This is the 1,985th post on BoWilliams.com. It appears roughly halfway through my blog’s sixth year in existence. It contains my blog’s first ever occurrence of “Kenya,” and only its fifth of “Hawaii.”
I trust this is sufficient testimony to my general lack of interest in questioning Barack Obama’s birthplace. My position has always been that there’s plenty enough wrong with the guy without going there. We don’t need to root through dumpsters in back alleys when we can read the billboards on the interstate.
So last week Breitbart, with a similar we’re-not-birthers disclaimer, ran a story describing a biography of Barack Obama published by his literary agency in 1991. The biography begins:
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.
Obama’s literary agent, Miriam Goderich, describes how this happened:
This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me.
The “error” was eventually corrected—in 2007. It was just a pesky little mistake that persisted for 16 years—right up until, oh, about the time Mr. Obama ran for president. See, it got kind of inconvenient then.
Now this shall certainly inflame the passions of those already inclined to believe our president is illegitimate because he was not born in the United States. This is a solid piece that seems to confirm that premise, the authenticity of which has been denied by no one.
My take on it is that I still really rather doubt Barack Obama was born overseas. However, I do find this biography eminently consistent with the way he operates. You see, in 1991, it was very cool for Obama to have been born in Kenya, so he was. He’s all things to all people. What do you need from me? What do you want to hear? Well, that’s who I am, that guy you’re looking for. Who is he again? Kenyan? Yeah, that’s me. See? It says so right here in my bio.
We all present different sides, to different people, in different circumstances. When you’re looking for conversation on a first date, you don’t lead with the zit in the middle of your back you can’t quite reach. But, gee, that’s not quite the same as a manufactured birthplace, is it?
(And don’t try to tell me Barack Obama never read it. In 1991, Obama would have read, at least ten times, anything in print in which his name appeared. He’d do it now, were it practical.)
So, my dear Obama supporters: can you write a plausible narrative through this that exonerates your hero? How do you think Obama’s birthplace came to be identified as Kenya? How did it continue as such for 16 years? Is this really a simple “fact-checking error”?
Are you nodding, saying “of course it is,” and still feeling the hope and change?
Is there any sand in the Astroglide for you yet?