Just for historical completeness, I note the recent remarks by birther Donald Trump who is still displaying his orangutanian heritage as a birther. Trump said at a Republican gathering in New Orleans (as reported in The Daily Beast):
I would have been totally happy about that [Obama born in the US]. In fact, I would have probably preferred it because that would mean we would have a president for whom everything was fine.
Trump then said that he thinks Obama lied about being born in Kenya to get favorable treatment in college. Trump previously offered millions to see Obama’s college records.
Trump had raised conspiracy theories last year about the death of Loretta Fuddy.
News coverage:
Trump is the crappiest birther EVAR. I bet he has no idea who Virginia Sunahara is. He never insists that Obama is gay or a Muslin. He doesn’t know who Lt. Quarles Harris is. He never mentions Terry Lakin or Emer deVattel. He’s the dumbest cluck in the tiny Republic of Birtherstan. I hork in his general direction. 😀
He really is quite the tool, isn’t he?
Is there one statement he made that isn’t an outright lie?
“I don’t think it was a distraction.” BZZT. Only if you think birtherism is more important than, oh, anything else at all.
“A lot of people love me for it.” BZZT. Love you? Really? Tool.
“I got him to produce his so-called birth certificate.” BZZT. Why he produced it is somewhat of a mystery to me, but Trump’s non-investigation investigation was certainly not the primary reason.
“or whatever it was” BZZT. It was a birth certificate. The canonical authority says so.
“I’d love to see Obama do great” BZZT. Ample evidence that you’re making up a constant stream of baloney for no purpose other than to work against him.
“I’d love to see him be a great president. It’s not going to work out that way” BZZT. His record is far better than you let on to. He may not be Lincolnesque, but in the end, I would say he will be rated in the higher ranks. More to the point, he will not be Trumpesque, much to the nation’s collective relief.
“Look, I offered him five million dollars, as you remember, and then in the last moments I even increased it to 50 million. I didn’t want see his marks. I just wanted to see his records.” BZZT. A complete circus stunt, through and through. What records would Obama have access to? How could he legally do a thing about this? And why has Trump never responded to Colbert’s offer?
“that would mean we would have a president for whom everything was fine.” BZZT. This is the divider between “nothing is fine” and “everything is fine”? Then rest easy, von Clownstick. The evidence is incontrovertible that he was born in the US.
‘He then suggested that Obama may have lied about actually being born in Kenya when applying for college because being from an African country would have helped him get into college and would have increased his chances for financial aid.” BZZT. This is an impossible scenario, as has been documented in many ways. It also, of course, is in complete opposition to his other idea, that Obama was not born in the US. But consistency is not the Donald’s strong suit.
“You might say it is a distraction, I tell you, I have more fans and more followers, I have millions of people coming up to me on the street saying, ‘Don’t give that fight up.'” BZZT. BZZT. BZZT. BZZT. (I don’t have anything to say here; I’m just pounding my face into the buzzer.)
“I am not giving it up. I am onto [the issue of growing] jobs, I am on to stopping China from ripping this country, because they are treating us very badly as a country. I am onto many other things.” BZZT. But you said this is the important thing! Not a distraction! Everything would be fine if only bleargh birther morble whoosh!
“I mean why would someone not take 50 million and give it to charity? That is a lot of money.” BZZT. Then do it. Don’t make it into some sort of ridiculous dare where you’re turning charity recipients into props for your combovery grandstanding. But, if that’s really the way you think things should be done, don’t forget to take Colbert’s money, too!
And what about those investigators, hah? Clearly that wasn’t any distraction — you wouldn’t dare stoop so low. So what did they find out?
Tool.
Even worse … I flat out guarantee, and would put fifty clams on it, that if a reporter asked him “Who is Mike Zullo?” he would have no idea. What kind of a crappy birther doesn’t know who Zullo the Clown is?
Maybe what Trump’s “investigators” “couldn’t believe what they [found]” was the sight of Zullo & Co shaking down nursing homes in HI.
Or not. Why would that disturb any member of an imaginary Trump operation? LOL!
He doesn’t care to know. He is using the birthers for his own purposes. He doesn’t want to be standing in the same trenches they believe they are standing in, he just wants to be known as one of their honorary members (honorary members don’t actually study at the place where they matriculate, and they aren’t expected to do core requirements there either). Trump seems to act as if he is above all of that.
They broke the mold when they cast The Donald, that’s for sure.
Trump talking about birth certificates, running for President, etc. = a new season of The Apprentice is starting soon
Rumor has it they beat the hell out of the mold maker, too.
Trump has said he isn’t interested in seeing what classes Obama took or the grades he got. Trump just wants to see the bio information on some of his college applications. Do they say Hawaii? or do they say Kenya?
Given that Obama’s high school transcripts are from Hawaii, I think you already have your answer.
I think the prevailing theory from Trump is that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii but lied in College and said he was born in Kenya to get special treatment.
Yeah, having been sunk by the birth certificate (even Trump apparently won’t go crazy enough to say that the State of Hawaii is in on it), he’s reverted to another old Internet rumor, in this case an April Fool joke.
Exactly WHAT “special treatment” John would that be..?
Please, I would be fascinated to see the wriggle, squirm and bloviation
Again this makes no sense. He would have gotten “special treatment” as a poor black american teenager. Pretending to be a foreign student gives him no distinct advantage.
foreigners always get special treatment when they go to college. Why do you think their so many foreigners in college.
That was high school. This is college. We know Obama said he was born in Kenya when he promoted his book. (The idea that his literary agent said it was a fact checking error and she made a mistake is simply BS. Somehow, that “error” went unnoticed for 17 years until Obama decided he wanted to run for President. In fact, the literary agent was suppose to go Peter Boyle’s show a couple of months to be confronted with this but she chickened out.)
See, there’s your problem there. Check with someone who went to College, and ask them if College just takes your word for things like this.
“By the way, College, I was born in Kenya, so please treat me specially.”
“Well, right-o, then! Here’s your ‘special treatment’ card. And don’t forget to have everyone call you by your stepfather’s Indonesian surname!”
It’s because the United States has the best higher education system in the world. Duh.
Donald Trump was also birfing when he gave a presentation at the National Press Club last week. I wrote about it, and about how he’s retroactively upped his offer to $50 million.
http://sky-captain.kinja.com/donald-trump-the-billionaire-presidential-candidate-wh-1582979562
Would one of the special treatments be paying out of state tuition fees? Wouldn’t he have to have a valid student visa to qualify as a foreign student?
That may be the ne plus ultra of DERP.
The only way that an international student can attend college (or high school) in the United States is if they are issued a Student Visa to enter and stay in the U.S. You can’t go to school without an F-1 or F-2 student visa and no one would grant you financial aid without the proper paperwork in place.
No one has ever found Barack Obama being issued a student visa. He was NEVER a foreign student in the U.S. and he attended Kindergarten through second grade and fifth grade through high school graduation in Hawaii.
In 1990, a full year before the literary agent’s error, there were newspaper articles about Barack Obama being elected president of the Harvard Law Review in all the major city newspapers. Every one of those articles said that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii.
Here’s a link to the article that was in the February 6, 1990 edition of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/1990/02/06/us/first-black-elected-to-head-harvard-s-law-review.html
Most of the foreign students I met in college had very wealthy parents paying their way. I knew a guy from West Africa who drove a Jaguar and had a designer wardrobe. I had a roommate from Iran who regularly went on extravagant shopping sprees.
Some foreign students are on scholarship, but not many.
But that the report’s fact. The bio in the book no doubt claim from obama himself.
From the original article by Breitbart:
“Acton, who spoke to Breitbart News by telephone, confirmed precise details of the booklet and said that it cost the agency tens of thousands of dollars to produce.”
“He indicated that while “almost nobody” wrote his or her own biography, the non-athletes in the booklet, whom “the agents deal[t] with on a daily basis,” were “probably” approached to approve the text as presented.”
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/17/The-Vetting-Barack-Obama-Literary-Agent-1991-Born-in-Kenya-Raised-Indonesia-Hawaii
If you read the various bios they are all written in the third person. Would Tip O’Neill calls himself “a legendary political figure”? Would Mark Olshaker refer to himself as “Mark Olshaker is a critically acclaimed novelist and award winning film maker whose fiction has been likened to “a collaboration between Robert Ludlum and Carl Sagan.”?
At the very least the finished bios were rewritten by someone other than the authors. According to the pamphlet “the text was edited by Miriam Goderich”. And we all know what she says about it.
So john, do you agree that you know about a thousand times as much about birtherism as that pathetic wannabe, the Donald? What’s that dead animal he wears on his head?
Yes, miriam Goderich response – “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”?
I thought he was just left over slurry that dried out and got puckered… I really don’t think you can accomplish that look of his with a mold, i’ll be happy to check with an expert I know, but I doubt it. Now moldy, that he’s got down to a fine art.
To me, Trump’s expression always says “Something stinks around here. Hope nobody figures out it’s me.”
What bio in which book? The one that was never written?
“no doubt,” eh?
An assertion without evidence. Typical.
Goderich is in a position to know. You are not.
What a vile little loser you are.
Where did you go to college?
There was no book to promote. It was never published. That is why the error went unnoticed. There was no reason to correct an error in a blurb for a book which was never published.
Never Never Land?
My recollection is that foreign students paid, at least, the out of state tuition and sometimes even more.
The ones I recall were rich kids: Nice cars and expensive apartments!!
I guess you will just have to add more names to the cast of thousands you already believe are in on the conspiracy. You are going to need a bigger curtain. Meanwhile the sane, rational people in the world will continue to ignore you.
Well, we all know he claimed to be from Hawaii when he was 6 years old in the Doc that birthers claim is 100% proof of fact except where it isn’t.
The whole basis of the smear is that Obama must have been doing something illegal to go to college as the son of a lower middle class family. I guess no-one ever heard of student loans.
I’ve known many foreign students when I went to college none of them got “special treatment” which leads me to believe you never went to college. define special treatment Jim.
There was no bio in a book. There hasn’t been a physical copy of the blurb ever presented. For all you know the blurb only exists online. The bios in his books say he was born in Hawaii.
One of he ones I knew was from Taiwan his father showed up with a briefcase of cash to pay the tuition.
Hey John…….you are quickly becoming the new Birther Loser Poster Boy. Congratulations !
john,
Obama’s first book was “Dreams From My Father”, and it came out in 1995. Nowhere in the book itself did Obama say he was born in Kenya, nor did he imply so. Nowhere in the promotion for the book did Obama say he was born in Kenya. Published reviews of the book, like the one in the L.A. Times on August 7, 1995, *specifically* stated that he was born in Hawaii.
When Obama was elected President of the Harvard Law Review in 1990, there were multiple newspaper articles printed about him, including in national papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Every one of them that referred to his birthplace said he was born in Hawaii. NONE of them said he was born in Kenya, or in any place *other* than Hawaii. The school paper of Obama’s alma mater, Columbia, also ran an article stating he was born in Hawaii.
After Obama moved back to Chicago, a couple of Chicago publications in 1993 profiled him as an up-and-comer. BOTH of them specifically said he was born in Hawaii.
And after Obama won a state senate seat in Illinois, which was after he published “Dreams”, he had an official webpage with a bio. And it specifically said he was born in Hawaii.
You can read all of these examples at the link below.
So john, what *exactly* are you suggesting everyone should believe about the Acton & Dystel bio, given that EVERY OTHER INSTANCE in the 1990s of Obama’s birthplace, both before and after 1991, said he was born in Hawaii?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/96756764/Barack-Obama-Was-Born-in-Hawaii
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Yes. It’s a variation on the theme: But for affirmative action, you’d be in the ghetto–where you belong.
LIke they do with Justice Sotomayor.
The idea is that Obama couldn’t be smart enough to be accepted into Harvard because we all know how much of a stupid loser the birthers think he is, except when birthers are freaking out because he’s a dictator who is taking their guns and throwing them in FEMA camps. LOL
I think John needs to answer for why he favors one over all these others.
Hey John (or Jim), I understand that you never went to college. You can get a free education in Norway, if you want one: http://matadornetwork.com/abroad/how-to-study-tuition-free-in-norway/
Obama was personally INTERVIEWED for several of the articles. Here’s an excerpt from the Los Angeles Times’ article from March 19, 1990. Note that Obama is quoted in the article and there is no mention of Kenya:
“The son of a Kenyan economist and an American anthropologist, Obama is a tall man with a quick, boyish smile whose fellow students rib him about his trademark tattered blue jeans.
“I come from a lot of worlds and I have had the unique opportunity to move through different circles,” Obama said. “I have worked and lived in poor black communities and I can translate some of their concerns into words that the larger society can embrace.”
His own upbringing is a blending of diverse cultures. Born in Hawaii, where his parents met in college, Obama was named Barack (blessed in Arabic) after his father. The elder Obama was among a generation of young Africans who came to the United States to study engineering, finance and medicine, skills that could be taken back home to build a new, strong Africa. In Hawaii, he married Obama’s mother, a white American from Wichita, Kan.
Two years later, Obama’s parents separated and he moved to a small village outside Jakarta, Indonesia, with his mother, an anthropologist. There, he spent his boyhood playing with the sons and daughters of rice farmers and rickshaw drivers, attending an Indonesian-speaking school, where he had little contact with Americans.
Every morning at 5, his mother would wake him to take correspondence classes for fear he would forget his English.”
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2008/09/barack-obama-ha.html
In the New York Times’ profile, which I provided a link to, Barack Obama was interviewed and directly quoted: “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.
”The fact that I’ve been elected shows a lot of progress,” Mr. Obama said today in an interview. ”It’s encouraging.”
”But it’s important that stories like mine aren’t used to say that everything is O.K. for blacks. You have to remember that for every one of me, there are hundreds or thousands of black students with at least equal talent who don’t get a chance,” he said, alluding to poverty or growing up in a drug environment.”
And with that, John will scurry back into his hole.
And besides, the book-jacket blurb would maybe be suspicious if BHO didn’t have a father with the same name who WAS born in Kenya. How hard is it to see that it was just a moment of laziness and/or sloppiness on the part of a probably-overworked junior publisher’s assistant?
Oh, I forgot: real hard, if your brain is infected with partisan hatred.
It wasn’t even a book jacket. It was a promotional pamphlet produced by the literary agent that was representing Obama. It was only sent out to prospective publishers. Probably no more than a few hundred people ever saw the pamphlet. The pamphlet also had the bio’s of 89 other authors they represented. The book being pushed in the bio was never published.
This is just another case of Slash-my-tires jy reporting things the way he wished they were instead of how they really are.
True. Or at least, the blurb in question was never used as a bio in a book.
I don’t believe that’s true. The Brietbart article that revealed this blurb (clearly a very important blurb, as its existence was completely unknown to friends and foes alike until the president had already been in office for 3-1/2 years) said they “obtained the booklet”, and printed images of it.
That’s sufficient for me to believe there’s a physical copy of the blurb. (Hint, hint, birthers)
However, again, to underscore your point: it should not be mischaracterized. It was not a “book bio” — it was a promotional description of one of dozens of authors or authors-to-be that Acton & Dystel represented. It existed in one place ever in physical form — this brochure. The content of the brochure was later pulled into a web site, where it languished in obscurity for years. As web content often does.
In Birferstan, a used-car salesman becomes a master detective.
In Birferstan, a temp clerk becomes a Senior Elections Official.
In Birferstan, a copier salesman becomes an expert on forged documents.
And in Birferstan, a one-off poorly-edited bio becomes Irrefutable Holy Writ.
Let’s not go to Birferstan; ’tis a silly place.
Additionally, the Breitbart article in question didn’t reprint merely the Obama bio, or just the page that his appeared on, but also scans of the front cover, the inside front cover, and two other interior pages, as well as written descriptions of the physical booklet and other information not present in the scans.
I have one!
I Birferstan a DUI attorney becomes an expert in Constitutional law.
In Birferstan, a mail-order bride/correspondence-school “lawyer”/ dental malpractitioner becomes a “civil rights attorney.”
I have a few!
In Birtherstan, all judges, except for that one honest judge, are traitors!
In Birtherstan, chanting for the death your fellow citizens means you’re a patriot!
In Birtherstan, lead paint chips are the best candy that there is, was or ever will be!
So what? No bearing on eligibility, no impeachable offense and he’s not running again. What gives?
So a conspiracy theorist with some pride would maybe say “who’s Prez today, the father or the son?”, like Yoda said in Episode II: “Who was defeated, the master or the apprentice?”. 😉
Hehe. Punahoe Academy where Obama attended school in Hawaii was a feeder school for the Ivy League.
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In Birtherstan, birthers are entitled to be treated completely differently than every other plaintiff and plaintiff’s attorney that appear before the Court. In Birtherstan, plaintiffs and plaintiff attorneys may willfully or negligently break every procedural and ethical rule in “the book”, and may contemptuously wield baseless accusations at the Federal District Court itself–all essentially without penalty.
In Birtherstan, birthers are entitled to the result they seek. An “honest” Court will assert jurisdiction it doesn’t have, and will ignore “technicalities” like service of process or standing or stating a claim upon which relief can be granted or the rules of evidence. In Birtherstan, no judge is honest, no judge has any honor or integrity, unless the judge ignores all due process of law and precedent, and instead rules in the Birthers’ favor.
In Birtherstan, patriotism is loyalty to Birtherstan. Anything else is a manifestation of treason to the U.S.A. , not to mention manifestation of loyalty to Satan.
In Birtherstan, the term We the People means We the Birthers. It does not include the other 300,000,000-more-or-less citizens of the U.S.A. In short, where the Constitution uses the term “the People”, it is only referring to the people of Birtherstan. It does not include the rest of us. In Birtherstan, there is a never-ending litany of reasons why we are not really the People and should be hung.
In Birtherstan, the Birtherstan religion is the established religion of the U.S.A. In Birtherstan, anything else is a manifestation of hating G-d and persecuting the faithful Birtherstanians who–unlike the rest of us–are uniquely endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.
In Birtherstan, a civil rights attorney is one who lobbies and litigates against the civil rights of others.
Hey now. Sarah Palin has told us in no uncertain terms that Birtherstan is “the REAL America.”
It gives them a justification for their hatred that:
a. Can’t be taken away by courts and/or contrary evidence, and
b. They don’t have to hide because it’s socially unacceptable.