Was Obama Just Pretending to Have Been Born in Kenya?

Everyone agrees that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Everyone agrees that the best place to end the Obama presidency is at the ballot box, not in the courts.

Most sensible political commentators agree that rehashing Obama’s past history is not a winning election strategy. The story has already been done to death. Everyone who cares knows all of the details. It will be better to run an election campaign on the issues.

Here, I demur. Wasn’t that the reasoning that led John McCain to ignominious defeat in the 2008 election?

You and I and everyone else knows that if a Republican candidate had been caught telling an egregious lie about his country of birth the media would be up in arms about the issue. A myriad of experts, from fields as diverse as public policy ethics and mental health, would flood the airways with comments about how nothing is more important than a candidate’s character and that the American people have every right to judge a candidate’s character.

For once they would be making an important point. People have a right to know if their president is a fraud. They have a right to know whether he can be trusted. They have a right to know whether they are electing someone who is who he says he is.

It is also fair to say that most people have heard the stories so many times that they now tune them out. Yet, no one really knows when the public mind reaches a tipping point where information that had been floating around suddenly crystallizes and becomes relevant.

Savvy political commentators do not want to touch the birther issue. It makes them look unserious. Everyone knows that two Honolulu newspapers announced Obama’s birth when it occurred, so, people who think he was born in Kenya are facing a very steep challenge.

Let us stipulate that Obama was born in Hawaii. Let us take him at his word.

If so, how do you explain that in 1991 his literary agents published a brochure in which they stated that he had been born in Kenya? And how do you explain that the agency continued to make the claim until 2007?

Writing for the Breitbart organization Ben Shapiro has uncovered the 1991 statement:

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.

Yesterday, Obama’s agent issued a statement taking responsibility for the error. When she was writing the promotional material she claims to have made a “fact-checking” error.

How, pray tell, did she go about checking the facts? Wouldn’t the best and only sensible approach have been to ask the man himself?

Roger Simon offers a list of the possible explanations for the “fact-checking” error:

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.

Now, the agent wants us to believe that Obama never saw the brochure and was never questioned about it by anyone who did see it. She wants us to believe that for 16 years no one noticed the fact-checking error.

Here, we do not need a conspiracy theory. We do not need to evoke birther theories. The continued presence of the error in the agency’s promotional material tells us that Obama seems not to have been bothered by the misrepresentation. If we are to believe Roger Simon, he might very well have gained some advantage from it.

It may not be necessary to repeat it, but it is good that Simon reminds us of the mainstream media’s dereliction in the matter of investigating Barack Obama’s past.

It has shown no interest in Obama’s college or law school transcripts. The Los Angeles Times has even colluded with the Obama campaign by refusing to release a tape of Obama’s oration at a farewell dinner for Palestinian activist and Obama friend, Rashid Khalidi.

If there is nothing to hide, why hide it?

The story of the corrupting of the American media has just begun to be told.

For his and his wife’s part, Simon wonders what might be worth hiding in the Obama transcripts.

Perhaps, the media wants to hide Obama’s mediocre grades. If so, then the evidence would undermine the media narrative that makes Obama the smartest guy in the country… even the world.

I grant that hypothesis slightly more credence than Simon does.

Simon’s other explanation does seem more cogent. Obama applied to college as a native-born Kenyan because he wanted to game the system and gain an unfair advantage.

In Simon’s words:

My wife Sheryl and I … 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?

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.)

Enrolling as a Kenyan does not make you a Kenyan. It makes you a fraud. In roughly the same way, trying to pass as 1/32 Cherokee makes you a fraud, someone who is trying to game the system.

Anyone who has been paying close attention knows that there is a chasm between what Obama said he would do and what he actually did as president.

Karl Rove’s Crossroads group has been playing ads showing the gross disparity between what Obama promised and what he delivered.

Still, the information has been readily available for quite some time now. Perhaps the false claim to be Kenyan will finally cause it to register.