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The Daily Dish - 2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan

Birther Of A Fox Nation

By The Daily Dish
Aug 3 2009, 10:25 AM ET

Yes: there's a third birth certificate! A reader writes:

"Dreams from My Father" tells us that Barack Obama Sr. already had a Kenyan wife and children who were living in Kenya when he met Stanley Ann Dunham in Hawaii and that Obama Sr.'s dad back in Kenya was not one bit happy about his son's second and concurrent wife being a white American.

So the birthers ask us to believe that Barack Obama Sr., a University of Hawaii student, took his teen-aged American wife to Kenya during summer break, when she was 8 or 9 months pregnant, when his father was disgruntled about the whole thing, when his Kenyan wife and kids would probably have been part of the welcoming committee, while he was a student without a lot of money to pay for a lot of flying around, so she could have the baby there, half a world away from her home and her mother, and then they could go right back to Hawaii so he could start school again in fall semester the following month. And what exactly would have been the point of doing so?



Well, the alternative is that none of that stuff is true because Barack Jr. just made it up when, as a recent law school grad., he wrote "Dreams from My Father". He made it all up to throw everybody off the scent during his future Presidential bid. In reality his Kenyan grandfather was ecstatic about his parents' marriage, there was no Kenyan wife and there were no Kenyan half-siblings, Obama Sr. was a jet-setter with plenty of cash to fly them around the globe and Stanley Ann Dunham's parents thought it was exciting to have their 18 year old daughter give birth half a world away from home (and near her husband's other wife and kids). But, of course, if he had said all THAT in his book...then people would have suspected that he was born in Kenya!

And so Barack Jr., who knew that he he was disqualified from being President by the fact of his Kenyan birth, nevertheless thought he could get away with it and spent years and tears and a whole lot of money trying to get a job that he knew he could be disqualified for at the drop of a birth certificate, with those lies in "Dreams from my Father" being the first nefarious step.

I think that's the current theory, but I got lost in the weeds of this a while back. I trust FactCheck.

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