation’s budgetary crisis. Bipartisan? He can’t even get a single Democrat to support his radically irresponsible proposals.

Why President Obama’s fellow Democrats hate him so? (Why, you could fill a book with that topic.)

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Bill Maher isn’t letting the quick implosion of the Washington Post’s “bullying” story about Mitt Romney’s teenage days from stopping him embarrassing himself:

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in “bullying” in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being “gently masturbated by a pop star.”

Apparently, that last phrase is a stock part of Maher’s shtick; he’s used it before — here’s an excerpt from his May 3, 2005 appearance on the CBS Late Late Show, hosted by Craig Ferguson:

Bill Maher: “I think that there is no perspective. People have no perspective, especially about crime. You know, zero tolerance. You know, of course, nobody ever wants to see a child, you know, diddled. That’s just plain wrong. But even the people who are testifying against him, they’re saying that he serviced them. They didn’t service him.”

Craig Ferguson: “You don’t have kids, do you, Bill?”

Maher: “No.”

Ferguson: “No. I have a son. It makes me crazy, this thing, this Michael Jackson thing. It drives me, the idea of someone touching my kid, I would go, I nearly swore there. I’d go crazy.”

Maher: “Very wrong. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid. I was savagely beaten once by bullies in the schoolyard. Savagely beaten. If I had a choice between being savagely beaten and being gently masturbated by a pop star. It’s just me.”

Ferguson: “The always controversial Bill Maher, everybody.”

Maher: “What? That’s it?”

Ferguson: “Bill Maher. We’ll be right back with Rain Pryor.”

Based on that transcript, and the clip I once watched of the incident (which may still be available on YouTube), Ferguson had the good sense to get Maher off the air as quickly as possible. Would that Maher’s employers at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a similar level of decorum.

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