Birthers owed apology?

billc

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Well, I was never one who believed that obama was born in Kenya. He may have been, but it didn't really matter because his mother is a citizen. There were people, laughed at as "birthers" because they wanted obama to show his birth certificate, much the way John McCain did because McCain was born in the Panama Canal zone. Well, it turns out that obama may be the very first "birther."

According to Breitbart.com, which is another reason they hate Breitbart, obama tried to get his first book published in 1991. This wasn't one of the two that became best sellers, but a different one. The literary agent he used had their authors write a 3-5 sentence biography about themselves, so the agent could use that to try to sell the book idea. Barak Hussein Obama, in his biography, written by himself and submitted to the literary agent...stated that he was born in Kenya.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...nt-1991-Born-in-Kenya-Raised-Indonesia-Hawaii

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."
The booklet, which was distributed to "business colleagues" in the publishing industry, includes a brief biography of Obama among the biographies of eighty-nine other authors represented by Acton & Dystel.
It also promotes Obama's anticipated first book, Journeys in Black and White--which Obama abandoned, later publishingDreams from My Father instead.
Obama’s biography in the booklet is as follows (image and text below):
Obama-Column.png
Before people go to the current explanation, that it was a fact checking error, here are two articles that explore this topic, from two authors, one of whom used the same literary agent, the same year as obama.

First from the author who used the same literary agent and submitted, by request, his own 3-5 sentence biography...

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Govern...on-guidelines-obama-kenya-fact-checking-error

All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner. She edited our rough-draft proposals and gave us feedback, but the final versions were all ours. Our final versions, bio included, were then simply photo-copied, by us, and distributed to potential publishers. This was back in the pre-Google days, recall.
I was asked to write the bio in the third person.

The next article is from another author, Roger L. Simon, and he addresses the issue of where the biographical material may have come from...

http://pjmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2012/05/18/the-mystery-of-the-kenyan-birth/
I will leave aside for the moment the question of whether he vetted the agent’s material himself. As the author of eleven published books and seven produced feature films, I have had plenty of dealings with agents and publicity people and always looked over the bios they had written about me. Every author I ever talked to about it always did too. We’re those kind of egotists. But I have no way of proving that Obama did — although I would faint if he hadn’t.
But whatever he did, the question remains. Why did they put “Born in Kenya” in his bio and leave it there until 2007? The latter part of that question can of course be ascribed to normal human sloth, but the first part — there’s the rub.
Here are the explanations I can think of:

  1. Obama told them.
  2. It was in some early draft of Obama’s abandoned book (Journeys in Black and White) he submitted to them.
  3. Obama wrote it in his book proposal to them.
  4. Obama told them in a query letter.
  5. Obama answered one of those biographical forms.
  6. … Well, I’m running out because they all amount to the same thing.
There is one other possibility. The agents simply made up the place of Obama’s birth, but I have never in all my life heard of a literary agent doing such a thing. It’s possible I suppose, but hardly likely. And why?
[/QUOTE
Anyway, per Occam’s Razor, I am going with the obvious — the agent’s source for Obama’s birthplace was… Barack Obama.

But again why? Why would he lie about where he was born?

So, what do you do with information like this? True, it doesn't change the fact that the man is a U.S. citizen and is legally allowed to be the President of the United States. What does it say about Obama as a man and as someone who sat around for months and allowed his minions to go out and make fun of and attack people who wanted to see his birth certificate? Is this a "nice guy?" Is this man a liar? Now many will say that he is a politician and therefore a professional liar. However, this was obama before he was anyone. This is a man trying to sell a book and a man who lied about his background to get the book sold. It is one more small item that reveals the character of obama. I believe the saying goes "Character is how you act when no one is looking." Well no one was looking and this is how he acted.

(not to mention the underage drinking, pot and cocaine use, and the associations with a convicted domestic terrorist bomber, a convicted felon who helped him buy his current home, an unrepentant domestic terrorist bomber good friend, an international terrorist group spokesman friend....the list goes on and on...)
 
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billc

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From Roger L. Simon on why obama may have lied about where he was born...

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?
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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.
But I could be wrong. After all, I am only a mystery writer and, worse yet, a screenwriter. The professional investigative journalists at The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times will no doubt dig deep and give us the true explanation.
 

ballen0351

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Look all that matters is Romney was mean in high school. Get it right
 

Sukerkin

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Contemplated giving some grief, then decided that the thought that would take to do it creatively without losing decorum was more minutes than I was willing to spare.

Here's ten pounds ... you win ...
 

Makalakumu

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Another conspiracy theory bites the dust...lol!
 
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billc

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Some more thoughts on this odd bit of obama behavior...

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog...rn_in_hawaii_before_he_was_born_in_kenya.html

Thomas Lifson has already made the definitive statement (here) as to the absurdity of the claim that a literary agent's [COLOR=#009900 !important]brochure[/COLOR] listed Barack Obama's birthplace as Kenya -- for sixteen years -- due to a "fact checking error" by bio editor Miriam Goderich. And it has been widely noted by those with far more experience in the publishing industry than I that such an author's biography would never be written without the involvement of the author or his official representative at some stage of the process.
Yet there is another peculiarity about this mysterious Kenyan birth "mistake" that seems worthy of notice. The brochure in [COLOR=#009900 !important]question[/COLOR] first appeared in 1991. At this time, Obama was merely a prospective author. He had not yet written a book, and, as is well known, he had never published any academic work or articles of note.
His only real claim to significance, at that time, was his being the president of the Harvard Law Review. And this accomplishment, in fact, forms the lead sentence of the infamous bio:
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.
This bio was written just one year after Obama was elected to the Harvard position. Upon his election, both the New York Times and the LA Times ran articles announcing this first of Obama's now endless series of "historic" achievements.
In the NYT article, published February 6, 1990, after a brief account of his parentage, we read this simple sentence: "Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii."
In the LA Times article, published March 19, 1990, we read this: "Born in Hawaii, where his parents met in college, Obama was named Barack (blessed in Arabic) after his father."
The two highest-circulation metropolitan newspapers in the U.S. explicitly claimed that Obama was born in Hawaii, a year before the Acton & Dystel bio was written. And those two earlier articles, like the literary agency's bio, were focused on Obama's position at Harvard Law Review. Where did the NYT and LA Times reporters (Fox Butterfield and Tammerlin Drummond, respectively) get their information about Obama's birthplace? Presumably, it was either from Obama himself, or from Harvard records. The former seems far more likely, given the parental details included in both articles.
So it seems that Obama was clearly representing himself as born in the U.S.A. in 1990, one year before the Acton and Dystel bio.

This bio in no way proves that Obama was born in Kenya, particularly in light of the two [COLOR=#009900 !important]newspaper articles[/COLOR] from a year earlier which describe him as having been born in Hawaii. What it does suggest, as others have observed, is that this man and his promoters have a long history of playing cat-and-mouse games with Truth. And not just regarding nebulous little matters like job creation or how we are to understand clause 7b on page 2,328 of some piece of legislation, but rather with regard to basic facts about who he is.
To be a flip-flopper on gay marriage or single-payer healthcare is politics as usual in the modern age. To be a flip-flopper on your basic identity or your past associations, on the other hand -- this is something new in presidential politics. Something historic, in fact.

 

Big Don

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That he used supposedly being born in Kenya to further his goals, really shouldn't surprise anyone.

I, for one, don't give a crap where he was born, the damage he's caused the economy, the military, foreign and domestic policies, are enough reason to dislike him.

 

Sukerkin

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He really hasn't damaged the American economy, Don, truly. It not only wan't his problem in the first place but also he's not been allowed to make much in the way of policy changes so far. As I've said before, any incoming government is largely saddled with administering the changes the previous government set in motion. Add to that there is a global financial coordination going on to 'stage' the First World economies through the slump (spread the pain out so to speak) and that has even more closely confined any freedom for manoeuvre Obama has had.

Your economic pain hasn't even started yet as it's been held off, deliberately, by not pandering to the pressure to start dealing with the deficit (let alone the underlying debt), thus keeping demand high enough to stop a severe crash. I have heard that what is called "structural" reform of the budget will not begin for at least another year or so. So batten down the hatches, there's a storm coming ... as the little Mexican kid in Terminator once said :D.
 

Makalakumu

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The political battles of the next 20 years will revolve around who gets stuck with the Old Maid. Lets hope it doesn't get settled with war...

That said, I don't know if Obama was born in Kenya. I know his wife has said he was born in Kenya a couple of times and everything has been dissembled to death. Who ****ing knows and really who cares where he was born. The first line in my post is the most important thing that people should focus on. This is a distraction...and it's instructive. The government is lying to us about everything. We don't even know where the President was born. We don't know if the medicine our doctors are giving us is safe. We don't know if the food we are eating is safe. The government is lying about Everything. Everything down to the very basic things required for survival. **** is so corrupt that the smell has become normal.

So, based on this, here's my advice. Don't trust a ****ing thing they say. Not about the wars, not about the terrorists, not about the machines they irradiate our children with, not about torture, not about who's going to be indefinitely detained, and especially not about what they are spending our money on. You don't ****ing know ****. You don't even know where the President was born.
 

Makalakumu

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Not until Monsanto and ConAgra make it illegal for us to grow our own food and treat ourselves.....the day's coming, though.



Sho'nuff.

And a sign post of the general blindness that will allow this to occur is the fact that don't even know where the President was born.
 
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