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Thursday, May 17, 2012

I Think This May Cause Some Problems For Obama...

Back in 1991, a literary agent was trying to find a publisher for Obama's first book, Journeys in Black and White, which never quite happened.  The bio that Obama's literary agent included in his attempt to sell the book describes Obama this way:
Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.
You can see the image of the blurb over at Breitbart.com--which has never bought into the birther stuff, and has you might expect, finds this rather shocking.  It's possible that the literary agent was just trying to make Obama a bit more exotic to sell a book.   But isn't it interesting that this inaccurate statement matches up with all the crazy birther claims?

UPDATE: While I think World Net Daily should always be taken a a bag of salt (not a grain), they have gathered up a number of items that refer to Obama as born in Kenya: press releases from the Kenyan government; Kenyan Parliamentary debates; newspaper accounts from when he was assured of election to the U.S. Senate (and having an African-born U.S. Senator was a big deal) and after he was elected President.

As I said, everyone knows that he was born in Hawaii...except, apparently, his literary agent, and people in the Kenyan government.
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5 comments:

  1. AnonymousMay 20, 2012 at 12:59 PM

    I have no doubt Obama wrote his bio blurb himself.

    But as we know, Obama has a tendency to lie, about himself, and to himself, as well as everyone else.

    ReplyDelete
  2. PawpawMay 21, 2012 at 5:04 AM

    I'd love to ask this question at a POTUS press conference: "Where did your literary agent get the idea that you were born in Kenya?"

    ReplyDelete
  3. asdfMay 21, 2012 at 6:57 AM

    But aren't you losing sight of the point, Clayton? His mother was American, so he is too. Doesn't matter where he was born. John McCain wasn't born in the US either. I know there are complications -- was the mother out of the country for a long time, was she over 18, etc. But this is starting to look like a distraction.

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  4. Clayton CramerMay 21, 2012 at 3:27 PM

    Actually, Obama mother being a U.S. citizen, under the bizarre citizenship laws of the time, would not necessarily be enough to make him a citizen if born abroad. (McCain was born in the Canal Zone, to two U.S. citizens. Not a problem.)

    The bigger question is whether there is a dishonesty problem. Did he claim to be a foreign born student to get scholarships or preference? That would be fraud, and somewhat relevant.

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  5. CargosquidMay 22, 2012 at 11:59 AM

    If his father was Kenyan, at the time, that made him a citizen of England. Dual citizenship disallows eligibility for presidency. And that's before any complications due to possible adoption by Soetero.

    It's a mess.

    ReplyDelete