Literary agent's bio says Obama was born in Kenya

Yeah, I have ... they had a shootout up north of me a few months ago. All the more reason to call in backup, arrest 'em and impound those cars.

 

Well that's it. I'm not voting for Barack Obama now.

 

Now I understand the gold fetish as I have little doubt most birthers are nutty about gold. How many of those people working the "Cash 4 Gold"-type ripoff schemes are also birthers? I'd guess it's a higher proportion than the general population.

 

You've gone round the bend, man.

 

At a certain level of nuttiness, we're all allowed to just point and laugh. Honestly. And you crossed that line.

That said, here's much more than you deserve.

It's an absolute nutjob conspiracy theory based on... Nothing. Not one thing.

Barack Obama was profiled by nearly every major paper in the country when he was named editor of the Harvard Law Review. This mistake appears in none of the contemporaneous profiles.

Here's the New York Times, in 1990:

The Harvard Law Review, generally considered the most prestigious in the country, elected the first black president in its 104-year history today. The job is considered the highest student position at Harvard Law School.

The new president of the Review is Barack Obama, a 28-year-old graduate of Columbia University who spent four years heading a community development program for poor blacks on Chicago's South Side before enrolling in law school. His late father, Barack Obama, was a finance minister in Kenya and his mother, Ann Dunham, is an American anthropologist now doing fieldwork in Indonesia. Mr. Obama was born in Hawaii.

Secondly, and I don't know how this isn't obvious, why would he lie about where he was born for a blurb for a book THAT EXPLAINED EXACTLY WHERE HE WAS BORN AND WHERE HE SPENT HIS CHILDHOOD?

Do you get that that assertion is insane on its face? I mean, sure, the book was going to be published and available to anyone with a library card, but that sneaky Obama got his secret message out through intra-book-publisher advance notices.

Right.

 

He wrote the book. It says where he was born in the book. Why would he lie about where he was born in the blurb and not the book?

Why would anyone write a blurb for a book that directly contradicts the facts laid out in the book?

 

I'm waiting for Obama to come out against the birthers. Like same-sex marriage, we expect more from him than Romney.

 

Have you ever written a book?

I have. I laughed at some of the stuff that came back on the initial book jacket and in some of the blurbs. Not biographical details, mind you, but stuff about what remarkable access I had to every important person. One of them talked to me for 15 minutes after a press conference. Another declined to speak at all. The rest were mostly normal dudes now that I just reached at their home, current team, or office.

Third parties botch details. It's a proven fact. Besides the book jacket, almost every time I've been a source for a story, the reporter has screwed up some detail about me.

Now, I don't think Ragu is being insane. And I certainly don't think he's a birther. But Zeke puts forth some pretty good evidence that Obama was pretty forthright about his birthplace contemporaneous to the book release.

I stand by my initial assertion: The peripheral people involved in the book subconsciously wanted him to be as exotic and hard scrabble as possible, and talked themselves into variations on his life story that would accomplish that. It's like a subconscious "The Usual Suspects."