Obama, man of international mystery

(OTTAWA SUN)

By John Robson

Barack Obama, I am certain, was born in Hawaii. I wish he was certain too.

Confused? Maybe you missed the recent rediscovery of a literary agent’s flyer for his 1991 book Journeys in Black and White saying “Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya.”

As my colleague Ezra Levant noted this week, the media that swarmed all over George Bush’s past and Sarah Palin’s children has been spectacularly incurious about the fog of unknowing surrounding Barack Choom Obama.

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The agency quickly dismissed it as a fact-checking error. Which has just the right plausible deniability due to its pseudo-exact vagueness on obvious key questions like “Who failed to check this fact?” and “Where did the fact come from that wasn’t checked?”

Someone claiming to be a former client says this agency normally asked authors to provide their own biographical blurbs. But if not, surely they ran it past him. Plus it circulated for 16 years without Obama correcting it. And I assure you people like him, and me, check our promotional bios. If it were George Bush there’d sure be questions.

Aha, you think. I’m backing into “birther” status. No. I’m asking whether a young Obama deliberately claimed foreign birth to enhance his appealing air of exoticism and poor-boy-made-good story that didn’t even need embellishment, and the press let him get away with it. Has anyone checked whether he exploited his “Kenyan birth” to help his college career?

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