Opinion: Counterfeit Kenyan279 comments

How's this for deus ex machina? Breitbart.com "has obtained a promotional booklet produced in 1991 by Barack Obama's then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, which touts Obama as 'born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.' "

Of course Obama wasn't born in Kenya. We've all seen the birth certificates that verify he was born in Hawaii. The president was pressured into releasing them by conspiracy nuts who theorized that he was actually born overseas and therefore ineligible to the presidency, which requires one to be a "natural-born citizen." (Birth in the U.S. is almost always a sufficient condition to make one a natural-born citizen. But as we explained in 2009, under the immigration statutes in effect at Obama's birth, in his case it was a necessary condition as well, because his mother was 18, his father was an alien, and his parents were married.)

Now it turns out that a literary agency acting on Obama's behalf claimed more than 20 years ago that he was born in Kenya. Obama's case ends up looking very much like that of Elizabeth Warren, who early in her career dubiously claimed to be "Native American."

Here's the full text of the Obama blurb: "Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation. He served as project coordinator in Harlem for the New York Public Interest Research Group, and was Executive Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago's South Side. His commitment to social and racial issues will be evident in his first book, Journeys in Black and White."

If only the working title had been "Bow Wow Chow," it would be perfect.

The blurb contains at least one other error. Barack Obama Sr. was never Kenya's finance minister. According to "Dreams From My Father," the elder Obama "got a job with the Ministry of Finance" sometime during his son's last two years in high school, which would have been in the late 1970s. Other accounts describe him as having been a "senior economist" at the ministry. The elder Obama died in a 1982 car accident.

PoliticalWire.com quotes Miriam Goderich, a partner in what is now known as Dystel & Goderich Literary Management, who explains the error as follows: "This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time. There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."

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A page from Obama's history.

Goderich doesn't specify if she failed to catch the error or if she introduced the error by "correcting" the statement that he was born in Hawaii. Either way, the statement that it was a "fact-checking error" begs the question: What was the source of the false information about his birthplace? (A 1990 New York Times story about Obama's election to the law review could have been the source of the error about his father's position, but it correctly identified his birthplace as Hawaii.)

One innocent possibility is that the young Obama himself was for a time under the misapprehension that he was born in Kenya--a parallel to Warren's assertion that she simply believed the "family lore" about her Indian heritage. Although one is physically present for one's own birth, one is not in any meaningful sense a witness to it. Obama, like the rest of us, knows he was born in Hawaii only because others have told him so and official documents say so.

In any case, Obama's putative foreign birth fit in with the image his agents were trying to sell: that of a young man whose exotic background gave him a pertinent perspective on "social and racial issues." Obama, like Warren, was a product of elite academia, which places a great premium on such "diversity." When tales of exotic origins become a kind of currency, it shouldn't surprise us to find that prominent people, when they were young and ambitious, turn out to have passed counterfeits.

The Wright Stuff Yesterday the New York Times reported that "a group of high-profile Republican strategists" was "working with a conservative billionaire," Joe Ricketts, "on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the 'super PAC' era":

The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.

The "plan," according to the Times, was only "one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts." A copy "was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone."

Yesterday afternoon, the Times reported on its website, Brian Baker, head of the super PAC, released a statement disavowing the idea: "Not only was this plan merely a proposal--one of several submitted to the Ending Spending Action Fund by third-party vendors--but it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take." The reporters counter that "in an interview on Wednesday evening, Mr. Baker did not reject the contents of the advertising proposal."

Meanwhile, Romney also rejected the idea. Politico quotes the presumptive GOP nominee: "I want to make it very clear, I repudiate that effort. I think it's the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the futures and about issues and about a vision for America." But Romney also "muddied his own message," Politico writes, "when asked about a February appearance on Sean Hannity's radio show in which he brought up Wright":

"I'm actually--I'm not familiar with precisely, exactly what I said. But I stand by what I said, whatever it was. And with regards to--I'll go back and take a look at what was said there," he said.

"I stand by what I said, whatever it was" sounds like a foolish statement, though one could argue that it treats the subject with an exactly appropriate degree of seriousness.

The Obama campaign sent out an email titled "You've seriously got to read this," using the abortive proposal as a fund-raising pitch of its own: "[It] shows in vivid and gruesome detail what the President and all of us are up against. . . . This is going to be worse than we could have imagined. President Obama needs your help to stop it before it starts."

For those who've forgotten, Jeremiah Wright, whom Barack Obama used to call his "spiritual mentor," is a practitioner of "liberation theology," which turns out to mean hateful anti-American leftism. His best-known pronouncements are "God damn America!" and "America's chickens are coming home to roost," the latter a reference to the 9/11 attacks, just days after they occurred. Even the New York Times editorial page acknowledges that Wright's views are "clearly racist."

Thanks to the New York Times, Wright has been all over the news for the past couple of days. And it didn't cost Joe Ricketts a dime.

Journalism and Junk Science This embarrassing correction was appended Wednesday to a Sunday New York Times op-ed by William Deresiewicz, "an essayist, critic and the author of "A Jane Austen Education":

An earlier version of this article misstated the findings of a 2010 study on psychopathy in corporations. The study found that 4 percent of a sample of 203 corporate professionals met a clinical threshold for being described as psychopaths, not that 10 percent of people who work on Wall Street are clinical psychopaths. In addition, the study, in the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law, was not based on a representative sample; the authors of the study say that the 4 percent figure cannot be generalized to the larger population of corporate managers and executives.

At the Daily Beast, Edward Jay Epstein has more:

As Ryan Holiday, author of Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, explained to me, "Headline-grabbing trend manufacturing such as this now dominates the pseudo-news cycle on the Web." Welcome to the Internet, which is not known for its source-checking.Unfortunately, it is then only a short leap to the so-called newspaper of record, which was happy to serve up to the public this non-existing study, which like much else demonizes financiers, as a scientific finding. As a result, we now have mad men of Wall Street running amok in the public imagination.

It seems to us it's quite unreasonable to blame the Times's error on "the Web." The Weekly Standard's Andrew Ferguson documents how several recent books purporting to prove scientifically that liberals are better than conservatives are based on pure hokum. He begins by noting that there was a spate of similar books just after World War II. Journalists have been regurgitating junk science since long before the Internet was commercialized.

Metaphor Alert "The False Equivalency Police are dancing on Americans Elect's grave."--Matt Miller, Washington Post, May 18

Out on a Limb

• "Meat And Masculinity: Men May Avoid Vegetarian Options Over Manly Perception of Meat"--headline, Puffington Host, May 17
• " 'U.S. Department of Peace' May Never Get Its Chance"--headline, Washington Post, May 18

We Blame George W. Bush "Who Is to Blame for Greece's Crisis?"--headline, Guardian website (London), May 18

We Blame Global Warming "For Dems, Bush Is to Blame--Forever and Ever"--headline, Washington Examiner, May 18

Uh-Oh, She's on the Warpath "Elizabeth Warren Goes After Wall Street in Wake of Native American Flap"--headline, ABCNews.com, May 17

Elizabeth Warren Was Going to Attend, but She Thought It Was on May 32nd "Annual Powwow Returns to Pocomoke"--headline, Daily Times (Salisbury, Md.), May 18

Not Smack, Though "Anti-Obama Ad Flap Deals Blow to Wrigley Field Rehab Plan"--headline, Chicago Tribune, May 18

Longest Books Ever Written "Obama's Biggest Mistake in the World"--headline, BuzzFeed.com, May 18

I Don't Want Your War Machines / I Don't Need Your Ghetto Scenes "America's Women Can't Be Trusted"--headline, Slate.com, May 17

This Is What Happens When Women Marry Down "Superior Woman's 'Ex-Husband Sale' Stops Traffic"--headline, Duluth (Minn.) Tribune, May 17

To Serve Man "California Chefs in a Stew Over Foie Gras Ban"--headline, TurkishPress.com, May 18

How It Got a Frying Pan He'll Never Know "Man Fights Off Mountain Lion With Frying Pan"--headline, PetersensHunting.com, May 16

The Lonely Lives of Scientists "Deep in the Ocean Floor Scientists Find Life Buried for Millions of Years"--headline, Houston Chronicle website, May 18

Whatever You Do, Don't Look Up "Exclusive: Male Student Suspended for Wearing a Skirt"--headline, WRC-TV website (Washington), May 18

Hey, Kids! What Time Is It?

• "Time for Nation to Declare War on Being Stupid"--headline, Ironton (Ohio) Tribune, May 18
• "Food Revolution Day"--headline, Puffington Host, May 17

Questions Nobody Is Asking

• "Does Your Cat Have a Drug Problem?"--headline, BuzzFeed.com, May 17
• "Can John Edwards Come Back?"--headline, ABCNews.com, May 17
• "Could McCain Have the Winning Strategy to Win Over Latino Voters?"--headline, FoxNews.com, May 17

Answers to Questions Nobody Is Asking "How to Have Your Big Gay Moment"--headline, Puffington Host, May 17

Look Out Below! "Obama Has Lost His Grip on the Youth Vote"--headline, Daily Telegraph website (London), May 18

It's Always in the Last Place You Look

• "Blacks Lose Majority in the District"--headline, Washington Examiner website, May 18
• "Census Shows Whites Lose US Majority Among Babies"--headline, Associated Press, May 17

News of the Tautological "UK Surveillance Program Could Expose Private Lives"--headline, Associated Press, May 18

News of the Oxymoronic " 'Rare' Genetic Variants Surprisingly Common"--headline, BioscienceTechnology.com, May 18

Bottom Stories of the Day

• "Al Gore Has a Girlfriend: California Donor and Activist Elizabeth Keadle"--headline, Washington Post website, May 17
• " 'Princelings' in China Use Family Ties to Gain Riches"--headline, New York Times, May 18

Huh Huh Huh, He Said 'Ayrault' "France's new Socialist government . . . has created a completely different problem in the Middle East," CNN reports from Abu Dhabi:

The prime minister's last name, it turns out, sounds like an Arabic slang word for penis.His name is Jean-Marc Ayrault. . . .The name has left broadcasters trying to determine if they should pronounce it as the prime minister does--"ai-roh"--or if they should resort to voicing the "L" and "T" in the written word.An editor at the pan-Arabic network Al-Arabiya said the network would pronounce the name in the French way."We cannot change names, so we have to deal with it and live with it. We have to be professional," said the editor, who asked not to be named because of the subject matter.

It's easy for us in the West to forget how much more advanced our culture is than the rest of the world's. After all, Americans have been inured to this sort of thing since the 1990s and "Beavis and Butt-head."

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(Carol Muller helps compile Best of the Web Today. Thanks to Judah Spetner, Mark King, Randall Woodman, T. Young, Michele Schiesser, Lynn Bateman, Steve Thompson, Timothy Knowlton, Dan Goldstein, David Hallstrom, John Sanders, Ed Grinberg, Eric Jensen, Kyle Kyllan, John Bobek, Bob Acker, Jeryl Bier, Richard Wong, Bob Wukitsch, Merv Benson, Johnny Ray, Zack Russ, Rod Pennington, Bart Borkosky, Dan Draney, Joe Dougherty, Imo Umoren and Monty Kireger. If you have a tip, write us at opinionjournal@wsj.com, and please include the URL.)