The New York Times has discovered yet another way to cheerlead the “authenticity” of the paper’s favorite presidential candidate – not just in this election, but perhaps in any election.
The “newspaper of record” managed to develop a comprehensive story that speculates Barack Obama, who claims, without substantiation, to be the son of a white mother and a Kenyan visiting student, has roots in slavery – like so many other African-Americans.
The irony of this claim is that the slave genealogy comes not from his alleged father, but his alleged mother.
But the real irony of the story is that the public still really has no proof of who Obama’s biological parents were – since they are both dead and the only documentation put forward has been disputed by anyone and everyone who has examined it, including the only law-enforcement investigation to do so.
The findings were reported by Ancestry.com, which concedes there is no “definitive proof” that Stanley Ann Dunham had at least one African forebear who happened to be one of the first documented African slaves in America.
What’s the point?
It can only be to boost Obama’s standing with African-American voters, demonstrating that he really is authentically “black” in the American tradition, rather than a privileged mixed race child raised largely by white grandparents.
Isn’t that pathetic?
Since when do Americans care about bloodlines like this? What difference could it possibly make that Obama may or may not have had an ancestor in the 17th century who was a slave?
It’s important to the Times because the paper will do anything – and I mean anything – to get Americans’ minds off the fact that Obama has presided over one of the most repressive and depressive four years in American history.
The Times even hired two “independent” genealogists to verify the research done by Ancestry.com.
But, even if one cares about this study, there’s a big problem with all this research – a problem so big you could sail a slave ship through it. That is simply the fact that Obama’s immediate family history is highly questionable, to say the least.
Obama is celebrating his 51st birthday this weekend, yet there is no proof he was actually born Aug. 4, 1961, as he claims.
There is serious doubt his father was actually Barack Obama, the Kenyan foreign student. There is even some question about whether his mother was truly Stanley Ann Dunham – and certainly no documented proof.
But the Times has never spent a single dime investigating the authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate. It has shown no interest in the fact that Obama represented himself as Kenyan-born for 17 years of his life before he became a presidential wannabe. It has shown no interest in his draft records, his Social Security number, his travel records, his health records, his student records and his personal unpublished writings. It has shown no interest in how he became an Indonesian citizen through his adoptive father, Lolo Soetoro, and then managed to regain his “natural born citizen” status – or even normal citizen status. It has shown no interest in the mentor role played in Obama’s life by Communist Frank Marshall Davis.
No, the Times is more interested in – and more certain about, apparently – an alleged ancestor from the 17th century.
No doubt the story’s copy was approved by the White House, as the New York Times revealed recently, in one of the more important and substantive stories it has published in years, that it routinely submits its copy to presidential subordinates before publishing.
As for me, it makes no difference to me whether Obama has slave roots from the 17th century.
What’s important to me is that he is making slaves out of too many Americans in the 21st century.