Doug Ross has put the “Wayback Machine Internet Archive” to good use and discovered that the Dystel agency is almost certainly lying about the origins of the section in Barack Obama’s author bio claiming that he was “born in Kenya.”
When the bizarre fact was uncovered earlier this week, agent Miriam Goderich furiously backpedaled and stated that the Kenyan birth claim was simply a “fact-checking error.” Luckily, such an error could be corrected in the next edition. Whew!
Except, well, it wasn’t. As Doug Ross carefully documents, Obama (or at least his ghostwriters) repeatedly edited the biographical sketch for 17 years, altering many significant details, and in all that time, the line “born in Kenya” remained intact. That is, until, by sheer coincidence, in the spring of 2007 when Obama declared his run for the presidency, at which point the entry was suddently changed to read that he was born in Hawaii.
As Ross says,
Sometime between April 3rd and April 21st, a member of the Obama campaign staff (or Obama himself) noticed the discrepancy in birthplace that would presumably disqualify the Senator from office.
The immutability of the bio’s “born in Kenya” claim despite numerous edits has been noted by others already, but Ross’s post is the first time that it has been clearly documented with irrefutable screenshots and links.
I’m no birther (I’m convinced Obama was in fact born in Hawaii), but I think this scandal is significant anyway, because it proves that Obama lied about his heritage to give himself more “exotic” origins, in order to score more PC Points.
Bookworm Room has come up with a very interesting theory that Obama was relying on Affirmative Action policies to get into a California college, but the 1978 Bakke Decision ruined his plans, so to get around the new ban on Affirmative Action he concocted an identity as a foreign-born student, which would have given him a leg-up into California colleges, even after Bakke came into effect. He may have lied on his college application that he was born in Kenya, and once that worked, he realized that a foreign birth was the ticket to ever more privileges throughout his academic career, so he kept the lie going — that is, until the day he decided to run for president, when he realized the lie would disqualify him for office.
(Also see Roger Simon’s The Mystery of the Kenyan Birth.)
The scandal is not that Obama was actually born in Kenya, but rather that he lied for his entire adult life about being born in Kenya, for personal gain.
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