[browardchad]

Your own narrative storyline re Obama's conception and birth is good too. But so is David's. Fact is that while they both make some similar level of narrative sense consistent and cohesive with known facts and testimony and reasonable inference of motives and patterns of behavior (imo), we don't have the facts to say to and surety whatsoever which is true.

My "storyline" is a very limited conjecture based on the absence of proof of marriage and the social mores of the time -- nothing more. David's, OTOH, is based on conjectures presented as facts -- of airport photos being  portrayed as "wedding photos," a pregnant girl's absence from school meaning, ipso facto, that she was living in Kenya, and a suspicion that a birth cert is irregular pointing to the nonexistent "fact" that Obama was therefore born in Kenya.  I don't consider those "reasonable inferences" -- no matter how badly he, or you, want them to be true.

I've read all the discussion, pro and con, on the birth cert, and I don't see anything definitive, either way. Again, your points about the cert are conjectures, not facts.

As far as your statement (if that's what it is) that "We know the truth. I think it may hurt him very much that he does not." -- Please. You're dealing with a master manipulator here, who's based a large portion of his  political career on his "life story." It took him six years to write his so-called "memoirs."  Has it occurred to you that the reason for that may be that he was checking to see how much exaggeration and distortion he could get away with? Do you really think he hasn't had legions of his minions out covering his messiah derriere for the remaining gaps? (The book contradicts itself internally on many points, and there's more than a few incidents in which his narrative has been refuted by people from his past.) If you don't think he's aware that his so-called "life story" is anything but, think again.

When the fawning NY Times has to print a story saying such things as his book is  "full of clever tricks — inventions for literary effect...simply the tricks that art trades in," and "He was writing at a time well before a recent series of publishing scandals involving fabrication in memoirs," and "it all had a sort of larger truth going on that you couldn’t make up.”  -- What exactly are they saying, other than the book -- and his life, as he presents it -- is, to some predictable degree, a piece of fiction?

[bvw]

Okay, I have a more minimalist version of David's storyline, I don't think there is an airport picture from the early sixties travels -- I think the ones with Obama Sr are early seventies, just based on the clothing. I do think people telling the Kenyan birth story have less reason to have created a legend than Obama's statesides. The Mercer Island friends -- some small talk is hard to fake -- when they say they "sort of thought they remembered" that Stanley arrived from Canada, or when they say Stanley did not know how to change a diaper -- that's true, imo. Because why? Don't know the reason, for certain, but "something happened" besides just a birth. Stanley was running back home. ... Speculation ... just trying to explain what the heck is up with the birth of that poor baby, Obama.

1961 is a very advanced era, records wise. If he was born here, somebody has a documentary record, photo, bill, notes, report -- something! But if he was born in Kenya? Maybe a record, or maybe just the oral family tradition.

Well we have reports of the oral tradition -- in Kenya, and we have no such detailed reports US, and we have no documents.

I don't *want* anything to be true -- the truth is what it is. And what is the truth about this man's birth -- where and when did it happen?

Yes, Obama is a master of the moment now, isn't he? Will beats all. His internal drives, his will, from what do they arise? He is "change", he is "hope", he is "a uniter"! He wanted to change his circumstance -- to have Dad and Mom, together, his own and not the substitute. He wants to recover the hope that he must have had as a child -- see the airport picture, look at how happy he was, in his own dad's arms -- that his parents would magically reunite. Magic, of a sort. was all around him in his life. He wasn't living in tribal Kenya, or second-world Indonesia -- magic! He was in the best of all Hawaiian schools, a exotic among the elite of the exotics - magic! He lived in some many worlds -- africa, indonesian, muslim, living-room marxism, upper-class banking and business -- magic! Who would not want to magically UNITE them all?