"Remember When Obama Wouldn't Show ID?" is now available at Amazon.
From the Introduction:
On November 9, 2018, Michelle Obama began to roll out her memoir, Becoming, one-half of the $65 million “joint deal” she and Barack Obama inked with Crown Books. Notably, the first round of headlines about the book were less about the life of the former First Lady than about her roiling anger at President Trump.
What stokes this anger?
Of the disputed Constitutional eligibility of her husband to be President of the United States, Michelle Obama writes:
The whole thing was crazy and mean-spirited, of course, its underlying bigotry and xenophobia hardly concealed. But it was also dangerous, deliberately meant to stir up the wingnuts and kooks. What if someone with an unstable mind loaded a gun and drove to Washington? What if that person went looking for our girls? Donald Trump, with his loud and reckless innuendos, was putting my family’s safety at risk. And for this I’d never forgive him.
As a tear-gas-blast of propaganda, this passage really has it all. Bigotry. Xenophobia. Wingnuts. Kooks. Guns. Trump. The lives of the “our girls” hanging by a thread due to Trump’s “loud” and “reckless innuendos.” And for this, Mrs. Obama concludes (sobbing, coughing, leading readers away from the subject), I’d never forgive him.
The passage ends, but the stinging, choking, tear-gas-cloud of aggrievement lingers on. Which, of course, is the point. The reader (sobbing, coughing, following Mrs. Obama away from the subject) is to believe that Donald Trump (1) led the vain effort to verify Barack Obama’s identity documents (2) based on bigotry, xenophobia, wingnuts, kooks, and, of course, racism. Neither is true.
But who remembers? There is no coherent record in the news media of the eligibility scandal as it unfolded; with the exception of World Net Daily, outlets from Breitbart to Daily Kos treated the subject with mocking derision or as taboo. My own syndicated newspaper column was reliably “spiked” when it touched the subject, for example, by the Washington Examiner. “It’s not that I don’t believe you, Diana,” my editor told me years ago after I presented him with some of the evidence I was drawing from. “It’s that I do. I don’t want the Washington Examiner to be responsible for blood in the streets….”
Michelle Obama’s recent broadside against the president, force-multiplied by the prObama media, drove me back to review my own contemporaneous effort to make sense of the scandal, and highlight the enabling role of protective media and the abdication of U.S. elected officials from their Constitutional responsibilities in the matter. I find myself impressed anew by the notable exceptions to the surrendering rule such as President Donald Trump, author Jerome Corsi, former Sheriff Joe Arpaio and other singular men and women of courage, so few as to be probably countable on both hands. Note that President Trump is beleaguered anew for having called on the 44th President to show I.D.; it took a presidential pardon for Sheriff Joe to avoid jail; and Jerome Corsi, who wrote the 2011 best-seller Where’s the Birth Certificate?, is currently experiencing Kafka-esque torment at the hands of Special Counsel Robert Mueller.
For the sake of the record, then, I have collected occasional columns and blog posts of my own that track various episodes of the story, through courts and a court martial, through media cover-ups and shocking investigations, through heights of incredulity and outrage. Possibly, these dispatches from the Obama eligibility wars will retain a little extra “first draft of history” value because the history’s “second draft” is not likely to be written. In the “narrative” Michelle Obama and the media see fit to re-enforce today, all questions about Barack Obama’s glaring eligibility issues are branded as a toxic exercise in bigotry and race-hatred -- not the kind of force-field most researchers care to cross.
Here, at least, a reader may see for himself what it was all about.