All My Sons

I normally do not post the semi foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Obama fare that seems at times to make up between 50 and 75 percent of the mainstream conservative Web. Particularly in the last three weeks, there has been an unceasing stream of supposedly devastating revelations about him. Consider the news that for 16 years, from 1991 to 2007, he had his literary agent post a biographical note about him that said he was born in Kenya. Conservatives are tremendously stirred up by this, charging that Obama made the born-in-Kenya claim when he thought it would help advance his career as an anti-colonialist author, but reverted to born-in-Hawaii when he began to run for president. They seem to have missed the point that when Obama ran for the U.S. Senate in 2004, when the born-in-Kenya bio was still posted at his literary agent’s website, he surely had a campaign bio that said he was born in Hawaii. And of course in his famous keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention he referred to his (at least presumably) American birth to a “mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya.”

So what, in the final analysis, will Obama’s born-in-Kenya claim, as weird and suspect as it is, amount to? It is not going to drag Obama down. It is not going to lead to that magical moment when Obama is suddenly, totally discredited and melts into a puddle in front of everyone’s eyes—which is what the conservatives clearly are hoping.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree of course with the mainstream conservatives that Obama is horrible in myriad ways and I hope with all my force that he is deposed in November, though I do not expect that to happen, and I certainly don’t expect it to happen on the basis of such odd (and probably never to be resolved) tidbits as the “born-in-Kenya” claim.

However, sometimes there are things about Obama that are so weird that even I cannot minimize them. Last week Thomas Lifson of American Thinker wrote about the fact, as reported by Terence Jeffrey, that

In two campaign speeches over the last two days, President Barack Obama has twice mistakenly mentioned “my sons” when defending his administration’s regulation requiring virtually all health-care plans in the United States to provide women, without any fees or co-pay, with sterilizations and all Food and Drug Administration-approved contraceptives, including those that can cause abortions.

Lifson comments:

I am gobsmacked, as the Brits like to say. How does one speak in public about sons if one is not a parent of male offspring? This is not the sort of slip of the tongue when a similar but wrong word is substituted for the right one….

But what kind of brain freeze or derangement leads someone to refer to my sons, when two daughters are the only fruit of conception one has created?

If George W. Bush [had] spoken of his sons in public twice, can you even begin to imagine the ridicule the likes of David Letterman, Bill Maher, and Jon Steward would heap on him? But with BHO, all one hears is the sound of crickets chirping.

My best guess is that the strain is showing. Obama likes to portray himself as “no drama Obama, always cool and in control. I think he is just good at maintaining the facade. Inside, he may be coming unglued.

Now the notion that Obama is falling apart, that he is desperate, is a constant trope of the semi-foaming at the mouth conservatives; the more power, indeed dictatorial power, Obama exerts (such as with the birth control mandate), the more the conservatives desperately cry out that he is “desperate.” But here, for once, I can’t immediately dismiss the notion that he is coming unglued. The “sons” references are truly strange.

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James P. writes:

Obama was obviously referring to Trayvon and the other countless victims of white racism, who are the spiritual fruit of his loins if not the genetic kind.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 29, 2012 10:52 AM | Send