Timeline: Exposing The Original Birther; Award For Most Absurd Lie To Protect A pResident

Birthers are those disgusting people who claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, in order to gain political or economic advantage.

The original birther seems to have been Barack Obama, who apparently told his literary agents in 1991 that he was born in Kenya.

The agency went online in 1998, and still listed him as born in Kenya.

By 2005 the profile was updated, and still said he was born in Kenya.

BARACK OBAMA is the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, and was the dynamic keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He was born in Kenya to an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, and was raised in Indonesia, Hawaii, and Chicago. His first book, DREAMS FROM MY FATHER: A STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE, is a New York Times bestseller.

As of February 2, 2007, the profile still said he was born in Kenya

One week later, on February 10, 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for President

Saturday, February 10, 2007; 3:28 PM 

Text of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s speech, as prepared for delivery Saturday in Springfield, Ill., and released by his campaign, in which he announced he is seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2008:

His profile was changed within a few weeks to say that he was born in Hawaii. [...] More @ Real Science.

IF YOU WANT A LITERARY AGENCY THAT WILL LIE FOR YOU OUTRAGEOUSLY TRY DYSTEL AND GOEDERICH

A limp statement was squirted out yesterday after the Breitbart item appeared that a woman who worked at the time as a low level assistant at Acton and Dystel, then Obama’s agent (and is now the Goederich who is Dystel’s partner) was now taking full responsibility for making an “error.”

As someone who has run a number of top bestseller publishers, I think this is an amazing MIRACLE.

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?

NEVER.

After all where do the bios come from? We don’t make them up. And neither did Dystel & Goederich. They come from the authors, like Obama. No one has ever invented a detail like that, and the authors usually review them and scream like hell if we get them wrong.

Can Dystel and Goedrich show us the correction appeal letter they got from Obama about the Kenya birth in over 10 years of using this bio? Or any other incident from any other publisher or agent that is similar to this “error?”

I really don’t care where Obama was born. The continued degeneration of the press in passing on hilarious nonsense as fact is a lot more serious problem. Give Dystel & Goederich the Rose Mary Woods Memorial Award for the Most Absurd Lie to Protect a President of the Year.

Thomas Lipscomb
Senior Fellow
Annenberg Center for the Digital Future (USC)
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Powerline.