I have never been much of a conspiracy theorist. For me it was always Oswald by himself from the Texas School Book Depository and nothing in the intervening fifty years has disabused me of this notion. For the most part, I’m an Occam’s Razor kind of guy — the most obvious explanation is likely to be true.
Moreover, conspiracy theorists from Mark Lane to Jerome Corsi (more of him in a moment) have always seemed to me a little bit, well, off.
Maybe it’s the temper of the times, however, the incessant presidential lying recently unmasked, but a brief Washington Post article linked on the Drudge Report Tuesday caught me up short. The headline told much of the story — “Obama’s uncle contradicts White House, says Obama stayed with him in 1980s.”
Obama’s uncle is Onyango “Omar” Obama, 69, a Kenyan national who has been living illegally in this country for five decades. Omar, the manager of a liquor store, was caught driving under the influence recently and faced deportation. The judge apparently let him off. What’s interesting is that Omar testified during his trial that the future POTUS stayed at Onyango’s apartment in Cambridge in the 1980s while Barack attended Harvard Law. Obama has previously denied ever having even met Omar. But the Kenyan’s landlord corroborated under oath Barack Sr.’s brother’s testimony. The White House, as is its wont these days, isn’t commenting.
Now, as a devotee of the aforementioned William of Ockham (“the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected”), I tend to believe, in fact I almost certainly believe, Obama’s father’s brother and his landlord, not the president. It makes little sense that Obama as a young Harvard grad student would not at least have looked up his father’s brother, when they were living in the same town for three years. Indeed, it makes good sense that he might have crashed on Omar’s couch for a few days or weeks while looking for an apartment. Many, if not most, of us have done something similar.
Furthermore, although there might be some incentive for Omar to lie about his relationship with the president to curry favor with the judge, what incentive would his landlord have had? To be indicted for perjuring himself? No wonder the White House is silent.
Around Obama there is an unprecedented silence, almost a media omertà. So much remains unknown about this man, although we do know, through the debate surrounding David Maraniss’s failed and tentative biography, that the president lied about his personal history on multiple occasions in his autobiography Dreams from My Father.
Of course, Bill Ayers — the semi-retired terrorist — has claimed on similarly multiple occasions that he was the true author of Dreams, which would make it a lie about a lie about a lie or something like that. The permutations of this are mindboggling.
Which leads me back to Jerome Corsi. A few years ago, in Chicago for a conference, I was introduced to the author-presidential gadfly who had rented a limo for the day to tour Obama and Obama-related real estate properties in that city’s Hyde Park district. He asked me to come along and, never one to refuse a free invitation, I went, but although I found Corsi personally engaging, I kept thinking quietly that the man was cracked.
No longer. Years and a multiplicity of deceptions later, I think what Corsi said and says is mostly (as in more than fifty percent) true.
That doesn’t mean I believe that Obama was born in Kenya. I remain unconvinced of that. And I don’t even much care if he was. I would vote in a heartbeat for a foreign born person if I thought he or she were the best candidate, assuming it was all legal and public, which in this case it wouldn’t have been, but you get my point.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the serial lies about Obamacare, Benghazi, the IRS, Fast and Furious, media surveillance, the NSA, Syria, Iran, etc., etc., I’m now prepared to believe many things of which I might initially have been at least somewhat skeptical.
To put it bluntly, Occam’s Razor has moved. Things that were once possibilities now seem almost certainties to me.
Principal among those is that Obama’s academic records are perpetually unavailable for a reason — and that reason is most likely that they reveal he received financial preferences, scholarships and/or loans, as a foreign student. They probably also reveal academic mediocrity, but that’s par for the course for many of our politicians (except it becomes embarrassing in Obama’s case where he has the reputation of being brilliant).
But that’s only one area of accusation. What if they were all true — or, if not all, say thirty, forty or even fifty percent? What if this were actually demonstrated while he was still in office to the degree that the standard spin that all politician lie no longer applied? What if we could prove that it had gone well beyond that, beyond Nixon and Clinton far into the realm of an invented man? What would that mean, exactly? Should his opponents rejoice? Would a new era and truth, beauty and prosperity be upon us?
Not likely. Great damage has been done. Consider for a moment that whatever theories we have about Obama, whatever prevarications and deceptions of which we are aware or unaware, are known equally to our adversaries — the intelligence agencies of China, Russia and Iran. Even if they were too dumb to figure it out for themselves, which they’re not, they read our newspapers and blogs.
These totalitarian — or near totalitarian, depending on how you want to parse it — states depend on lies for their existence. In Obama they have found a partner in crime, a semblable, as Baudelaire would say. They are currently exploiting this. In all likelihood our world will never be the same. This is no cause for celebration by any American.
UPDATE: According to the Boston Globe, as of today Thursday, Obama now acknowledges having lived with his uncle.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member