Seeing Is Believing?

People believe what they want to believe.

In TIME magazine for August 23, James Poniewozik wrote a column headlined, “The Myth of Fact. Despite all the evidence, many still believe Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.”

Poniewozik wrote, “. . . according to a CNN-Opinion Research poll, 27% of Americans say Obama was probably or definitely not born in this country. There’s a political divide – 41% of Republicans believe it – but a not insignificant 15% of Democrats do as well. And they believe it despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that the rumor has been repeatedly and thoroughly debunked by the press (and dismissed by Hawaii’s Republican governor).”

Barack Obama was born August 4, 1961, at Kapi’olani Medical Center, in Honolulu, Hawaii.

My brother showed me an official-looking birth certificate distributed all over the internet, claiming that Obama was born in Kenya. This is a fraud. It correctly names his parents. His father was Barack Obama Sr., who was born in Kenya. His mother was Ann Dunham, who was born in Wichita, Kansas, shortly after her father went overseas with the U.S. Army to fight with Patton during World War II.

I plowed through 591 pages of David Remnick’s “The Bridge”, subtitled “The Life and Rise of Barack Obama.” Friends tell me they don’t have time to read the entire book, so I will cherry pick a few passages for them.

Obama Sr. abandoned his wife and child when Barack Jr. was two years old. According to Remnick, “But as a child, Obama experienced his family as a small unit dominated not so much by the absence of his African father as by the presence of his mother, Ann Dunham.”

Ann Dunham never spent a day of her life in Kenya. And Barack Jr. knew nothing about Kenya until he was a freshman at Occidental College in California, where he met a fellow student who lived there as an American volunteer, and who told Barack — for the first time – about his father’s African tribe.