XPost: dc.urban-planning, wa.politics   
   From: nancy.pelosi.childmolester@senate.gov   
      
   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   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)