PrintJanuary 17, 2011
What Obama Has Said about His Own Birth
While Democrat Congressman Frank Pallone read the "natural born Citizen" clause of the U.S. Constitution on the House floor last Thursday, a spirited female in the audience shouted out, "Except Obama! Except Obama! Help us, Jesus!"
Later that day, NBC's Brian Williams improbably chose to assign blame for the woman's outburst on newly elected House speaker John Boehner. "How much responsibility do you feel?" Williams asked pointedly.
"The state of Hawaii has said Obama was born there," said Boehner, who is no more intimate with the "Birther" movement than Williams himself. "That was good enough for me."
The person Williams should have been asking about "responsibility" is the president. Obama's conspicuous fabrications over the years have caused even the sober among us to doubt his origins story.
In September 2009, President Obama addressed the nation's schoolchildren writ large, an innovation that struck many on the right as a wee bit too Big-Brotherly. In the talk, Obama asked America's students to take personal responsibility. That was all well enough.
Missed in the media hubbub, however, was his take on why this could be difficult for some students. "I get it," he told the kiddies. "I know what that's like. My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother."
In his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, Obama made the same claim. "He had left Hawaii back in 1963," he wrote of Obama Sr., "when I was only two years old."
When Obama wrote this in Dreams, he may have been relating what he had himself been told. By 2009, he knew better, but so vested was he in the story, and so useful had it been in his rise, that he continued to dissemble, even before millions of schoolchildren.
There are clues in Dreams, however, which suggest that Obama was creating a fiction for future use that he already knew to be untrue. He tells of coming across an article from the Honolulu Advertiser celebrating Barack Obama, Sr.'s planned grand tour of mainland universities on his triumphant way to Harvard.
Obama writes ruefully in Dreams, "No mention is made of my mother or me, and I'm left to wonder whether the omission was intentional on my father's part, in anticipation of his long departure." What Obama does not mention is that the article was dated June 22, 1962.
Obama was reportedly born on August 4, 1961. He was not yet a year old at the time Obama Sr. left Hawaii for good. More to the point, Obama fails to mention that he and his mother, Ann Dunham, were living in Seattle at the time and had been since at least August 19, 1961, the day she enrolled at the University of Washington.
In short, the family never lived together. There was no Obama family. The Obama camp surely knew this by the time he ran for president, but Obama kept dissembling about his origins nonetheless.
Although Obama's African relatives seem to have accepted the president as one of their own, there is even less clarity on the Kenyan side. According to Dreams, Obama Sr. had children with at least four different women, two of them American, and he occasionally circled back to the first of the four, Kezia.
Ruth Nidesand, a white American, had two children by Obama Sr., Mark and David, the latter of whom died young in a motorcycle accident. She was also forced to raise Kezia's two oldest children, just as the woman Obama knows as "Granny," the family storyteller, was forced to raise Obama Sr. as her own. In another time and place, the Obamas would have had their own reality TV show.
Questions linger about the paternity of many of these offspring. In Dreams, Obama's cryptic and contrarian Aunt Sarah would tell her presumed nephew, " ... the children who claim to be Obama's are not Obama's." Obama must have wondered whether she was referring to him.
Curiously, when Obama found the article about Obama Sr.'s departure, he found it "folded away among my birth certificate and old vaccination forms." Later in Dreams, in a passage heretofore overlooked, Obama unwittingly reveals that there may have been problems with that birth certificate.
On the occasion of his father's death in 1982, lawyers contacted anyone who might have claim to the estate. "Unlike my mum," Obama tells his half-sister Auma in Dreams, "Ruth has all the documents needed to prove who Mark's father was."
Ruth obviously could produce a marriage license and a birth certificate for her son Mark. Ann Dunham apparently could not do the same for her son Barack, at least not one that could tie him to Obama Sr. -- not even with a potential payoff on the table.
The long form birth certificate could pose a number of problems other than country of origin, including the date of Obama's birth, the state of his birth, and the identity of his father. Any one of these revelations could unravel the yarn that Obama has been spinning.
These problems derive from the fact that Ann Dunham enrolled at university on August 19, 1961 and returned to Hawaii only after Obama Sr. had left Hawaii for good. Both of these facts are more firmly established than President Obama's Honolulu birth on August 4, 1961. In my forthcoming book, Deconstructing Obama, I review these possibilities in some detail.
The failure of the mainstream media to even address the inconsistencies in Obama's story is downright shameful. That failure has created a windstorm of curiosity that is becoming increasingly difficult for the media to ignore. The final responsibility for the outburst in Congress last week is theirs.
Jack Cashill's new book, Deconstructing Obama, can be pre-ordered here, with a special offer for American Thinker readers.
corrected 6:38 AM PST 1/17/11: Rep Frank Pallone is a Democrat
corrected 6:38 AM PST 1/17/11: Rep Frank Pallone is a Democrat
