What an Odd President We Have

Earlier today, as pretty much everybody knows, Breitbart.com reported that in 1991 the literary agent for President Obama produced a promotional booklet for its authors. The President's bio read:

"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. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White."

ABC News then reported on the story, and spoke with Miriam Goderich:

"Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.

'This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time,' Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. '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.'"

That's fair enough, but it begs the question: where did the facts that needed to be checked come from? Did Goderich just make them up? It is difficult to believe that a junior staffer would do so. And why did it take 16 years to rectify the mistake?--the ABC article closes with the paragraph:

"In a follow-up post, Breitbart.com noted that Obama was listed as being born in Kenya on the Dyster & Goderich website until April 2007, "just two months after then-Senator Obama declared his campaign for the presidency."

What an odd situation. As a writer in the UK Telegraph said, this isn't "birtherism," it's the opposite of "birtherism". It's not somebody saying President Obama was born somewhere else and pretended to be born in America, it's somebody saying President Obama wasn't born in America and pretending that he was born somewhere else! And its not his enemies, but his friends, or at least business associates who are saying this.

I personally think that the people Obama hangs out with thought that his being born in Kenya (instead of the boring old U. S. of A.) gives him extra cachet. I think they thought this would help them sell Obama to their audience. What a crew.

Posted by Gibbons J. Cooney