Trival Pursuit: Kenyan Edition

IANAB, but it is entertaining.

Promotional booklets produced in 1991 by Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, states that Obama was “born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”, because…

A) he wrote it

B) his agent did it as a joke.

C) it was a collaborative effort, manufactured for street cred.

D) it was a simple mistake which no one noticed, and subsequently was repeated a few times by others who didn’t think anything of it.

E) it’s a parallel universe back-story that popped into our reality through a dimensional gateway.

F) it’s a vast [del]racist teabagger[/del] right wing conspiracy

G) George Bush

H) Hitler

I) Robot

J) Crew

K) guise, enuff kidding around. What is the OP talking about?

L) Dorado

This.

M) Breitbart being a douchebag from beyond the grave.

N) terprising attempt by Breitbart.com to make a mountain out of an error, and by IntelliQ to keep this story going.

Is this really an Elections thread?

O) MG An error? Like 'whoops, I accidentally typed ‘Kenya’ error?

Since the passage in question also contains another obvious error (from kd99’s link):

Barack Obama Sr. was a civil service economist in the Kenyan Ministry of Economic Planning and Development, not a “finance minister”.

Not sure what you mean by “…was repeated a few times by others who didn’t think anything of it”, though. As far as I can tell, even the Birthers have never brought this up.

And this.

P) Attribution of malice to that which can adequately explained by . . . well, in this case, simple carelessness.

Q) uite ludicrous.

Ok again…carelessness? They accidentally said that Obama was born in Kenya and his father was a finance minister?

It’s material from his literary agent! I don’t think he was born in Kenya, but both he and his agent obviously thought it would make a better bio if he was, ditto having his father be a finance minister.

That’s not ‘careless’…it’s a calculated lie to inflate his bio. But it still does nothing to bolster the arguments of the birthers.

Who exactly is the audience they were targetting with this lie? Book buyers in Kenya?:confused:

I’m not a birther, far from it, but the lie to pad his bio doesn’t make much sense either.

These popped up through Drudge today, he’s having a field day…

2007 client list

2010 Kenyan newspaper

There’s plenty more surely. Im too lazy too dig. One can also just chalk it up to a “few” considering the massive amount of writing that’s been done about him in the past X amount of years.

It’s too much of a stretch to believe that material that was

[ul]
[li]meant to get books sold, [/li][li]probably composed with the assistance of or with information provided by Obama[/li][li]proofread by probably yet another party [/li][li]probably approved by O[/li][/ul]…can be classified as a mistake.

Obama wrote an actual autobiography where he gives his correct nationality and his fathers correct profession. He pretty clearly wasn’t trying to perpetuate a lie. Braingluttons link explains the source of the error, an assistant at the agency made a mistake, presumably because in 1991 no one really cared where Obama was born.

This ^^^

Oh, well if someone who was an assistant at the agency 20 years ago says it ws just a mistake…not sure how anybody could question that.

It was, after all, right there in the Huffington Post, an outlet known for it’s skepticism of Obama.

R)epublicans love this kind of stuff. It takes the minds of the electorate off of their obfuscatory tactics.