Posted: April 14, 2011
1:00 am Eastern
© 2011
Word to Donald Trump: Nothing scares our Lilliputian media like facts. Each fact you present makes them rethink their petty little mission to whittle you down to size.
When asked why you don't take President Obama's word that he was born in America, simply reply, "Why should I? The story he has been telling America about the first two years of his life is provably and profoundly untrue."
This will sting. The Lilliputians have invested great emotional equity in what Obama-friendly biographer David Remnick calls his "signature appeal: the use of the details of his own life as a reflection of a kind of multicultural ideal."
From the beginning, Team Obama has worked hard to protect the investment. This has meant shielding the world from all salient documentation about Obama's life, his long-form birth certificate included.
In the last few years, Obama's nativity story has been told almost as often as Jesus' but with nowhere near the accuracy. Obama led with it in his 2004 convention speech and repeated it in the first sentence of his 2008 speech.
Jack Cashill's literary investigation uncovers revelations galore about Obama's alleged life narrative. Order the new book "Deconstructing Obama: The Life, Love and Letters of America's First Post-Modern President"
As Obama told the story in 2004, his father had grown up in Kenya "herding goats." His mother he traced to Kansas, as he always did. "My parents shared not only an improbable love," Obama continued, "they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation."
Obama refined his story for a critical speech in Selma, Ala., in March 2007, a speech that would define his presidential campaign.
"Something happened back here in Selma, Alabama," said Obama. This something "sent a shout across the ocean," which inspired the Barack Sr., still "herding goats" back in Kenya, to "set his sights a little higher."
This same something also "worried folks in the White House" to the point that the "the Kennedys decided we're going to do an air lift."
Something about Selma apparently inspired Obama to manufacture facts more flagrantly than usual. For starters, herding goats in his father's town was like delivering newspapers in an American one. Everyone did it as a kid.
Obama Sr. grew up speaking English and attending Christian schools. He was working as a clerk in Nairobi, not a goatherd in "Obama Land," when he applied for the first airlift in 1959. The Republican Eisenhower, not the Democrat Kennedy, was the president when he came to the United States.
Although born in Kansas, Stanley Ann Dunham (Ann), Obama's mother, was not exactly Dorothy. She spent her formative years in the Seattle area where she earned the nickname "Anarchist Annie" under the tutelage of her hipster teachers.
Selma had nothing to do with Obama's birth in any case. He was conceived four years before anyone outside of Alabama ever heard of the town.
The problems, of course, go deeper. According to divorce papers filed in 1964, Barack Sr. and Ann Dunham married in Wailuku, Maui, on Feb. 2, 1961.
One has to wonder, however, whether it was a marriage in anything but name or whether there was a marriage at all. In "Dreams from My Father," Obama says, "In fact, how and when the marriage occurred remains a bit murky, a bill of particulars that I've never quite had the courage to explore."
No family or friend attended a wedding. In fact, no one in Barack Sr.'s clique seemed to know there was a relationship, let alone a wedding. Clique member Pake Zane could not recall Ann at all.
When current Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie and Zane visited their friend in Nairobi in 1968, Barack Sr. shocked them by never once inquiring about his presumed wife and 6-year-old son.
The facts get more problematic still. After the birth of baby Barry in August 1961, Ann left for Seattle as soon as the doctors cleared her to travel. Once there, she enrolled at the University of Washington. Barack Sr. stayed behind in Hawaii.
The apolitical Washington state historical blog, HistoryLink, now confirms Ann's presence in the fall of 1961, identifies her Capitol Hill apartment in Seattle, names the courses she took, and documents an extended stay by Ann and little Barry into the summer of 1962.
If that is not proof enough, the 1961-1962 Polk Directory confirms an "Obama Anna Mrs studt" at the Capitol Hill address.
Somehow, this information escaped the four book-length biographies I consulted (including one by the New York Times), the official campaign biography and Obama himself in "Dreams."
By the time mom and son returned to Hawaii in the summer of 1962, Barack Sr. had long since left for Harvard. There was no Obama family, never was, no "abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation" save on the teleprompters at the 2004 convention.
Obama knew all of this when he gave his televised Big-Brotherly talk to America's coerced schoolchildren in September. It did not stop him from dissembling.
"I get it," he told the kiddies. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was 2 years old, and I was raised by a single mother." Does it get lower?
To be sure, Obama's mother and grandparents created the "Barack Obama" legend not to groom a future president but to give a fatherless biracial kid an identity.
The legend does not withstand scrutiny. Those who have read my book "Deconstructing Obama" know that there is good reason to doubt the very paternity of Barack Obama Sr.
As to the transformation of legend into official story, I believe that it was Bill Ayers who imposed a consciously Homeric structure – the search for the father – on "Dreams" when he took over the book project from the floundering Obama.
I believe, too, that when Obama hooked up with campaign guru David Axelrod in his 2004 race for the U.S. Senate, it was Axelrod who hardened the story into a marketing strategy.
From then on, Obama was stuck with the story, truth be damned. Until Donald Trump entered the scene, he was surely confident that he had gotten away with it.
And now here is "The Donald," blowing the cover not only on his origins, but also on the authorship of "Dreams."
The Lilliputians have their work cut out for them.
No comments:
Post a Comment