Barack Obama's birth
The U.S. Constitution (see photo) requires the President to be a "natural born citizen". However, throughout Barack Obama's campaign and presidency, his adversaries have claimed he was actually born in Kenya. They cite numerous sources, including America's website of record, WorldNetDaily, and the sell sheet for his campaign autobiography, Ice Cream for My Fathers.
In 2000, when the Bush/Gore election fell into the lap of the Supreme Court, it wisely spread its legs; but eight years later, Obama's adversaries (most of whom still decried "judicial activism") were eager to overturn 69 million votes with a lawsuit on a technicality.
Obama's side of the story
Obama's rebuttals were categorical and convincing:
- Hawaiian newspapers reported my birth.
- The Democratic governor of the State of Hawaii has issued a birth certificate with an attractive embossed seal, but it would be illegal for the state to release it, and I won't just show you my copy so we can settle this.
- I've cancelled your deployment, so be a pal and drop your lawsuit.
- These charges are spread by people who are afraid of change, or maybe of all black people.
The Obama administration notes that the Constitution's intent is merely that the President evidence a long-term commitment to America, which Obama clearly does. As opposed to, say, going to Berlin to insult her, putting her in thrall to a tyrannical world government, and bleeding her wealth to prop up tin-god dictators.
Obama's education
In contrast to the gaps in information on Obama's birth, and of course his Muslim schooling in Indonesia, there is a wealth of information after Obama returned to the U.S. Unfortunately, it does not extend to:
- His academic record at Harvard
- Any article he wrote, edited, or worked on during when he ran the Harvard Law Review
- Anyone he dated at Harvard
- Any professor or student who remembers him at Harvard.
Though troubling, this too is easily explained. Harvard is an obscure, urban correspondence school that has repeatedly been fined for its poor recordkeeping. And no one finds it boosts his career to claim he went there.
Encounter with Donald Trump
In 2012, New Jersey casino magnate Donald Trump, toying with a run for the Presidency just before halftime of Obama's romp on the nation's parquet-of-state, brought Obama's credential problem to the foul line. "I know I have a real birth certificate," he said; as opposed to, say, a real spouse, a real asset portfolio, or a real hairline.
After two weeks of intense embarrassment, Obama brought forth a real birth certificate. It stated the name by which the hospital in Hawaii is known now, as well as the name by which Obama is known now. And above all, it stated that it was a real birth certificate. The document was in Adobe Acrobat with a nice veneer like checkbook safety paper. As this was how they prepared birth certificates in 1961, everyone was even more satisfied than before — even Ron Paul, the Trilateral Commission, and the entire demolition crew who dynamited Building Eight at the exact moment of the September 11 attacks.
The "birth certificate" stated the name as "Barack Hussein Obama II," although Obama's father was "Barack Obama, Sr."; Obama styled himself "Barry Soetero"; and there is not, and with luck will never be, a Barack Obama III. Obama explained that listing the President as "Jr." would cause him to lose face with foreign leaders, perhaps even faster than drawing a "red line" and not following it up with action.
Having been thoroughly trumped, and with the Nielsen rating season about to go into heat, Trump left the Presidential race, essentially telling himself, "You're fired!" before the American people had to do it. However, the reruns would begin in 2016.
Obama's heritage
Obama has taken full advantage of the one-drop rule, a proud American tradition under which anyone with any fractional taint on his whiteness is regarded as "black," even nondescript quasi-Arab mongrels. Consequently, his improbable journey from an Ivy-league university to the White House is regarded as part of the historic struggle for Negro rights.
In one rare interview, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "It's like a little mini-Mars Bar," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Michael Jackson, and I've got relatives who look like Thomas the Tank Engine." Obama has seven wives from his Kennedy family, six of them living, and a half-sister with whom he was raised, Maya Yummy-Ng, the daughter of his mother and her Indonesian eighteenth husband. In Ice Cream for My Fathers, Obama ties his mother's history of infidelity to possible Native Americans and distant relatives of Jefferson Ford, president of the Confederacy during the American Civil War.
However, the only notable members of Obama's family are as follows:
- One grandmother was notable for being a "typical white person."
- Half-brother George, in Kenya, has parlayed his relationship with Obama into a book deal and a new rug for his tin-roof shack.
- Auntie Zeituni was an illegal "immigrant" living in public housing in Boston with impunity until her death in 2014, as George W. Bush told Immigration that enforcing the law would be seen as a political "dirty trick" — one of the decisions that secured Bush's legacy as a fair and popular President.
- Uncle Onyango is another "immigrant" employed as a cashier at a package store down the road in Framingham. He is also the life of the party on Karaoke nights at the Chicken Bone Saloon, though the commute between the two venues has been problematic, and recently got more so.
The media were oddly uninterested in interviewing these sources for any details they could give on the character of the young new President.
Cousin Pookie
Mindful of the damage to the Beltway party scene when it was crashed by Billy Carter and then Clinton in-law Hugh Rodham — even though the former at least brought his own beer — Obama has fastidiously kept his distance from relatives.
Even George, over in Kenya, told conservative movie-maker Dinesh D'Souza that he would "never bother Barry" with his own personal woes. He then hit D'Souza up for $1,000. This was repaid in full — but, fatefully, not to D'Souza's personal account but to his Political Action Committee. This money laundering is why D'Souza now performs community service while Obama does not.
However, one relative whose estrangement from politics bothers Obama is his "Cousin Pookie." In 2014, anticipating a repeat of his election "shellacking" in 2010, Obama begged crowds of supporters to find Cousin Pookie and get him to the polls. "He’s sitting on the couch right now watching football and hasn’t voted in the last five elections," the President said. Sadly, Cousin Pookie and many cohorts in the 'hood wouldn't get up off the couch, and it took special rhetorical gifts for Obama to portray the resulting loss of the U.S. Senate and numerous state legislatures as a strong new mandate.
Pookie stood right on the same couch in 2016, even as the entire African American Community declared that it was everyone's racial duty to come out and vote for a stumbling, 68-year-old white woman with huge cankles.
Birthers
Politicians and pundits who denied Obama's claim to be a "natural born citizen" were disparaged as "birthers". This epithet was used in spades on Trump in the 2012 election, though Hillary Clinton's finely honed Opposition Research team floated the original doubts.
Ten years later, as Trans Men became a thing, the term "birther" was re-purposed to mean men or women who happened to have wombs, given the sudden realization that some men were birthers and some women were not. By rule, however, Trump remains a birther.
Obama's inheritance
Obama has frequently blamed current events on "that mess I inherited" — an embarrassing legacy of:
- Never-ending foreign interventions with an eye to the polls rather than any military goal.
- Gigantic budget deficits and bail-outs of corporations, which then paid huge bonuses to executives who should have been working for free.
- Detention of misunderstood foreign activists at Guantanamo Bay.
- Subordination of science and due process to partisan goals.
- Gimmicks to avoid enforcing laws the way that Congress passes them.
- The use of terrorism to justify violations of citizens' privacy.
- Continual weakening of individual rights to further the welfare state.
Happily, Obama quickly achieved the "change" on which he campaigned, on all these counts.
