Obama, we hardly know ye
Sick of the Obama birth certificate wheeze? Me too. National Review has an excellent editorial about the subject here.
And yet, and yet . . . When it comes to Obama, mendacity is never far behind. Andy McCarthy has a must-read piece responding to that NR editorial and making the key point that the real issue surrounding the President’s provenance concerns not geography but candor, that is, the lack of candor that characterizes the President. As many of us on the politically mature side of the aisle pointed out during the campaign, one of the alarming things about the prospect of an Obama presidency was that we knew so little about the candidate. And much of what we did know was the opposite of reassuring. The connections with dubious characters like Bill “the Bomber” Ayers, Jeremiah “the racist” Wright, Tony “the crook” Rezko, Rashid “the Islamic radical” Khalidi; the mystery years as a “community organizer,” the shadowy college years (why can’t we see those records?), the competing narratives about his religious upbringing, etc., etc. Exactly who, we wondered, was this chap Barack it’s-racist-and-Islamophobic-to-use-his-middle-name Obama? Hard to say, wasn’t it? As McCarthy points out,
Before January 20 of this year, Barack Obama had a negligible public record. He burst onto the national scene what seemed like five minutes before his election to the presidency: a first-term U.S. senator who actually served less than four years in that post – after a short time as a state legislator, some shadowy years as a “community organizer,” and scholastic terms at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard that remain shrouded in mystery. The primary qualification supporters offered for Obama’s candidacy was his compelling life story, as packaged in 850 pages’ worth of the not one but two autobiographies this seemingly unaccomplished candidate had written by the age of 45.
Yet we now know that this life story is chock full of fiction. Typical and disturbing, to take just one example, is the entirely fabricated account in Dreams from My Father of Obama’s first job after college:
Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool. They treated me like a son, those black ladies; they told me how they expected me to run the company one day. . . . The company promoted me to the position of financial writer. I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors – see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand – and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve. . . .
As the website Sweetness & Light details, this is bunk. Obama did not work at “a consulting house to multinational corporations”; it was, a then-colleague of his has related, “a small company that published newsletters on international business.” He wasn’t the only black man in the company, and he didn’t have an office, have a secretary, wear a suit and tie on the job, or conduct “interviews” with “Japanese financiers or German bond traders” – he was a junior copyeditor.
What’s unnerving about this is that it is so gratuitous. It would have made no difference to anyone curious about Obama’s life that he, like most of us, took a ho-hum entry-level job to establish himself. But Obama lies about the small things, the inconsequential things, just as he does about the important ones – depending on what he is trying to accomplish at any given time.
The fact is that Obama’s account of his background is increasingly revealed as a fabrication, not his life as lived; his utterances reflect the expediencies of the moment, not the truth. What is supposed to save the country from fraudulence of this sort is the media. Here, though, the establishment press is deep in Obama’s tank – so much so that they can’t even accurately report his flub of a ceremonial opening pitch lest he come off as something less than Sandy Koufax. Astonishingly, reporters see their job not as reporting Obama news but as debunking Obama news, or flat-out suppressing it. How many Americans know, for example, that as a sitting U.S. senator in 2006, Obama interfered in a Kenyan election, publicly ripping the incumbent government (a U.S. ally) for corruption while he was its guest and barnstorming with his preferred candidate: a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law, and whose supporters, upon losing the election, committed murder and mayhem, displacing thousands of Kenyans and plunging their country into utter chaos?
So, the issue is not “where was Obama born.” The answer to that is Hawaii. The issue is, Who is Barack Hussein Obama and why has he so consistently misled the public about his personal history?
Outstanding.
Barack Obama recently got caught lying about how he met his wife. He claimed that they became a couple while still in college. That Barack and Michelle actually met at work is well established. Why would Obama lie? Is it possible that he lies so much that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction? This is truly disturbing. Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson also occasionally deceived the American people—but they never insulted their intelligence.
The birther’s chorus is absurd, but absurdity does not pop up out of nowhere. This kind of nonsense would have evaporated in a New York minute if the president had not made so many folks suspicious about the value of his words.
Americans will tolerate rethorical exaggeration here and there, but the systematic misrepresentation of the facts will eventually react, rationally or otherwise.
Andy McCarthy and Roger eloquently state the actual truth. It’s less about the birth certificate itself than it is about his continuing resistance to releasing it. McCarthy rightly notes that other aspects of his past are even more disturbing (the 2006 Kenyan episode) than the birth certificate story line. I, for one, want all the information about this person out in the open. He has not earned, nor does he deserve, the reverence and adulation the mainstream press has fallen all over themselves to present to us.
My thought is, I don’t care if it’s crazy, let’s start with the birth certificate. Where is it?
Is the Obama campaign really as clever as it looks?
Was the birth certificate affair calculated to make its opponents look ridiculous? The whole affair could have been quickly resolved if the candidate had simply authorized a major media organization to get a certified copy directly from the State of Hawaii. Instead, it runs an image on its website that I think first appeared at Daily Kos. It fights in court not to release the certificate. All of this fans doubts that succeed in pulling commentators like our host dangerously close to the ‘fake but accurate’ territory we correctly disdain.
Court cases to force the release of a certificate seem to have failed for lack of standing. Is it possible that no one has standing to verify that the Constitutional requirement is actually met?
You’ll never find the truth unless you start at the beginning… and the birth cert is pretty much the beginning.
Plus most of the stuff you talk about is meaningless… it doesn’t matter if obama praised hitler, stalin, marx or even helped his kenyan “family” incite the chaos… its meaningless. He will still be president.
The simple fact is that you either want to legally stop obama, you want to illegally stop obama or you want to deny reality and believe that he will lose in 2012.
Most of the stuff you talk about is wonderful for if he was running for president… its a little past that point.
If you want to stop obama stopping “obamacare” or any other retarded bill is meaningless… the next time a leftist is elected he’ll put out the same crap… the simple fact it countering bills and programs is like cutting a blade of grass on a midwest prairie… its going to grow back and you haven’t gotten rid of it.
If you want to stop obama legally then you need o target important things… go for the root of the problem… in this case obama himself. Proving that he is illegally president removes him… proving that he has committed massive election fund fraud puts him in jail… proving that he stole hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarship funds by pretending to not be a US citizen could put him in jail….
Proving that he lies none stop about meaningless things because he’s an egomaniac… not going to stop him from lying… or being an egomaniac… or writing and passing socialist bills, laws and programs….
Richard Milhous O’Bama?
That’s what Hugh Hewitt seems to think. Nobody has been able to gain standing to do discovery. You’d have to actually have airtight proof that he’s NOT a NBC before the courts wouldn’t throw it out.
0bama’s handle on constitutional law is pretty shaky in other areas, but this one he seems to understand perfectly.
“You’d have to actually have airtight proof that he’s NOT a NBC before the courts wouldn’t throw it out.”
Hugh Hewitt convincingly argues that the burden of proof is on those who doubt the validity of Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He is not obligated to prove anything!
The Founding Fathers never dealt with this matter—because there was no such thing as the documentation of one’s birth during that era. My guess is that the birth certificate as we know know it today didn’t become the norm until the late 1900s or even the early part of the 20th Century.
I should have mentioned something else in my earlier post: Barack Obama is probably spending very little money “defending” himself from these peculiar laws suits. It is my understanding that the judges are barely giving these case a few minutes of their time. The law is supposedly very clear that these plaintiffs do not have standing. They are just wasting everybody’s time. Once could compare them to those extremists who believe there is no constitutional obligation to pay one’s income taxes.
Has the actual birth certificate been released? An official copy of it can be easily found on line (FactCheck.org for example, who calls it a “birth certificate” — it’s a “copy” of one).
But I have yet to see an image of the actual birth certificate. Why? What’s so difficult bout producing the real thing rather than a copy? All of this speculation could be put to rest immediately.
“All of this speculation could be put to rest immediately.”
But why would Barack Obama and David Axelrod want to put an end to the controversy? They are thanking God every day for this gift horse. Let the good times continue to roll! The American people, rightfully or wrongly, think the “birthers” are stark raving crazy. Are there any polls whatsoever to indicate otherwise?
The time lines, places, actions, motives, when analyzed, support, and are consistent with, what is the answer to the Obama birth puzzle:
Obama’s grandmother is his mother and his mother is his sister.
Think about it. Review all the facts and claims.
13, Oh, man. So Malcom X was diddling the gramma ?
Barack Hussein Obama II has NEVER RELEASED AN ORIGINAL COPY OF HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE – nor has anyone in the media ever seen or obtained one. What the media has been showing as a “birth certificate” is NOT AN ORIGINAL CERTIFICATE OF LIVE BIRTH from the State of Hawaii. The White House itself has never even produced a non-redacted copy of this Certification with both sides visible. The only one of these ever produced with both sides was given by the Obama campaign to factcheck.org and there is no flat scan of that certificate. This Certification is merely a purported computer generated “Certification of Live Birth” which does not have important information on it that would be on the original Certificate of Live Birth issued in 1961, specifically:
1) + 3. This Birth (Single, Twin, Triplet)
2) + 4. If Twin or Triplet, Was Born Child (1st, 2nd, or 3rd)
3) + 6c. Name of Hospital or Institution (If not in hospital or institution, give street address)
4) + 6d. Is place of birth inside city or town limits? If no give judicial district.
5) + 7a. Usual Residence of mother: City, Town, or Rural Location
6) + 7b. Island
7) + 7c. County and State or Foreign Country
8) + 7d. Street Address
9) + 7e. Is residence inside city or town limits? If no give judicial district.
10) + 7f. Mother’s mailing address
11) + 7g. Is residence on a Farm or Plantation?
12) + 10. Age of Father
13) + 11. Birthplace (Island, State, or Foreign Country)
14) + 12a. Usual Occupation
15) + 12b. Kind of Business or Industry
16) + 15. Age of Mother
17) + 16. Birthplace (Island, State, or Foreign Country)
18) + 17a. Type of Occupation Outside Home During Pregnancy
19) + 17b. Last Date Worked
20) + 18a. Signature of Parent or Other Informant (Parent, Other)
21) + 18b. Date of Signature
22) + 19a. Signature of Attendant (M.D., D.O, Midwife, Other)
23) + 19b. Date of Signature
24) + 20. Date Accepted by Local Reg.
25) + 21. Signature of Local Registrar
26) + 22. Date Accepted by Reg. General
These 26 additional pieces of information (shown with their Field Numbers from an actual original Hawaiian Certificate of Live Birth from 1961) are what are missing on the computer-generated “short form” “Certification of Live Birth.”
The State of Hawaii HAS NEVER CONFIRMED THAT THEY ISSUED THE CERTIFICATION OF LIVE BIRTH that was put up on Obama’s web site fightthesmears.com and which is shown on the LA Times as well as on numerous MSM print and TV reports, and that Certification is TOTALLY INVALID based on the redaction (alteration) of the certificate number as it so plainly states on the bottom of that Certification “ANY ALTERATIONS INVALIDATE THIS CERTIFICATE.”
It is just astounding that anyone in the media would put up this particular graphic of the Certification when the alteration makes it completely invalid – but this is the only graphic that has ever been directly provided by the Obama people (with no scan of the back at all where there would be a stamped signature and release date from the State of Hawaii), with the other copy on the factcheck.org web site being a completely different certification with VERY DISTINCT TRI-FOLD LINES which negate the possibility that this graphic scan was ever taken from that certification for which factcheck.org never provided an image of flat scans of the front and back.
In fact there have been 3 incompatible versions of this purported 2007 COLB displayed on the internet and by the MSM over the past year – and as Lou Dobbs asked last week, “Which COLB are you talking about?”
Further, the hospital where Obama purportedly claims he was born, Kapi’olani Medical Center has recently refused to even confirm that Obama was in fact born there, and has even refused to confirm the authenticity of a letter purported be from Obama dated January 24, 2009 and bearing White House letterhead (without a seal) and signed by BO which it had previously published on its own web site and has now pulled that letter from its web site. As to who the attending physician was at the time of Obama’s birth, no information has ever been released about that and nobody has come forward to say they were present at the time of his birth in Honolulu, Hawaii, nor that they knew him and his parents as an infant.
Americans of all political persuasions are demanding that Obama’s original Certificate of Live Birth be released, and this issue will continue until exactly that is done.
WHERE’S THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE?
The Feds don’t accept a certification of live birth when you apply for a passport (or a dozen other citizen benefits). Why would they accept it from a person wanting to be President?
Also, Andy McCarthy engages in a bit of sophistry when he rejects “crackpot” demands to see the real document but excuses himself for wanting to see it—not to question Obama’s right to be a legitimate President — but just to satisfy his curiosity about a details of Obama’s life.
O’Reilly says FOX has a copy and it has been certified by the Hawaiian authorities.
“When it comes to Obama, mendacity is never far behind.”
Obama should’ve done what W did: declare his reported pot smoking, coke snorting days off limits to questioners.
#15: “Barack Hussein Obama II has NEVER RELEASED AN ORIGINAL COPY OF HIS BIRTH CERTIFICATE – nor has anyone in the media ever seen or obtained one.”
My, my, Roger, your blog certainly attracts an interesting readership. And yet, and yet….
Don’t forget that Chicago Machine bagman Tony Rezko purchased the yard for Obama’s house. After the first stink was raised and they knew they had to build a fence, Rezko had to sell a part of what he bought (the so-called Rezko Lot) to Obama because if he had not the fence would have run through the Obamas’ house.
#7 I’m always amazed at how the MSM and the Liberals have succeeded in demonizing Nixon to the uninformed.
Of course, he wasn’t posh like the Martha’s Vineyard set, and he dared to oppose them politically. Let’s measure his character for a moment against the hero of the Massachusetts voters:
Chappaquiddick Revisited [NRO]
Liberals still lionize Ted Kennedy. Forty years ago, he revealed his true character.
By R. P. George and D. Quinn
On the evening of July 18, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne died while trying to free herself from Edward M. Kennedy’s submerged automobile in a tidal channel on Chappaquiddick Island.
The fortieth anniversary of Miss Kopechne’s death passed with scarcely a word’s being mentioned of it in the media. Perhaps it was not simply a matter of liberal bias. With Senator Kennedy now seriously ill, many journalists no doubt considered that it might be unseemly to bring up the subject.
But however uncomfortable it may be to recall the circumstances of Mary Jo Kopechne’s death, Americans must not forget what happened to her, nor must a delicate sensibility prevent us from remembering how a powerful man and his savvy handlers were able to shield him from responsibility for his behavior towards her. Mary Jo Kopechne died because, after recklessly causing an accident, Teddy Kennedy, in his nearly unfathomable self-absorption and political ambition, failed to do what almost anyone would have done to rescue her — namely, report the accident and call for emergency help. Instead, Kennedy thought only of himself and his political career.
Mary Jo Kopechne was 29 years old when she died. She was a bright and idealistic young woman who had worked closely with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in the presidential campaign that ended tragically with his assassination in June 1968. On July 18, 1969, she attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island that reunited several of RFK’s campaign workers and friends. Teddy Kennedy also attended the party, and he and Miss Kopechne left together sometime before midnight, with Kennedy at the wheel of his 1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.
Having taken a wrong turn, and driving too fast along a dirt road, Kennedy was unable to brake properly when approaching Dike Bridge, which had no guardrail. The car went over the side of the bridge and plunged into the channel, known as Poucha Pond. Ted Kennedy managed to escape the submerged and overturned vehicle, but Mary Jo Kopechne did not.
Kennedy later claimed that he made several attempts to swim down to the car to rescue her. He then rested on the shore for a few minutes before walking back to the party. On the way, he passed several houses where he could easily have stopped, asked for help, and notified authorities. With a woman in danger of drowning, that is what any decent person would have done. But Kennedy did not do it. He later said that he had not seen a house with a light on. This would have been a pathetic excuse even if true. The evidence is, however, that the very first house that he had passed, only 150 yards or so from the scene of the accident, had a light on.
When Kennedy finally got back to the party, he enlisted a cousin, Joseph Gargan, and a friend, Paul Markham, to return to the accident scene and attempt a rescue. (What was needed, of course, was a properly trained and equipped emergency diver.) When their efforts failed, the two men — both of them lawyers — attempted to prevail on Kennedy to report the accident and get police and professional rescue help. But Kennedy did not report the accident. Gargan and Markham testified that they themselves did not report it only because they believed that Kennedy was going to do so. What Kennedy did, rather, was return to his hotel room in nearby Edgartown, where he retired for the night. Early the next morning, Gargan and Markham joined him and again pressed him urgently to notify the authorities. Instead, Kennedy found a pay phone and began soliciting advice from trusted friends and relatives. By this point, Mary Jo Kopechne was certainly dead, and Teddy Kennedy had still not notified the authorities.
The police first heard of the incident when a pair of fishermen, having seen the car in the water, went to one of the residences that Kennedy had passed the evening before to make sure that the authorities had been informed. The police sent a diver, who quickly recovered Miss Kopechne’s body. From its positioning in the car, it was clear that she had survived for some time before drowning or exhausting the available oxygen. It was surely a terrifying and perhaps an agonizing death. The diver later testified that, had Kennedy run to the nearest residence and called for emergency help, “there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.”
The police became aware that the car belonged to Edward M. Kennedy when they ran a check on the license plate. When Kennedy, still at the pay phone, saw that the body had been recovered, he went to the police station, where he made a few more calls and then dictated to Markham a statement for the police. It was carefully crafted to avoid saying very much, thus keeping open a range of explanatory options.
A week later, Kennedy pleaded guilty to the comparatively minor charge of leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury. Astonishingly, the local Massachusetts judge, a man named James Boyle, gave Kennedy only the statutory minimum punishment — two months of jail time — which he immediately suspended. In explaining his leniency, Judge Boyle pointed to what he described as Kennedy’s “unblemished record.” One supposes that for the judge, it was a bit like having Mother Teresa in the dock.
Having managed the immediate legal issues, the legendary Kennedy machinery went to work on managing the political problem created by the senator’s shocking behavior. On the evening of his sentencing, one week after Miss Kopechne had died in his car, Kennedy read a prepared statement that was broadcast on network television. The statement was a masterwork of spin — telling parts of the story (in the least unfavorable light possible, of course); leaving out the more inculpatory parts; and vacillating between abject apology and excuse making. The most risible part was when he suggested that his conduct was accounted for by a cerebral concussion and shock, while insisting that, of course, he wouldn’t dream of using his medical condition as an excuse.
He asked the people of Massachusetts whether they wanted him to resign. “Think this through with me,” he said. “In facing this decision, I seek your advice and opinion. In making it I seek your prayers.”
It worked.
Six weeks later, an inquest into Mary Jo Kopechne’s death was held. Kennedy’s lawyers asked the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to make it a secret inquest, and the judges proved to be entirely compliant. Later, a lengthy transcript of the inquest was made available to the public. The presiding judge was one who had already proven to be friendly from Kennedy’s point of view: James Boyle. Interestingly, Boyle found “probable cause” for believing that Kennedy was guilty of criminal negligence and even possibly manslaughter. Still, he did not issue a warrant for the senator’s arrest.
The district attorney, an ambitious Democrat named Edmund Dinis, almost certainly could have gotten a grand-jury indictment, but he, too, declined to pursue the matter. In fact, when a grand jury looked at the question, Dinis told the jurors that there was not sufficient evidence to warrant an indictment of the senator even on charges of reckless endangerment, much less manslaughter.
Did we mention that all of this happened in Massachusetts? Did we note that the perpetrator was Democratic United States senator Edward M. Kennedy?
In the end, Kennedy’s punishment for his appalling acts and even more appalling omissions at Chappaquiddick was that the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles suspended his driver’s license for a few months.
Many liberals lionize Teddy Kennedy. They like his politics and often thrill to his aggressive tactics against their adversaries. (That list begins with Robert H. Bork, whom Kennedy defamed brutally in a successful effort to block his confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.) But they should consider what kind of man Ted Kennedy is. His character was revealed at Chappaquiddick and in all that he said and did to evade responsibility for his conduct in the months and years that followed.
It is a sad irony that liberal groups heap praise on Kennedy as a champion of women’s rights. Of course, the reason they like him — and the reason he can always count on them to deflect attention from questions of character and to attack those who raise the questions — is that he is a champion of liberal ideology. Someone who honored women’s rights — someone who honored human rights — would have laid aside any question of political consequences, run to a nearby house, and called for emergency help to rescue a woman whose life, through his own fault, was in grave peril. Such a person would have honored the right to life of Mary Jo Kopechne.
— Robert P. George is McCormick professor of jurisprudence and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. Dermot Quinn is a professor of history at Seton Hall University.
“and yet, and yet” – poor, poor little wingnuts – marginalized to the fringe, laughed at, pointed at, mocked by even the stupidest of the right. We all know you have nothing – so throw the sh@t against the wall like so many monkeys to see what sticks. The world remembers what you did to Clinton – endless lawsuits, Whitewater, Vince Foster, lurid stories of murder, drug dealing – and the MSM went right along – Fox and friends dredging this crap up daily – But – we all know your tricks now, and you stamp your little feet, mad that no one will listen to your tinfoil hat fantasies – the only hope you have is that the majority of the US is really, really stupid – easily distracted by that shiny object that, that, – what was I saying? You nutjobs ARE heavily armed though, and seething with your impotence – so, hopefully your circular firing squad does its’ job. See you next election!
Hawaii was not a state when Obama was born. His father, such as he was, was a Keyan…there you have it folks…
ooops…sry..a Kenyan
President Obama, will you let the world see your original birth certificate?
I feel so wild-eyed, mixed-up and crazy — an insane “birther.” Gosh what a nutty question.