We Have Been Duped: The Story

The American people have been duped.  We are victims of an organized campaign to give legitimacy to a fable.  The fable concerns Barack Obama's origins -- the "improbable love" his parents shared.  This fable proved so captivating that four years after he told it at the 2004 Democratic Convention, the American people elected the storyteller to the presidency of the United States.

The fairy-tale is found in the pages of Obama's book, Dreams from My Father.  When Obama began his campaign, there were very few sources that could verify the story told within its pages.  Most of the central characters had died, including the mother, father, and maternal grandfather.  The maternal grandmother who died shortly before the 2008 election was kept sequestered and was allowed to talk to the press only if the reporter had a "minder" from the Obama camp.  Early Obama biographer David Mendell admits as much.

There were others, though, who proclaimed that the fable was true.  These were friends of father Barack Obama, Sr. in Hawaii and friends of mother Ann Dunham in Seattle.  Their recollections mirror the fable found in Dreams.  In light of what we know today, much of what these friends have attested to is simply impossible.  If we accept that the friends are not delusional, that they are able to tell the difference between fact and fiction, then they must have been intentionally falsifying their memories to protect the fable in Dreams.

For the uninitiated, the origin fable in Dreams is as follows:

Obama, goat herder from Kenya, arrives in Hawaii to pursue his studies.  There, in a Russian language class, he meets and falls madly in love with Ann Dunham, who reciprocates his passion.  She is a young girl just out of high school and newly arrived in Hawaii with her parents.  Her father Stanley had relocated the family in order to chase brighter prospects in the furniture trade.

Soon Ann was pregnant.  Sometime later, the couple, secretly and alone, flew to Maui to be married.  Then, on August 4, 1961, our future president was born.  The couple lived together.  Ann dropped out of college to take care of the child while Barack Obama continued his studies.

Then the brilliant Barack was offered two scholarships to continue his graduate studies in economics.  One was to the New School, a university in New York City.  The money offered was enough for Obama to take his wife and child with him.  The second offer was from Harvard and was for tuition only.  The proud egomaniac Obama chose Harvard.  After he left for graduate school, the marriage disintegrated, leading to a divorce a few years later.

Since the 2008 election, several inconvenient truths have emerged that prove that the story in Dreams is a fable.  The liberal David Maraniss in his recent book Barack Obama The Story, confirms the following:

• Obama Sr. was "a man who was married in name only."

• "Within a month of the day Barry came home from the hospital, he and his mother were long gone from Honolulu, back on the mainland, returned to the more familiar turf of Mercer Island and Seattle and the campus of the University of Washington."

• "As the spring semester at the University of Hawaii neared an end, Barack Obama [Sr.] was consumed with getting into graduate school. By the time Obama wrote the letter [to his sponsor in America, Tom Mboya, May 1962] he had settled on Harvard."

• "... the New School possibility was so incidental to his thinking that Obama [Sr.] did not include it with Harvard."

Neil Abercrombie and the Snack Bar Crowd

Neil Abercrombie, current governor of Hawaii, and others whom Maraniss called the "snack bar crowd" falsely testified to the behavior and activities of Barack Obama Sr.  In a previous article, many of Abercrombie's deceptions were exposed.  Here are some of Abercrombie's impossible memories:

Abercrombie: "I know he loved Ann . . ."
We now know: Obama Sr. was "a man who was married in name only."

Abercrombie: "I knew Senator Obama's mother and father; I went to school with them. I was best friends in Hawaii with his dad."
We now know: Obama Sr. had been abandoned by his wife Ann.  A best friend would know this.

Abercrombie: After Obama was accepted to study at Harvard, Stanley Ann disappeared from the University of Hawaii student gatherings . . . Abercrombie said he rarely saw her after that.
We now know: Ann and son had left for Seattle nine months before Sr. was accepted to Harvard in May 1962.  Obama Sr. left Hawaii only one month after being accepted to Harvard.

Abercrombie: "Stanley [Ann's father] was disappointed that Barack had left his daughter, but not too disappointed. . . . He figured that the marriage was going to fail sooner or later and so it might as well not go on so long that it would hurt Little Barry, as he always called him. If he was going to play the father figure in the boy's life, he felt, he might as well start."
We now know: Ann and son had left for Seattle 10 months before Obama Sr. left Hawaii for Harvard in June 1962.

Abercrombie: "... his ambitions and her ambitions weren't going to work out[.] ... In the end, he went to Harvard because it was the top of the heap."
We now know: There was never a choice between Harvard and the New School, and there was never a conflict of ambitions.  Ann had left long before any Harvard decision.

Abercrombie and the snack bar crowd's recollections mirror the fictional story in Dreams as far as Obama Sr. is concerned.  But to truly sell the fiction in Dreams to the public, witnesses were needed to testify about the activities of mother Ann.

Ann's Friends in Seattle

The two people who have supplied the most information about Ann Dunham are her two Mercer Island high school friends: Susan Botkin Blake and Maxine Box.  The easiest way to understand their prevarications is to analyze the story they tell of Ann's "visit" to Seattle.  There are at least three versions:

Version I

In a March 27, 2007 video interview Blake said:

She came to visit briefly one afternoon in 1961 when Barry was just a few weeks old. We were sitting at my mom's house one late August afternoon and she had just finished nursing her baby. She was patting him and she went 'Oh, he pooped.' She looked at me 'cause I had two little baby brothers and she handed him to me and said here Botkin, you know how to do this so she handed him out so I changed Barry's diaper and showed her how to do it, said get used to it, they do this a lot these new babies do[.]

Box last saw her friend in 1961, when she visited Seattle on her way from Honolulu to Massachusetts, where her then-husband was attending Harvard.

Author Michael Patrick Leahy interviewed both women for an article in August 2008:

On at least one occasion, very shortly after the birth of Barack Obama Junior, friends of Stanley Ann Dunham recall her visiting them in Seattle with her new born baby, Barack Obama Junior.

Blake recalls that Dunham, who was calling herself Ann Obama at the time, visited her at her house in Mercer Island during the last week of August 1961.

She left Honolulu just as soon as she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby. He was just 3 weeks old....She was very excited about her new life, and her husband. She was nuts about him, crazy in love. I was under the impression that he had left Honolulu before Barack's birth; that he had gone to Harvard already for his studies, and that Ann was on her way to join him there.

As with Blake, this visit would be the last time that Box ever saw her high school friend.

Blake's and Box's recollections agree with the fable in Dreams; Ann and Obama are madly in love, he is at Harvard, and a distressed wife and child are on their way to be with him.  These recollections, however, are simply impossible.  In reality, Ann Dunham wasn't "visiting"; she was living in Seattle and attending school at the University of Washington.  Ann couldn't have been on her way to Harvard because no one, including Barack Obama, Sr., knew anything about Harvard until May of 1962.  Yet Blake anchors the date of the visit to late August 1961 by referring to a young baby, "pink and very new," "3 weeks old"; "I showed her how to do it [change diapers]."  If we accept the president's date of birth as August 4, 1961, then it is impossible for Blake not to be talking about 1961.  Finally, how can Blake describe Ann as being "nuts about him, crazy in love," when Ann had just left Obama Sr. back in Hawaii for good?  The marriage (if indeed there was a marriage) didn't fall apart "a few years later," as Box stated; it had already fallen apart, as evidenced by Ann and baby moving to Seattle.

Version II

According to David Maraniss in an August 2008 Washington Post article, August 1961 was not the last time Blake and Box saw their friend Ann, as was stated in version I.  In March of 2008, Washington Post reporter Michael Dobbs discovered that Obama Sr. didn't learn he was accepted to Harvard until May of 1962.  Could this be why Maraniss pins Ann's "visit" to Seattle in late summer 1962?

Her husband finished his degree, graduating in June 1962 ... Then, before the month was out, he [Obama Sr.] took off, leaving behind his still-teenage wife and namesake child ... Did Ann try to follow him to Cambridge? Her friends from Mercer Island were left with that impression. Susan Botkin [Blake], Maxine Box and John Hunt all remember Ann showing up in Seattle late that summer with little Barry, as her son was called.

"She was on her way from her mother's house to Boston to be with her husband," Botkin [Blake] recalled. "[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him ... but I remember that afternoon, sitting in my mother's living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies. She had her baby and was talking about her husband, and what life held in store for her. She seemed so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She was leaving the next day to fly on to Boston."

This second version of Ann's "visit" is as impossible as the first.  In late August 1962, Ann was not coming from her mother's house in Hawaii; she was residing in Seattle.  She had been in Seattle for at least a year and certainly had no intentions of "leaving the next day" to see her husband in Boston.  Though this second version gets rid of the problem of when Obama Sr. learned of Harvard and when he went there, it is total hogwash.

Version III

Four years after his 2008 article, Maraniss wrote his book, Barack Obama: The Story.  The incontrovertible fact that Ann was in Seattle by August of 1961 forced him to change the date of the "visit" back to 1961 while keeping many of the details the same:

Barry was not yet a month old when they left Honolulu in late August 1961 ... And she [Ann] made her way over to Susan Botkin's mother's house with the baby and spent an afternoon there ... they sat in the living room, drinking iced tea and eating sugar cookies, as Ann cradled baby Barry ... She looked neither frightened nor intimidated, but rather "so confident and self-assured and relaxed. She nursed him and was burping him, and oh, he pooped, and she handed him to me -- 'Here, Botke.'"

Careful historian Maraniss might more accurately be described as an "enabling dissembler."  By looking at the three versions of the "visit," it is clear that as conflicting facts have been discovered, recollections have been conveniently modified to fit them.  From the initial version of a young woman, "crazy in love," stopping off in Seattle in 1961 on her way to see her beloved in Boston, who by the way wouldn't be in Boston for another year, we find out that the "visit" really happened a year later in August 1962 -- and when it becomes clear that Ann moved to Seattle and was never on her way to see her husband in Boston, we wind up with a totally innocuous story reset to 1961 of two friends visiting one afternoon for an amiable chat.

It is clear that people are lying.  It is clear they are lying to protect a fraudulent story.  It is clear that the official Obama nativity story is bunkum.  Those who have orchestrated this cover-up should be ashamed of themselves for trying to fool us.

We should be ashamed of ourselves if we allow them to do it.