Nancy Pelosi NAMBLA supporter
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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 pretend to know the
answer -- at least to the first of those two questions.