Obama: I Was 'Born In Kenya'

[The Mad Monk]

There's a rather large gulf between "legendary" and "Kenyan".

[Wiglaf]

There's a rather large gulf between "legendary" and "Kenyan".

Lots of people are pretty narcissistic, including our current President.

These are good observations. Do you really think Obama didn't write --- or even READ --- his own biography on the book for ten years?

[giblets]

These are good observations. Do you really think Obama didn't write --- or even READ --- his own biography on the book for ten years?

Why assume he read a booklet that was distributed to business colleagues just because it mentions him? You're assuming he's a narcissist and then using that to conclude he's a liar. You have no objectivity.

[The Mad Monk]

Why would it be narcessistic to check on what your own PR people are writing about you?

Not doing that would be sloppy, if not unprofessional.

Public figures live and die on their PR.

[Guynemer]

This whole thread is a hoot.

[The Mad Monk]

Guy, as totally noninterested bystander, let me ask:

Would you wife review things like this, or just assume everything is hunky-dory?

I know my brother would be all over this, but YMMV.

[Guynemer]

#1: The publishing industry is bursting at the seams with incompetents, morons, and fools.

#2: My wife is... well, a little more OCD than the average person. She would definitely catch this. If it were me, would I catch it? Probably not.

[Wiglaf]

#1: The publishing industry is bursting at the seams with incompetents, morons, and fools.

#2: My wife is... well, a little more OCD than the average person. She would definitely catch this. If it were me, would I catch it? Probably not.

What? This isn't a small typo that you "catch." It is a book ABOUT race. To argue about catching an innocent typo is one thing. This is a major "mistake" that goes to the core of the books purpose. Coincidental? Come on.

Sent from my iPhone

[Guynemer]

I'm under the impression that this was for a potential book that wasn't written; is that not the case?

[Wiglaf]

You've got the guys wife saying he's from Kenya. His own bio said it for years. Either this elite publishing house fabricated Obama's birthplace, disregarding the bio Obama himself submitted to them, or the president wanted to play up his life story --- as his wife did --- to seem more compelling. Not hard people.

It was a blurb for a book that became Dreams from my Father.

[giblets]

If Obama wanted to fabricate his life story he would have claimed to be born in Kenya in Dreams from My Father.

[Wiglaf]

DFMF was released as he began his political career. The blurb was written for a memoir prior to his political ambitions, a memoir that probably did make that claim.

[giblets]

You claimed earlier that he wanted to be born in Kenya until he read the Constitution in 2007. Liar. :rollleyes:

[Wiglaf]

I suspect what happened is, Obama wanted to appear Kenyan-born until 1995, when his political ambitions kicked in. Lying wholesale in a book, or in his biography, struck him as a poor idea at that point, presumably because he had given the Constitution a cursory glance while at Harvard Law School. So his initial book was scrapped (probably because it mentioned his Kenyan birth in both the book cover and book text) and gave way to Dreams from my Father, which excised all mentions of the Kenyan birth. Obama failed to notify the publisher to change the Kenya line until 2007, when he and his publisher probably re-read the Constitution.

Sent from my New iPad
Drafted on my iPhone

[Wiglaf]

From the brilliant Jim Treacher:

Yesterday, Big Government reported that back in 1991, Obama’s literary agency, Acton & Dystel, put out a bio claiming he was born in Kenya.

Which is weird, because as all reasonable people know by now, Obama was born in Hawaii.

And of course, the left’s reaction has been predictable: “Hurr, hurr, Birthers, derp derp!” Because apparently, sometime within the last 24 hours, “Birther” has been redefined to mean “somebody who believes Obama wasn’t born in Kenya.” The word “Birther” means whatever lefties need it to mean, at the moment they need it to mean that. Just like every other word in every other language.

Unless you’re a credulous rube, it sure does look like Obama told his literary agency that he was born in Kenya for some reason. And the false information wasn’t corrected until April 2007, a couple of months after he launched his presidential campaign.

“But wait,” you protest. “How do you know Obama wrote that? How do you know he ever even saw it? Shut up!” Well, we all know that Obama is the exception to every rule, so maybe he’s the exception to this one too. Author and television producer Steve Boman writes at Breitbart.com about his own mid-’90s working relationship with literary agent Miriam Goderich, the woman who now claims the “born in Kenya” misinformation was somehow a “fact-checking error”:

Now let me say right up front: when it comes to Obama, I’m not going to speculate who wrote what, when. Dystel had assistants, one of whom is now her partner, Miriam Goderich, who says the whole Obama-born-in-Kenya thing was a fact-checking mistake by her. And I cannot speak specifically to the mechanism of Dystel’s publicity. (Alas, Dystel was unable to sell anything I wrote, so she had no reason to promote me, but I’m getting ahead of myself.)

I can speak of what she was like to work with and how she generated material. In my dealings with Dystel, I found her exceptionally thorough and very professional. She had a template she wanted non-fiction writers to follow, and my writing partner and I followed her template closely. She was rather fastidious, going so far as to mail a personal “Season’s Greetings” card in December.

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.

Lefties, I will now pause while you go look up “third person.”

…

Got it? Okay.

So, either Obama wrote his own bio, as Boman was required to, or he didn’t. If he did, why did he claim he was born in Kenya, when we all know he was actually born in Hawaii?

If Obama didn’t write that, for whatever reason, who did? Why did that person think Obama was born in Kenya? In what possible sense is botching a client’s birthplace by 10,000 miles a “fact-checking error”? And why did Obama let it slide for 16 years, until he decided to run for president?

I suppose it’s possible that Obama told the truth and wrote “born in Hawaii,” but then this fact-checker changed it to “Kenya.” If that’s what happened, why did it happen?

And is there a particular reason I’m not supposed to ask any of these things?



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