Was Barack Obama born in Hawaii or somewhere else, or did he just change a name?Ed cites Jim Geraghty, who thinks that the Obama Campaign’s failure to produce the candidate’s birth certificate has caused these rumors to fly:
1. Obama was not born in the US, but in Kenya.Of these, only one is serious.
2. Obama’s middle name was Mohammed, not Hussein (but then why change it to another Arabic name?)
3. His real first name is “Barry”.
My first instinct is to call Bravo Sierra on this story, since it’s most likely an ever-mutating product of the malignant imagination of a guy named Kenneth Lamb who saw fit to make up lies about my tribe—the same tribe that Obama stems from. Lamb claims that our tribe is an Arab tribe. Yes, really. The goal in creating this fiction is to refute the idea that Obama, whose mother was a white American, is a “legal” “African American,” whatever the heck that is. (I suppose that, by this logic, I am half “African American” since my mother is a black American.)
See the guy on the right? That’s my father, journalist Philip Ochieng, a Kenyan Luo like the senior Barack Obama. The two were also friends (something which Father's beginning to rue since he's being inundated by American media requests of late). Does he look like an Arab to you?
Obama has produced so many gaffes—both about his personal life and about American history—that I’m beginning to wonder whether anything he says is something which he hasn’t learned rote from a script. However, allowing this fantasy about the Luo tribe--one born of ignorance regarding African countries--to mix in with real, live concrete issues regarding a prospective Barack Obama presidency hurts the opposition to that candidacy. That it p*sses me off is beside the point.
Make no mistake, Lamb’s novella is the origin of these rumors.
