Why Sailer doubts the Kenya story; and a further link between Obama and President Kennedy

Steve Sailer back in September dismissed the idea that Obama had been born in Kenya. His reasoning was that Hawaii and Kenya are on opposite sides of the globe, air travel between them would have required a long, exhausting trip with many flights, and it is inconceivable that a woman in an advanced stage of pregnancy would have wanted to put herself through such a grueling experience.

The argument doesn’t strike me as definitive. Let’s assume that Stanley Ann became pregnant in early November 1960, nine months before little Barack’s birth on August 4, 1961. She and Barack Sr. married in February 1961. Classes at the University of Hawaii would have ended around the end of May, when she was just short of seven months’ pregnant. Being adventurous (this gal defined adventurous, right?), she may well have wanted to travel with her husband to his country for an extended visit over the summer. Thus they may have flown to Kenya right after the end of the school year when she was just short of seven months pregnant, not when she was eight or just short of nine months pregnant.

By the way, assuming that Barack was conceived in early November, he may well have been conceived on the day John F. Kennedy was elected president, November 8, 1960. How about that for Democratic Party hagiographic symbolism? Just as there was that photo of a smiling President Kennedy shaking hands with the eager, 16-year-old Bill Clinton, as though Kennedy was passing his charism to his future successor, I can imagine some art work showing the spirit of Barack Obama appearing in the world at the moment of Kennedy’s election.

- end of initial entry -

Ken Hechtman writes from Canada:

Never going to happen.

The pro-choice people would go crazy if we even suggested spirits appear in the world at the moment of conception.

LA replies:

Haha, hadn’t thought of that. But you’re forgetting that from the point of view of liberals/pro-choicers, the personhood of the fetus is a function of the desires of the parents. If the parents don’t want the baby, then the fetus in the womb is not a person. But if they want it, then it’s a person from conception. Obama was wanted by his parents, and also he’s a messiah wanted by the whole world, the One we have been waiting for. Therefore he was both a person and a spirit from conception.

Ken Hechtman writes:

The Conservatives actually forced that conversation on us with Bill C-484 last year.

The political debate on abortion, largely dormant in Canada, is being revived because of a bill that would make it a criminal offence for someone to attack a woman with the intent of killing her unborn child.

Bill C-484, which will receive second reading next week, is designed to cover what its proponents say is a gap in the Criminal Code: taking the life of a fetus against the will of the mother.

The conservatives took one of the classic anti-abortion wedge arguments (“If a fetus is simply a non-human mass of cells belonging to the mother’s body then is kicking a woman in the stomach and making her miscarry exactly the same crime as hitting her in the nose and making her bleed? If not, why not?”). It’s a powerful argument, because gut reaction even among liberals says, no it’s not the same, while pro-choice dogma carried to its logical conclusion has to defend the proposition that it is the same. The conservatives wrote it up in the form of a criminal law and let it loose among us like a cat among the pigeons.

This bill was never going to pass. It was a private member’s bill. It was going to die in committee before third reading like all private members’ bills do. The point was to get the feminists organizing campaigns against it that just struck everyone else as wrong on a gut level.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 10, 2008 08:54 AM | Send