“Do you know what your problem is?” asked Barack Obama rhetorically of erstwhile “uncle” Reverend Jeremiah Wright; “You have to tell the truth.” This exchange was related to Edward Klein, author of the newly published Obama exposé Amateur, in an interview that Wright granted the writer. The reverend’s response to the President was, “That’s a good problem to have.”
Unfortunately, it’s clearly not a problem Barack Obama has.
The latest story evidencing this is the shocking revelation that Obama’s literary firm billed him as having been “born in Kenya” in promotional material issued in 1991. Joel Pollak broke the story at Breitbart.com, writing:
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.
Now, understand that Acton & Dystel is no rag-tag outfit. The promotional literature literally cost tens of thousands of dollars to produce and is a polished, finely crafted volume. Nonetheless, the individual who helped edit the booklet, Miriam Goderich, has come forward to say that the claim about Obama was merely a “mistake.” Breitbart published her statement:
You’re undoubtedly aware of the brouhaha stirred up by Breitbart about the erroneous statement in a client list Acton & Dystel published in 1991 (for circulation within the publishing industry only) that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me — an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more.
It’s always nice when someone falls on his sword for you, but Goderich’s explanation just doesn’t ring true. As Breitbart also writes:
Goderich’s statement fails to explain why the “fact checking error” persisted for 16 years, through at least three different versions of Jane Dystel’s website, and through at least four different versions of Obama’s biography.
It persisted, in fact, more than two years after Obama became a United States Senator, and until after Obama had declared his campaign for the presidency in 2007.
So did this “error” escape Obama’s notice for those 16 long years? Was a young, 20-something budding author really so incurious about his own very flattering promotional material that he didn’t take a look at it even once? In reality, states founder of Acton & Dystel Edward J. Acton, Obama likely saw it before it was even published. Reports Pollak, “He [Acton] indicated that while ‘almost nobody’ wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom ‘the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,’ were ‘probably’ approached to approve the text as presented.”
Whether or not Obama had to approve the text, however, one thing is certain: He almost definitely provided the information about his birth to the firm in the first place. As Thomas Lifson at American Thinker deduces, “There is no plausible explanation of how the literary agency came to believe Obama was born in Kenya, other than that Obama told that to his agency. They could not make a mistake ‘fact checking’ without an initial fact to check. Only Obama could have supplied such information.”
Precisely. And this is why, regardless of what the truth about Obama’s past is, the President cannot emerge from this with clean hands. Either he actually was born in Kenya, in which case he was lying all along, or he fed his publisher misinformation for personal gain.
In which case he was lying all along.
There are no other plausible possibilities.
For the record, my belief is that Obama was born in Hawaii and that other explanations account for his confusing and contradictory personal narrative. As to the Acton promotional literature, it wouldn’t at all be surprising if he played the exotic/race/foreigner card to exploit affirmative-action benefits to the fullest. (This is what Massachusetts Senate hopeful Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren did in claiming that she was Cherokee when she wanted to advance in academia.) Remember that when Obama came of age, affirmative action was in full swing, and he certainly had the skids greased for him his whole life. I very much doubt he completely earned anything of what he supposedly achieved, least of all the presidency, which he ascended to partially because of cultural affirmative action: Many Americans were just itching to prove their non-bigot bona fides and elect the first black President. The question is, however, is Obama guilty of any kind of actionable fraud for having possibly benefited himself through misrepresentation?
Whatever the case, the Acton promotional literature serves, in the least, as yet another reminder that the Obama birth-certificate matter needs to be investigated fully. Why do I say this if I believe he’s likely natural-born?
Because the evidence is now overwhelming that the President is hiding something.
Moreover, as explained superbly here and here, there is now no question that the image of the certificate of live birth that the administration posted online has been doctored. I urge you to read the linked articles — I think you’ll find them very compelling.
Also compelling was what I considered to be the tipping point in the birth-certificate story: the findings of Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s “Cold Case Posse.” As I wrote in March:
[With these findings] an incredible claim has become an incredible situation: a team of professional investigators, commissioned by a major law-enforcement agency, has determined that the alleged birth certificate produced by the president of the United States is a probable forgery.
Process that for a moment. The regime of the world’s most powerful nation — a republic that prides itself on adherence to the rule of law – is likely peddling a forged document. What say you, citizen?
… And I will spell out the possibilities here:
1. The Arizona investigators are correct.
2. They are mistaken.
3. They are lying.
… [T]he answer may be number one or two, and it’s incumbent upon us to find out through further investigation. And, for those who dislike Sheriff Arpaio, what if the answer is three? Well, if a major law-enforcement agency is producing fraudulent evidence for the purposes of damaging a sitting president, wouldn’t that warrant investigation, too?
For sure, somebody is guilty of fraud here. And I strongly suspect it just may be a guy who thinks telling the truth is a problem.
