This week's Post-Gazette column, in which Jack tries yet again to "prove" liberal media bias with an oh so careful selection of supporting evidence, is difficult to refute. How would one do it? By showing negative Obama coverage in the media? No matter how much you find, it won't refute Jack's carefully selected evidence. Like trying to prove Nixon had nothing to do with the Kennedy Assassination. I mean he was in Dallas that day, right??
He said/he said arguments like this never get anywhere.
So I am leaping over them. I wanted to point out Jack's birtherism:
Barack Obama was born in Kenya, according to a booklet of clients his literary agency produced in 1991. "This was nothing more than a fact-checking error by me," said Miriam Goderich, who was an editorial assistant then and now is a partner in the firm.You'll note a couple of things; that Jack never actually tells the truth: - he never says that Obama was actually born in Hawaii and that Obama never actually told Goderich that he was born in Kenya.
Her "fact checking error" went undetected until Mr. Obama began his campaign for president. In the interim, the biography was revised three times.
The policy at Dystel & Goderich, as at most literary agencies, is that authors provide biographical briefs. How plausible is it that Mr. Obama failed to notice for 17 years that his birthplace was listed incorrectly?
Why would Mr. Obama say he was born in Kenya? A clue is his refusal to release his college transcripts, thinks Roger Simon, author of 11 detective novels. Did Mr. Obama claim to be a foreign student to claim a scholarship or slot only for foreign nationals?
How do I know that last part? It's from Godrich herself:
Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.Huh. Omitting some important facts there, Jack. Including them would have undermined your (false) argument, doncha think?
"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more." [emphasis added.]
Birther.
So, according to Jack, Obama was telling people in the very early 90s that he was born in Kenya.
Except he didn't. Take a look at this from about a year before Godrich's "fact-checking error." It's from the New York Times and so it had a much much wider audience than that of the Acton & Dystel (not Dystel & Goderich as Jack Kelly incorrectly asserts) bio:
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.If Obama was looking to score some favor by lying about his birthplace, wouldn't he have done it in the pages of the Times?
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. [Emphasis added.]
And if he knew that the truth was already in The Times, then why would he lie to Godrich?
Difficult questions for a birther to answer. The easy answer, of course, is that it was a fact-checking error on Miriam Godrich's part that no one bothered to fix for a long time and that this birther conspiracy (like all the others) is false.
Which was is closer to reality? And which way was does Jack go?
Birther.
