Birth of an Oddball: The Perplexing Mr. Obama

The authors of New York Times editorials once again struck the pose of exasperated schoolmarms on April 28th, 2011 with an editorial titled “A Certificate of Embarrassment.” It was subtitled, “The president is finally forced to react to a preposterous political claim about his birth.”

Yup. Barack Obama had “finally” produced a facsimile of his birth certificate and the sages on the New York Times editorial staff were expressing their dismay that this commonsense act was somehow beneath Obama’s dignity. These nameless editors had collective amnesia about Obama’s Inauguration Day, when Chief Justice John Roberts bungled the Oath of Office and the two men tripped artlessly over one another’s words.

Obama had been so rattled by this muddled ritual that he promptly summoned Justice Roberts, a photographer and an Associated Press journalist to the White House Map Room for a next-day re-enactment of the oath taking. Obama declared that he didn’t want the garbled oath on Inauguration Day to cloud the legitimacy of his presidency.

Got that? In 2008, the New York Times had reported that Obama had immediately re-staged his oath-taking ritual because of his concerns for the legitimacy of his presidency, but three years later the very same New York Times was declaring that it was embarrassing that Obama had been “finally forced” to defend the legitimacy of his presidency by displaying a simple every-day document. I live in New Jersey where everyone must produce a birth certificate to get a driver’s license. Is it such a big deal for Obama to produce a birth certificate to become President of the United States? For Obama, it was a big deal.

Barack Obama had spent a staggering amount of his money – well over a million dollars – in a feverish attempt to keep this prosaic document hidden from his countrymen, but in the end he spent a mere fourteen dollars for a copy that appeared in the New York Times. Those of us who don’t have a spare million dollars to piss away can be forgiven for thinking that Obama may be nuts. The Times editors chose to characterize the sensible release of this one piece of paper as “a profoundly low and debasing moment in American political life.” That’s how they talk on Planet Liberal.

The New York Times editorial-team chorus hit its self-righteous high note with this choice line: “It was particularly galling to us that it was an answer to a baseless attack with heavy racial undertones.”

Racial undertones? What undertones? The editors don’t tell us. It was just another one of their nasty verbal ad hominem hit and runs. Smear all doubters and then skitter away into the shadows without substantiating the accusation.

In paragraph 4, the cowardly editors declare that, “If there was ever any doubt about Mr. Obama’s citizenship, which there was not, the issue was settled years ago when Hawaii released his birth certificate.”

This is simply a declaration that the editors never had any doubts, but lots of ordinary Americans were less than convinced by the little laser-printer knockoff that was date stamped “2007.” It wasn’t an original document or even a copy of an original document; laser printers weren’t in existence when Obama was born. The tiny scrap of paper tendered by a timid Democrat flunky in Hawaii just didn’t seal the deal.

Barry Obama had become Barry Soetoro and then had morphed into Barry Obama again and then morphed into Barack Obama. He had assumed different nationalities; he had led a complicated life. Ordinary Americans could be forgiven for being perplexed on the issue of his eligibility to be President of the United States. It was a sensitive issue for them. The Constitution requires that any president be a “natural born” American, so Barry Obama didn’t help his cause by greasing a battalion of lawyers to keep his original birth certificate under wraps.

The snarling Times editors didn’t see it that way; to them it was all about race; they were obsessed with race: “. . . the birther question was never really about citizenship; it was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race.”

Then, amazingly, the Secret Order of Times Editors declared: “It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious ‘other’ would have been conducted against a white president.” Had they just returned from another notorious New York twelve-martini lunch?

Was it all that alcohol that made the Times editors forget how Obama partisans had sought to undermine John McCain’s legitimacy because he had been born in the Panama Canal Zone? The Canal Zone was a U.S. territory; Congress had long ago declared that any child born there to American citizens was also an American citizen. But that didn’t stop Obama’s flunkies from flinging dirt and sowing confusion.

Predictably, the cabal of loudmouthed liberals at the Times remained silent about the fact that it was Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign that first raised questions about Obama’s status as a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Apparently, Saint Hillary is above reproach.

By the end of their diatribe, the Times editors had lapsed into farce:

Mr. Obama was tactically smart to release the certificate and marginalize those who continue to keep the matter alive. It is tragic that American politics is fueled by such poisonous fire. Mr. Trump quickly moved on to a new fixation, questioning Mr. Obama’s academic credentials.

To their way of thinking The Donald was just a dopey populist with hair issues. Times columnists and cartoonists dwelled obsessively on Mr. Trump’s hair styling; none of them had a word to say about the hair-plug re-forestation of bald-headed Joe Biden or the high-priced dye jobs that keep grey-haired crones Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi looking preposterously youthful.

Trump’s curiosity about Obama’s super top secret academic history is just an average guy’s topic of interest. The liberals, who had disparaged Yale-grad George W. Bush as a mere “legacy admission” because his father had attended Yale, were silent about the fact that both Barack and Michelle Obama were also legacy admissions: Barack’s daddy had attended Yale at the behest of Kenya’s communist bossman Jomo Kenyatta and Michelle’s brother had attended Princeton on an athletic scholarship. Trump was highlighting Obama’s tight-fisted secrecy about all things Obama – his birth records, his academic records, samples of his writing style, etc. Obama is an obsessive control freak who micromanages every aspect of his public image. When Donald Trump expresses curiosity about Obama’s hyper-secretive behavior, Trump is instantly disparaged as a fool and a quibbler. Consequently, Obama remains an enigma who offers us only the illusion of truth and transparency.

As long as a decade ago, in a book Barack Obama claims to have written, he declared:

I am new enough to the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views. As such, I am bound to disappoint some, if not all, of them.

He was saying, in effect, that if people had a false notion of who he was, then that false notion was a product of their imaginations and in no way the result of anything he had said or done. The budding Barack declared himself to be innocent of causing any misapprehensions that others may have of him.

Even then he was a master charlatan. Obama had climbed the political ladder by deliberately concealing his true self. He had been groomed for the U.S. Senate by his Illinois-Senate mentor, Emil Jones, who allowed Obama to present as his own all sorts of legislation that had been stolen away from other Illinois legislators who had done all the hard work of preparing it. Back then, Obama was widely hated as a lazy “bill jacker” by other Illinois senators. After Obama got to the U.S. Senate using his bogus reputation as a hard-working creator of inspired legislation, he rewarded Emil Jones with lucrative federal goodies from Washington.

Super-sophisticated analytical software of the sort that conclusively identified a long-anonymous script as a play by William Shakespeare has also concluded that Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope were not written by the same person, or even the same sort of person. The vocabulary levels, the average word count per sentence, the allusions and imagery types are all wildly different. When Barack Obama claims to have written both of these texts, we can confidently conclude that Barack Obama is a liar.

When compared with a variety of randomly chosen texts these two books show scant resemblance to any of them, but when compared to the texts of two men intimately associated with Barack Obama, extremely close matches leap out at us.

The highly evolved literary style of Dreams from My Father is a close match to William Ayers’ Fugitive Days. The far more pedestrian plodding of The Audacity of Hope is a good match to the texts of Obama’s closely-held speechwriter Jon Favreau, whom Barack Obama has made the highest-paid speechwriter in history – a lavish sum that insures Jon’s allegiance and his silence. Bear in mind that this is the same Barack Obama who cannot address a class of elementary-school children without a Teleprompter machine and Jon Favreau’s words to guide him, that Obama goes off on attention-deficit meanderings whenever he speaks spontaneously, and that Obama repeatedly bungles the pronunciation of common words such as “corpsman.” Suddenly, the crowd who had gleefully poked fun a George W. Bush for pronouncing the word nuclear “nu-cu-lar” wanted to change the subject when their affirmative-action Harvard-grad hero repeatedly mispronounced the word corpsman as “corpse man,” as in Night of the Living Dead “corpse man.”

The editors of the New York Times spill oceans of ink trying to persuade Americans that conservatives are anti-intellectual rubes, bumpkins and snake handlers – idiot Creationists who can’t do simple arithmetic. But when science so sophisticated that it convinces literature experts that an unattributed play is definitely the work of Shakespeare also fingers Obama as a liar, the New York Times editors are suddenly speechless.

The last question Barack Obama wanted to answer was why he had spent over a million dollars of his children’s inheritance to keep his birth certificate hidden. It was a question that questioned his sanity. Was the President of the United States nuts?

Obama quickly changed the subject:
“We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers,” he declared – an unmistakable poke at Donald Trump. But he never answered the question: What was he so afraid of ? Instead, Obama pretended to be above all that.

“We do not have time for this kind of silliness. We’ve got better stuff to do!” he proclaimed. Whereupon Barack dashed off to do all that “better stuff.”

The “better stuff” had nothing whatsoever to do with his ruinous budget deficit or skyrocketing gasoline prices or our languishing economy. No,no,no! The better stuff was all about hobnobbing with Oprah Winfrey and headlining three big-bucks fund raisers in New York City.

President Obama, who has transformed his administration into a Goldman Sachs alumni association, rushed to a fundraiser at the Upper East Side home of former failed New Jersey governor Jon Corzine, who was yet another Goldman Sachs alumnus. It was there that Obama wisecracked that, “Nobody checked my ID at the door.”

Later, at a Town Hall event, Obama quipped: “My name is Barack Obama. I was born in Hawaii.” The guy who swore that he wanted to put all that silliness behind him just couldn’t stop jabbering about it.

When all was said and done, Donald Trump had forced Obama to dance to Trump’s drumbeat. The President of the United States had been reduced to a supporting player in Trump’s reality-TV campaign. The networks had rushed to cover Trump’s open-mic inquisition, leaving the press room at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue totally vacant. Obama was compelled to tap his foot and pout while Trump sucked up all of Obama’s oxygen. It was drop-dead hilarious.

When he couldn’t stand being ignored any more, Obama began complaining about how he had come to talk about big stuff, like foreign policy, but the networks wouldn’t give him the time he deserved. It was a comical echo of that old 60’s laugh line about how “The black man can’t skate ‘cause whitey won’t give him no ice.” Obama looked like a chump, plain and simple.

What made Obama’s staggering ineptitude even more astonishing was the clumsy manner in which he trampled all over his big news line of the day: his choice of the much-admired Davis Petraeus to head the CIA. This was the kind of news that would make Obama look good. Instead, a shaken Barry Obama lost himself in an emotional war of words with someone he had dismissed as a carnival barker, which left Obama looking like a sideshow dwarf.

By actual count, Barack Obama made no fewer than 510 promises to American voters during his 2008 campaign. These promises were conditions of his employment as president; the legitimacy of his presidency depended upon his keeping these promises. To date virtually everything Obama has promised or predicted has fallen flat or been proven wrong, if not utterly delusional. Whether he was blabbering about Gitmo, or his foreign wars or his healthcare promises or his promises of fiscal responsibility, Obama failed to keep his word. He has long since surrendered the benefit of the doubt; he is no longer worthy of our trust. Obama simply will not deliver on his promises; he’s a shallow-water fish in a deep-water world. Barry is in over his head; it’s time for him to return to his exclusive Hyde Park enclave where yet another ghost writer will write Barry’s memoirs.

Only months remain until the rest of us will have the long-awaited opportunity to replace Barack Obama with an adult.