He's sat in 'the big chair' for the past 3 1/2 years or so. Can't wait to see the grand circus this time around... Maybe huge collapses both physical (wars n' destruction) and virtual (Stock markets, Media and Social networks) will add some chaos to the show.
[This message has been edited by TheDigitalAlchemist (edited 05-17-2012).]
Interesting question, though.....if he was never legally entitled to be President, does that make every law and executive order he signed Null and Void ? ....and is everybody who had losses as a result of his actions entitled to compensation as victims of fraud ??????
Interesting question, though.....if he was never legally entitled to be President, does that make every law and executive order he signed Null and Void ? ....and is everybody who had losses as a result of his actions entitled to compensation as victims of fraud ??????
Could be quite the mess.
And, if true, anybody that had the knowledge and helped him should be shot. I kid not.
Interesting question, though.....if he was never legally entitled to be President, does that make every law and executive order he signed Null and Void ? ....and is everybody who had losses as a result of his actions entitled to compensation as victims of fraud ??????
I honestly never disbelieved that he was a natural born American, but honestly... when you look at the mountains of evidence to the contrary, it really makes you wonder whether or not we're actually being had? The Democrats have clearly done everything in their power to convey that anyone who believes otherwise is a "crazy person" by even coming up with a term for it... a "birther." They obviously very much want this to go away... and quite honestly, I don't think his supporters really care whether he was born in America or not either...
Democrats have always believed that the end justifies the means. It doesn't matter what laws you break, or how you bastardize the office... because they believe that what they're doing is the "right thing" so even if they have to break a few laws, it's of no consequence to them.
That's the difference between a conservative, and a liberal... the ends justify the means...
Clearly this is a big LIE by the ROMny campaign to paint Dear Leader as less than IMMAcuLATE. Don't fall for the dogMA. Think for yourSELF and beLIEVE what WE tell yOu tO.
Disclaimer: This post inspired by the "smart kids."
quote
Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]:
quite honestly, I don't think his supporters really care whether he was born in America or not either...
If anything, they're patting themselves on the back for getting away with it.
[This message has been edited by Formula88 (edited 05-17-2012).]
Originally posted by MidEngineManiac: ....if he was never legally entitled to be President, does that make every law and executive order he signed Null and Void ?
I honestly never disbelieved that he was a natural born American, but honestly... when you look at the mountains of evidence to the contrary, it really makes you wonder whether or not we're actually being had? The Democrats have clearly done everything in their power to convey that anyone who believes otherwise is a "crazy person" by even coming up with a term for it... a "birther." They obviously very much want this to go away... and quite honestly, I don't think his supporters really care whether he was born in America or not either...
Democrats have always believed that the end justifies the means. It doesn't matter what laws you break, or how you bastardize the office... because they believe that what they're doing is the "right thing" so even if they have to break a few laws, it's of no consequence to them.
That's the difference between a conservative, and a liberal... the ends justify the means...
Todd
WTF? I seem to remember that you and the other hardcore righties on this forum had no problem disbelieving the fact that George W Bush was at worst a deserter and at best VERY AWOL from the national guard... Pot? Helloooooo...?
------------------ Drive safely!
[This message has been edited by NEPTUNE (edited 05-17-2012).]
WTF? I seem to remember that you and the other hardcore righties on this forum had no problem disbelieving the fact that George W Bush was at worst a deserter and at best VERY AWOL from the national guard... Pot? Helloooooo...?
Hah, Neptune, I don't know anything about him being AWOL, but I do know he joined the National Guard. It's quite possible he did it to escape the draft, but... Bush is no longer president.
Makes you wonder if this way the big story that Brietbart was going to release before he was killed. In other news, it has been released that cause of death for Brietbart's coroner was arsenic poisoning. The coronoer was found dead shortly after doing a preliminary autopsy on Brietbart.
Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]: Hah, Neptune, I don't know anything about him being AWOL, but I do know he joined the National Guard. It's quite possible he did it to escape the draft, but... Bush is no longer president.
Yep. Ya dodged that bullet again.
[This message has been edited by NEPTUNE (edited 05-18-2012).]
WTF? I seem to remember that you and the other hardcore righties on this forum had no problem disbelieving the fact that George W Bush was at worst a deserter and at best VERY AWOL from the national guard... Pot? Helloooooo...?
Not me. But none of those would disqualify you from holding office, as is the subject here.
Originally posted by 82-T/A [At Work]: Hah, Neptune, I don't know anything about him being AWOL, but I do know he joined the National Guard. It's quite possible he did it to escape the draft, but... Bush is no longer president.
But if he wasn't qualified to run and be elected ( which is not the case ) it would still be an issue and should be pursued even if he was out of office. I really don't think that just because a person is out of office now that any potential 'crime' that was committed in relation to that office should just go poof.
( note i'm NOT saying that bush did anything illegal here.. just using your statement that h es now out of office.. )
I think in the case of The O, we will never find out the full truth, and if we do, and if he wasn't eligible, nothing will ever come of it and it will be another farce pulled over America.
( now, i still doubt The O was ineligible to run and he's been evasive all this time for another reason, but there is always that chance, however small )
And, if true, anybody that had the knowledge and helped him should be shot. I kid not.
And the perpetrator.. All would be considered treason as it was a direct illegal attack on our political system. And last i heard, treason is still an executable offense.
While the internet buzzed with Breitbart News’ release of a booklet from President Obama’s literary agency circa 1991 describing him as being “born in Kenya,” the mainstream media still refuses to report the story, or plays defense for Obama.
Never mind that the agency used the “born in Kenya” biography until 2007. Never mind that authors who have worked with the agency state that the agency asks that authors pen their own biographies. Never mind that Obama has routinely padded his biographical details to appeal to particular audiences.
Nothing to see here.
Michael Shear, at the New York Times, was in full defense mode:
“Perhaps the darker side of politics is always close to the surface … the conservative Drudge Report Web site published a headline: “BORN IN KENYA,” based on a three-decade-old promotional booklet for a publisher that included an inaccurate biography of Mr. Obama. It stayed on the site for much of the afternoon. The headline linked to a report at Breitbart news, another conservative site, which suggests that the booklet represents a pattern in which Obama — or the people representing and supporting him — manipulate his public persona.’”
We presented a document. The Times calls that “the darker side of politics.” Absurd. And that was the Times’ only coverage of the story – dismissing Obama’s pattern of biographical manipulation without comment. All the news that’s not fit to print.
How about the Washington Post, the paper that assured us that Mitt Romney’s 50-year-old haircut incidents were news? It trotted out leftist stalwarts and Friends of Media Matters Greg Sargent and Erik Wemple to cover for Obama and his literary agency. Sargent scoffed, “rumor has it the whitey tape will break any minute now.” Wemple’s only comment: “Okay.”
Well, okay, then.
How about the Los Angeles Times, which still refuses to release tape of Obama speaking with Palestine Liberation Organization former spokesman Rashid Khalidi at an anti-Israel event? Not a word.
How about Obama’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune? Crickets. The Boston Globe? Nada. CBS? Nope. NBC? Nothing. ABC News’ website did mention the story, but only by syndicating a Yahoo! News report – and meanwhile, Jake Tapper was on Twitter, downplaying the story.
Huffington Post did cover the story – but not initially. Instead, they waited for Obama’s literary agency to fall on the sword, making the dubious claim that she had committed a simple “fact checking error” – a fact-checking error that lasted 16 years and two agencies, all the way until after Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007.
What was Huffington Post’s headline? “Birthers Make Another Blunder.” Once you click in, the headline becomes, “Obama Birther Rumor Debunked As Literary Agent Clarifies Mistake.” The first line of the piece? “Barack Obama birth certificate conspiracy theorists have been foiled again.”
This leaves questions as to whether the Huffington Post’s editors are actually literate, since Breitbart News’ piece introducing the Obama bio explicitly states repeatedly that Breitbart News is not stating that Obama was born in Kenya, supports the veracity of the Obama birth certificate, and explains that the evidence goes to Obama’s construction of his own biography. Huffington Post did quote the original piece, but buried Breitbart News’ non-birtherism at the end of its article labeling the story a “birther” story. This is magnificently dishonest, and played just as Obama would have his minions play the story.
Politico’s Dylan Byers covered the story by calling it “an old claim that Obama was born in Kenya.” This would be a lie. It’s not an “old claim.” It’s a biography put out by Obama’s literary agency, his legal representative in the literary world. And it lasted on their website for 16 years. No doubt Byers’ check is in the mail from the Obama campaign.
So, what important news was the mainstream media covering while conspicuously ignoring the hottest story on the internet, and a story that calls into question the character of the President of the United States?
The New York Times ran a piece on how one Jolie Clifford likes wearing clothing cribbed from 1950s issues of Playboy.
The Washington Post had an article on an angler who “may have broken world record with snakehead caught in Occoquan River.” The Post did not report whether Mitt Romney lashed the snakehead to the roof of his car.
The Los Angeles Times posted a piece explaining how Los Angeles’ electric car drivers are different from others across the nation.
The Chicago Tribune did an article on Doodling for Google. Whatever that means.
How about the Boston Globe? They don’t have anything on Obama’s bio. They do, however, want readers to know that “With jazz trio Pilc Moutin Hoenig, anything can happen.”
The NBC News website featured video showing a five-time “Jeopardy!” champ rating Chuck Todd’s “Celebrity Jeopardy!” appearance. Todd beat comedian Lewis Black and columnist Clarence Page, in case you were wondering.
CBS reports in breaking news that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, wife of former French President Nicholas Sarkozy, is returning to the music industry and will release a new album by the end of the year. The world waits with bated breath.
Clearly, the mainstream media has better things to do than cover stories calling into question how the President of the United States has spent his life constructing and reconstructing his persona. Clearly, they are too busy to vet this president. That’s why Breitbart News does it.
Though it quickly became an Internet punchline, Attack Watch should not be dismissed. Attack Watch is paid for and an extension of Obama for America, which is part of BarackObama.com, the online campaign hub for the White House. That means that the Obama campaign itself has decided to comment on the Breitbart News' exclusive surrounding a 1991 booklet published by President Obama's literary agency that falsely claimed the President was born in Kenya. It's also worth noting that this claim extended to the lit agency's website until 2007, two months after Obama announced his candidacy for president.
What's fascinating about the Obama campaign's response is the many questions it leaves unanswered:
Fact: The Breitbart bloggers chose to ignore the very clear facts that belie their claim. •The literary agent who put together the 1991 pamphlet in question noted that, “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.” The mistake in the pamphlet was the result of “nothing more than a fact checking error” by the agent.
•Despite the Breitbart bloggers’ claim that the booklet was an attempt to manipulate some carefully crafted persona, numerous news outlets had already reported the President as Hawaiian-born. A year before the pamphlet’s release in 1991, a New York Times article on Barack Obama’s election to head the Harvard Law Review reported correctly, “Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.”
As far as that first bullet point, what the Obama camp won't tell you is that Breitbart News made numerous attempts to contact the literary agency without any kind of response. Once the agency finally released a statement, we published it.
But it's the combination of both bullet points that's most revealing. We've since learned that the agency in question, Dystel & Goderich, asks writers to submit their own bios and if our President had an "R" after his name, this is the thread that would be pulled to launch a thousand mainstream media questions, the most obvious among them being: Did Obama submit his own bio? If so, what did it say? How in the in the world does someone mistakenly assume an American citizen was born in Africa? This may well be a "fact checking error," but it's an awfully bizarre one with an origin that deserves an explanation. Moreover, did Obama ever see the 16 year-long error and request it be fixed? Was he ever asked to proof the bio?
There's no mistaking the fact that there's a legitimate narrative surrounding Obama that involves the way in which both he and those around him engage in myth-making. Even Obama protectors like Politico admitted as much as recently as just a few weeks ago:
Yet, make no mistake, [the upcoming David Maraniss biography] is a dangerous book for Obama, and White House staffers have been fretting about it in a low-grade way for a long, long time — in part because it could redefine the self-portrait Obama skillfully created for himself in 1995 with “Dreams from My Father.”
And yet, the literary agency that handled this "skillfully created self-portrait" known as "Dreams from My Father" is the same literary agency that falsely claimed Barack Obama was born in Kenya. This potential new piece of a puzzle, though, has only been met with dismissiveness from Politico (along with the rest of the media).
After what we've learned and are still learning about Elizabeth Warren, the number of questions worth asking about the "skillfully created self-portrait" of Barack Obama only grows. The media has made clear that what Mitt Romney did a half-century ago as a teenager is fair game. Barack Obama is a sitting United States president and was a grown man in 1991 (and in 2007). If either he or those around him were intentionally primping his biography, we have a right to know.
No sooner did the literary agency brochure in which Barack Obama was said to be Kenyan-born surface than the media went to work to deep-six it.
"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me - an agency assistant at the time," Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC 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."
This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of reasons. Let us start with the obvious. At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant. How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 "error" to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007? To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth. I am confident that there is no such submission.
Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's explanation for a New York minute. "As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE," writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line. "It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?"
The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted, "All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner." This is standard. In the eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information sent out about me either by agent or publisher. Like most authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.
The most interesting "tell" in the 1991 Acton & Dystel brochure relates to what was said about Obama's career in the business world. Obama, the reader learns, "worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation."
In Dreams from My Father, Obama inflated his stint at Business International even more and transformed it into a faux moment of racial awareness, one of at least a half-dozen concocted racial melodramas in the book. As Obama tells the story, a "consulting house to multinational corporations" hired him and promptly promoted him to the position of "financial writer."
Here, he felt like "a spy behind enemy lines," and a guilty one at that. "As far as I could tell," he adds, "I was the only black man in the company." He does not boast of his racial uniqueness. Rather, in full grievance mode, he considers it "a source of shame." Indeed, the whole experience troubled him:
I had my own office, my own secretary, money in the bank. Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors-see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand-and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve.
As early as July 2005, however, former co-worker and Obama fan Dan Armstrong revealed Obama's whole account to be a "serious exaggeration." Obama worked at not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters." He was not the only black person who worked there. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles. He mostly just copy-edited business items and slipped them into a three-ring binder for the company's customers.
Are we supposed to believe that Goderich not only changed Obama's birthplace from Hawaii to Kenya, but also transformed him from a grunt filling three-ring binders into a "financial journalist and editor"?
When this discrepancy surfaced years later, pundits in either camp were confused as to why Obama would lie about such seemingly irrelevant details. There are two good, non-exclusive possibilities. For one, the exaggeration enables the reader to see Obama as he would like to see himself -- "a spy behind enemy lines." For another, Obama's co-author, Bill Ayers, once again took the framework of Obama's life and roughed in the details.
In Fugitive Days, Ayers' 2001 memoir, he uses the phrase "behind enemy lines" almost literally to describe his and his comrades' quiet infiltration of the opponent's position. Wife Bernardine Dohrn has said the same in public. When the Weather Underground declared its state of war with the United States in May 1970, Dohrn warned that people fighting "Amerikan imperialism" all over the world "look to Amerika's youth to use our strategic position behind enemy lines to join forces in the destruction of the empire."
The bottom line is this: Obama has been creating and shifting identities his entire adult life. If the agency brochure was a snapshot of the 1991 Obama, Dreams captured him in his 1995 pose: hip, black, progressive, wounded by racial slights but able to overcome them, just the man to lead Chicago into the 21st century, then the extent of his and Ayers's ambition for him.
"I met [Obama] sometime in the mid-1990s[,]" Bill Ayers would tell Salon, likely pushing the actual date back several years. "And everyone who knew him thought that he was politically ambitious. For the first two years, I thought, his ambition is so huge that he wants to be mayor of Chicago."
Friend Cassandra Butts traced that ambition back at least to Harvard. "He wanted to be mayor of Chicago and that was all he ever talked about as far as holding office," she would tell early Obama biographer David Mendell.
No one would have challenged Obama's biography had he not gone beyond Chicago, but he did. And so where he was born matters, and whether he even wrote his own biography matters, too. As much as I know about Obama, I don't know or pretend to know the answer -- at least to the first of those two questions.
