Thoughts from Andrew Breitbart:
My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education. During the endless 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama would not release his college grades. Given that President George W. Bush and Sens. Al Gore and John Kerry all had proved mediocre grades were no impediment to a presidential bid, Mr. Obama likely had other concerns.
While I have no desire to see Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, I do want to see his college transcripts. My suspicion, one could even call it a conspiracy theory, is that Mr. Obama committed himself to a radical curriculum, aligned himself with the far-left professoriate, and sought to keep this biographical information from his political enemies, especially then-rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, for fear that they would paint the former community organizer and follower of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as something other than an advocate of racial reconciliation.
Through his acts over the last few weeks, Mr. Obama has reinforced my fears and my admittedly speculative thesis. He has shown he has neither the desire to provide a fresh angle on race, nor wants to draw attention to the bad ideas that dominate higher education and stifle the mainstream media.
Not only were there no fresh ideas about race and living in multiethnic America, but there were hardly even any stale ones. Perhaps this was because Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Gates’ initial – and thus probably most authentic – reactions in playing the race card had proved so unpopular, and so they just wanted to have their frosted malt beverages and get outta Dodge.
But for whatever reason – this ballyhooed beer summit proved merely to be a semi-private photo-op that just happened to be held at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. There were rote, banal and opaque statements, with no public discussion, no interaction with reporters, or even with voices as identifiably conservative as Mr. Gates is identifiably liberal. For what Mr. Obama had called a “teachable moment,” the teachers were pretty much absent and there wasn’t even much of a lesson plan.
What a fraud this guy is. One also wonders why the administration is spending so much legal resources to avoid showing the original birth certificate, when they could simply end the controversy by releasing it.
Fortunately, while, as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, the number of those people seems to be shrinking, and below a majority in recent polls, at least among likely voters.
The birthplace issue is a handy smoke screen to avoid questions surrounding the actual birth date and whether because of the specific age requirements his mother would have had to fulfill to legally confer resident status to her child. I believe this is the reason we have not seen the birth certificate. Having said that I don’t believe this arcane technicality should be used to invalidate his citizenship.
Except of course Obama did release his birth certificate, and the State of Hawaii confirms it’s real.
It’s real for legal purposes, such as proving place of birth, getting a passport, etc., but it’s not the original certificate.
It’s real for legal purposes you mean, like establishing the legal requirements to be President?
It’s real for legal purposes you mean, like establishing the legal requirements to be President?
I don’t know — that’s a higher bar. More than simply being a citizen is required to be president. But I don’t necessarily have any reason to think that he’s Constitutionally ineligible to be president – I just wonder what he’s hiding.
Obama is going to a lot of trouble to hide what should be readily available. The birth certificate issue seems patently absurd but he does act like he has something to hide. Why? But that’s beside the point. Everyone on the Left keeps say how smart Obama is. If that’s the case, why is he hiding all of his college work? For a man who is supposed to be so smart, why is he doing such ignorant things on economic policies?
Others have proposed that he is hiding his originally given name (such as Barry), although I think “Janet” or “She-ra” would be more embarrassing.
I supposed it is *possible* that it would reveal some other man listed as father.
Either way, I would be unsurprised if it revealed something that contradicts the president’s official history.
Though JJS’ proposal is also a possibility.
I supposed it is *possible* that it would reveal some other man listed as father.
Yes, like Frank Marshall Davis…?
Maybe he accidentally rolled it up into a spliff and smoked it.
Though, I’d probably actually vote for him if he got up on TV and said, “I uh, would show you my birth certificate, but I uhhhh, uhhh smoked it….” *Cosby puddin’ pop face*
My view at this point is that Obama is hiding it because that’s what he does, that his instinctive reaction to any request for his history is to obsfucate, hide, and delay. He’s got so many buried land mines that it’s better to hide everything than to figure what’s safe. There’s also his obvious contempt for The Masses, who are to be given only the absolute minimum that is required. All slack should go to Obama, with none for the rest of us.
Transparency for thee, not for me. Even though that’s what I campaigned on.
I don’t think AOG is far off the mark.
When it comes to the long-form birth certificate, I think about what I would do if someone demanded to see mine, and started concocting conspiracy theories about what it might “really” say. It’s hard for me to come down on the side of agreeing that Obama “should” do so simply because some wackos insist it means something.
I hope he fails, but come on.
One also wonders why the administration is spending so much legal resources to avoid showing the original birth certificate, when they could simply end the controversy by releasing it.
Do you really think the controversy hurts Obama? Right now I’d say it’s hurting the GOP. The latest polling shows that 75% of Southern whites, the last stronghold of the GOP, aren’t sure that Obama was born in the U.S. The number in the rest of the country is under 10%.
The birthers aren’t going to support Obama no matter what. But by clinging to an obviously false conspiracy theory they are revealing themselves to be racists who can and should be ignored.
[Side note: in a recent house cleaning we could not find my wife’s birth certificate. She was born in Honolulu, a few years before Obama (when Hawaii was still a territory). She ordered a replacement, and sure enough, it looks just like the one on Obama’s website. So now she has no original birth certificate, and by the standards of other commenters here can’t run for President without arousing suspicion. Except that she’s white, so no one would even bother to raise the question.]
Yes, like Frank Marshall Davis…?
I’d love to hear your theory as to why Ann Dunham, by then Mrs. Barack Hussein Obama, would have put Davis’s name on the birth certificate of a child named Barack Hussein Obama.
My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education.
The notion that anything about his college education could tell you more about him than his public life since college — the votes he’s cast, laws he’s written, books he’s written, speeches he’s given, people he’s appointed, decisions he’s made, etc. — is preposterous.
How many of us feel that our true nature was revealed in our college transcripts?
How many of us feel that our true nature was revealed in our college transcripts?
I don’t. Nonetheless, I wonder why a politician who ran on how smart he was is afraid to reveal them.
I’d love to hear your theory as to why Ann Dunham, by then Mrs. Barack Hussein Obama, would have put Davis’s name on the birth certificate of a child named Barack Hussein Obama.
The only reason that I could come up with is because he was the real father, and that wasn’t the original name.
Just speculating…
And that perhaps Obama would have been a better name, in retrospect…
There are not too many reasons I can think of why Obama would not reveal which Hawaiian hospital and doctor delivered him:
Caution: pure speculation
1) His mother entered the hospital under an alias. Revealing this could uncover her hobby as a paid Soviet agent.
2) His mother was treated for three types of VD in the hospital and had a visit from a pimp.
3) He can’t risk exposing any information on his whereabouts before his own Terminator arrived from the future to protect him.
4) He was not actually born in a Hawaiian hospital
Anyone have another reason that would explain why he won’t reveal simple details like hospital and doctor?
McGeeHee;
You’re not a Presidential candidate or a President. Andy McCarthy does a good job of laying it out, the bottom line being that is is expected of someone who wants to have the most powerful position in the nation to be generous in revealing things about himself so that citizens may better judge him. Tax returns, medical records, school transcripts, etc. In my view Obama’s effort to not show the long form was very indicative of his coming style of governing, petty contempt and arrogance. The entire incident is important for what it reveals about what he grew up to be, not so much on where he came from.
The only reason that I could come up with is because he was the real father, and that wasn’t the original name.
The newspaper birth announcements (which are based on information from the Dept. of Health) list the parents as Mr. and Mrs. Barack H. Obama. So you can be pretty sure those are the parents on the birth certificate.
There’s nothing there, but the whole thing is discrediting the right the way 9-11 truthers discredit opposition to Bush/Cheney.
Andy McCarthy does a good job of laying it out, the bottom line being that is is expected of someone who wants to have the most powerful position in the nation to be generous in revealing things about himself so that citizens may better judge him.
That must be why George W. Bush was so forthcoming about his DUI arrest, whether he’d ever used cocaine, etc.
Has any presidential candidate before ever been asked to produce a birth certificate? Do you expect Sarah Palin to ever release her college transcripts?
Nonetheless, I wonder why a politician who ran on how smart he was is afraid to reveal [his transcripts].
Maybe they’d be a distraction — I’m guessing he’d rather talk about health reform than the political views of every professor he had at Columbia. That doesn’t mean he’s “afraid” to reveal them, or that he’s hiding anything, just that he’d rather not help change the subject to one that doesn’t advance his goals.
Even if he was a straight-A student at Columbia, and never took any classes from anyone to the left of Milton Friedman, revealing those things wouldn’t turn a skeptic into a supporter. So why bother?
Even if he was a straight-A student at Columbia, and never took any classes from anyone to the left of Milton Friedman, revealing those things wouldn’t turn a skeptic into a supporter. So why bother?
It’s a demonstration of fitness. Obama was running for president. Why couldn’t he address the “Manchurian candidate” conspiracies? Even Bush did it.
I note also how you casually classify the paranoids as “racist”. How bigoted of you.
I don’t know what Hawaiian long-form birth certificates included in the early 1960s, but I suspect it included “religion”… and that Barack was listed as a Muslim.
Ditto for transcripts from Columbia in the 1970s.
Personally, I don’t care if he is/was/will-be Muslim, or Mormon, or Flying Spaghetti Monsterian. But, to reference a similarly-paranoid President, “It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”
I fail to see how such statements as refusing to live in Africa, or never voting for a black are “baldly racist” statements. The Russian natives speaking them are simply stating their opinions. This goes to show that, for all the sacred pronouncements about a unity of brotherhood, equality, etc., promulgated by the old USSR, the average Ivan and Tatiana know the deal. They have less use for blacks in Russia, than Archie Bunker had for George Jefferson. My own father (who was born in what is now Belarus) would have made Theodore Bilbo look like a Kennedy-type liberal on race matters.