This is an article from the American Thinker .com. I reprint this article because the topic comes up in almost all conversations. President Obama need to straighten this controversy out now. So the questions can be laid to rest and the economy can move on. He Is President ?... or Isn't he ?.
July 30, 2009
Obama's birth certificate and the real issues
Thomas Lifson
I doff my cap and bow low to Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online, who has produced essential reading for anyone wondering what to think about the birther controversy rocking the right, and now breaking into the mainstream media, which sees an opportunity to mock and discredit the right.
He and I agree: the entire Kenyan birth theory is a distraction, and a useful tool in the hands of Alinskyites on the ridicule and destroy mission. But before moving on to other significant issues, McCarthy acknowledges that NRO's editorial yesterday accidentally mischaracterized the nature of the documentation that is available from Hawaii. He writes:
The information in the certification may be identical as far as it goes to what's in the complete state records, but there are evidently many more details in the state records than are set forth in the certification. Contrary to the editors' description, those who want to see the full state record - the certificate or the so-called "vault copy" - are not on a wild-goose chase for a "secondary document cloaked in darkness." That confuses their motives (which vary) with what they've actually requested (which is entirely reasonable). Regardless of why people may want to see the vault copy, what's been requested is a primary document that is materially more detailed than what Obama has thus far provided.
McCarthy then lays out the real issue: Obama's extraordinary secrecy, amounting to a scrubbing of his paper trail, combined with his demonstrated record of lying about his past. Obama is a phony, though and through. A former assistant US Attorney, McCarthy economically but methodically assembles the evidence, including sources, that Obama has presented a false story of his life. He lists a startling number of lies about his life story, with documentation.
The major media have done their best to obscure the existence of oddities in Obama's life story that never made it to the two autobiographical works purportedly authored by him. It has been left to the blogosphere to point out his many lies about his past. Yet the general public remains blissfully unaware of these lies, though it does know everything about Sarah Palin's family thanks to inquiring minds of the media.
Even worse, the mainstream media twice dug up intimate details of the lives of two men who stood in his way in acquiring his seat in the United States Senate. Richard Baehr explained this on AT in 2006:
In 2004, then-State Senator Obama trailed badly in third place just weeks before the Democratic primary for the open Illinois US Senate seat being vacated by Peter Fitzgerald. The leader was investment banker Blair Hull, who had spent about $40 million on an ad campaign that got him name recognition and a big lead in the polls.
Then the Chicago Tribune peeked into his bedroom, and revealed that he was an alleged wife beater. Hull's campaign collapsed and most of his support swung to Obama, who was a poorly funded candidate going nowhere until the Tribune story destroyed Hull's candidacy.
Next, the Tribune released supposedly sealed divorce documents concerning Republican nominee Jack Ryan, revealing he was a bit too kinky in his sexual tastes for his former wife. Ryan pulled out of the race, and the Illinois Republican Party, true to its decade long death wish, nominated Alan Keyes to oppose Obama. Suddenly, the unknown State Senator was now US Senator Obama with a smashing 71% share of the vote.
Obama is, in other words, a manufactured candidate. His way was paved by the media, he has lied about who he is, and he continues to lie in ways big and small. This realization is slowly dawning on people beyond the readership of the conservative internet-based media.. Growing numbers of Americans are coming to realize that they have bought into a false picture of Barack Obama. They thought he was post-racial, a healer who loves white people and can bring closure to the trauma of the legacy of slavery. His gut-level response to the Gates arrest revealed a man still angry about race, who has little regard for the men and women on the thin blue line. Also, somebody who doesn't know how to admit he was wrong.
Once a mind is open to the concept that it has been deceived, it becomes far more curious about deceptions. This is the momentum which could well be the undoing of Obama.
Citizenship - Indonesia, not Kenya
Forget Nairobi, focus on Jakarta. McCarthy writes:
Shortly after divorcing Barack Obama Sr., Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, married an Indonesian Muslim, Lolo Soetoro Mangunharjo, whom she met - just as she had met Barack Sr. - when both were students at the University of Hawaii. At some point, Soetoro almost certainly adopted the youngster, who became known as "Barry Soetoro." Obama's lengthy, deeply introspective autobiographies do not address whether he was adopted by the stepfather whose surname he shared for many years, but in all likelihood that did happen in Hawaii, before the family moved to Jakarta.
Under Indonesian law, adoption before the age of six by an Indonesian male qualified a child for citizenship. According to Dreams from My Father, Obama was four when he met Lolo Soetoro; his mother married Soetoro shortly thereafter; and Obama was already registered for school when he and his mother relocated to Jakarta, where Soetoro was an oil-company executive and liaison to the Suharto government. That was in 1966, when Obama was five. Obama attended Indonesian elementary schools, which, in Suharto's police state, were generally reserved for citizens (and students were required to carry identity cards that matched student registration information). The records of the Catholic school Obama/Soetoro attended for three years identify him as a citizen of Indonesia. Thus Obama probably obtained Indonesian citizenship through his adoption by Soetoro in Hawaii. That inference is bolstered by the 1980 divorce submission of Ann Dunham and Lolo Soetoro, filed in Hawaii state court. It said "the parties" (Ann and Lolo) had a child (name not given) who was no longer a minor (Obama was 19 at the time). If Soetoro had not adopted Obama, there would have been no basis for the couple to refer to Obama as their child - he'd have been only Ann Dunham's child.
There are many other points made in this long, thorough, and clear article. There are many things the American people legitimately deserve to know about the past of the President who leads them. And reasons to look into the legally murky question of whether he is a natural born citizen.
As McCarthy asks in a section heading: "When did information suddenly become a bad thing?" The born overseas scenario is a distraction, but the refusal to release the far more informative vault copy is a symbol of the cover-up of his true life story.If the media had not abandoned its watchdog role for Obama, while aggressively pushing it on two strategically situated opponents, he would never have become president.
Hat tip: Clarice Feldman
