Democracy Has Prevailed.

May 27, 2012

Jack Kelly Sunday

Jack's a birther.

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.

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?
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.

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.

"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.]
Huh.  Omitting some important facts there, Jack.  Including them would have undermined your (false) argument,  doncha think?

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.

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.]
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?

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.

11 comments:

EdHeath said...

No, no, it is a vast east coast intellectual conspiracy.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

Miriam Goderich explains it all.
.
Which is why she (like Elizabeth Warren) just releases a press statement and now will not comment any further.

A 'Fact Checking Error'? Dystel & Goderich Ask Writers to Submit Their Own Bios

When Obama falsely claimed to have been born in Kenya, you said it was a "typo." Why don't you know what a typo is?

EdHeath said...

HTTT, maybe I am missing something but I don't see any smoking gun in that piece. We don't know what Obama wrote, only what Goderich says she transcribed, which she says she transcribed incorrectly.

But then you are taking a piece from Breitbart. While it does not appear to be biased, let's remember all the times you have whined about Dayvoe referencing Media Matters. Remember we know that an edited tape came from Breitbard, which he claims he received edited, that totally distorted what Shirley Sherrod said some years ago. At the very least, Breitbart did not do any sort of due diligence. Your quoting from his site shows you support lying to people.

Conservative Mountaineer said...

The Bio..

"Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago’s South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White."

How can anyone, with a straight face, say it was a "typo"? Unless they were/are a total effin' incompetent. Mriam, you're a tool.. bought and paid for by the Muzzie dog-eating Kenyan. FUBO.

From American Thinker..
"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me - an agency assistant at the time," Miriam Goderich, now a named partner in the literary agency, Dystel & Goderich, wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News, which was then picked up ABC 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."

This confession rings false to the point of preposterous for any number of reasons. Let us start with the obvious. At the time, 1991, the Acton & Dystel agency listed 90 clients, Obama among its least significant. How likely is it that Goderich would have remembered enough about a 1991 "error" to know it was hers, especially since it went uncorrected through several revisions until changed in 2007? To make this claim credible, there would have to be an existing paper trail leading to an Obama submission in which he lists an Hawaiian birth. I am confident that there is no such submission.

Former publisher Tom Lipscomb does not buy Goderich's explanation for a New York minute. "As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE," writes Lipscomb emphatically on Power Line. "It is the ONLY case I have ever heard of in which an editorial assistant INVENTED a biographical detail. I have heard of typos, wrong dates, misspellings of names. But to pick a really weird country of origin like Kenya for an author?"

The Breitbart people followed up with a piece by Steve Boman, a Jane Dystel client in the mid-1990s, who noted, "All material she used in our proposals came directly from me and my writing partner." This is standard. In the eight books I have written under my own name, I have reviewed all biographical information sent out about me either by agent or publisher. Like most authors, I have let a little fluff pass, but not much.

Conservative Mountaineer said...

Oh, Ed.. you spelled Brietbart incorrectly.

Neener, neener.

EdHeath said...

CM, you are right ... I spelled Breitbart. Maybe I was projecting, since Breitbart seems like a author of fiction, not a reporter of fact.

CM, are you saying that this Author's pamphlet actually means anything at all? That it trumps the short and long form birth certificates, newspaper notices and family testimony. Or are you just blathering to preen?

EdHeath said...

er, I spelled Breitbart wrong.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

That it trumps the short and long form birth certificates, newspaper notices and family testimony.
Elizabeth Warren's family claims she is a Cherokee. That does not make it so.

The pamphlet shows Obama is willing to lie about his past when it is convenient.

totally distorted what Shirley Sherrod said some years ago.
No, You are repeating the Media Matters narrative. It did not distort what she said.
The "edited" video failed to show her she changed her mind about "his own kind would take care of him."

Rush changed his mind about Sandra Fluke being a slut. Does he get the same benefit of a doubt as Shirley Sherrod?

EdHeath said...

HTTT, your statement about Obama is nonsensical. What would Obama gain claiming to have been born in Kenya? Does that make his story more compelling than having been born in a mixed race family and having his (Kenyan) father leave the family at an early age?

Meanwhile, did Obama produce the author's pamphlet? Did he send it to the printers? Do you know for a fact each author's bio was submitted as a digital file and not a printed version to be transcribed (not that even a digital file couldn't be edited)? Why do you assume that the original version is correct when the people who produced say it was mistaken?

Meanwhile, I can totally see what you are saying about Shirley Sherrod. She is obviously a die hard racist, as all of the NAACP is, since the only racism that exists now is that of black people towards white people. As shown in the unedited version of the tape where she talks about feeling like the white guy had a superior attitude towards her, but she went and helped him anyway and they became friends. A total racist, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod

Rush said he should have chosen different words when he described Sandra Fluke. He said he didn't mean to attack her personally (when he said she was having so much sex he was surprised she could still walk). He never said (in anything I read) that he changed his mind about her. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rush_Limbaugh%E2%80%93Sandra_Fluke_controversy

I still maintain that the obvious biases shown in Breitbart's site, or American Thinker, Powerline, World Net Daily are all so biased in everything they that you insult us when you link to them. After all, they deny science. But that's OK, you show you total lack of a willingness to have an actual discussion, you just want to go on unrelated tangents (like Elizabeth Warren) to distract from the fact you are totally wrong about Obama.

Social Justice NPC Anti-Paladin™ said...

He never said (in anything I read) that he changed his mind about her.
From the Wiki article you linked
Yeah, that's right. Pimp's not the right word. Okay, so she's not a slut. She's "round heeled". I take it back

since the only racism that exists now is that of black people towards white people.

Only white people/crackers are racist.

“A RACIST: A racist is one who is both privileged and socialized on the basis of race by a white supremacist (racist) system. The term applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States, regardless of class, gender, religion, culture or sexuality. By this definition, people of color cannot be racists, because as peoples within the U.S. system, they do not have the power to back up their prejudices, hostilities, or acts of discrimination. (This does not deny the existence of such prejudices, hostilities, acts of rage or discrimination.)"

EdHeath said...

HTTT, you understand the concept of "round heeled", don't you? If you want to hold Rush Limbaugh up as an example of a man with an enlightened attitude towards women, be my guest. You define yourself by the topics you raise.

I think the website you linked to about the definition of racism is holding it up as unacceptable. Anyway, I was repeating statements I have seen in comments by people like you, perhaps even you yourself.