My argument is not that Obama is foreign born. I said that nowhere. I think he may well have been born here. Or not. I am even open to the possibility he meets all constitutional eligibility requirements. Or not. Yet all that would not have the slightest effect on my opinion that he is more alien to the office he holds and the American institutions and ideals he alleges to support than any foreign interlopers the Founders ever sought to proscribe. Thus my opposition to him, permanently grounded as it is in his pathological leftist ideology, will remain unaffected by any future discoveries concerning his birthplace.
My comment on Obama's missing nativity narrative is simply an observation of fact, based on history and social patterns that are well known, and indeed are frequently used to discredit bits and pieces of fairy stories that sometimes emerge with the passage of time. If you are unfamiliar with that manner of historical analysis, so be it. Nevertheless, even in less "chatty" cultures such as ours, oral traditions function as history and do survive for many generations. You no doubt have, as I do, dozens of instances from your own family where the retelling of unusual occurrences became a routine part of family gatherings.
Oral tradition is even more prevalent in cultures where it is the primary means of transmitting cultural memory, as is the case here. Obama's story would be significant, not in anticipation of something significant Obama would later do (a red herring argument if ever there was one), but because the event in itself was culturally significant at the time it happened, and thus warranted remembering through storytelling.
That is why our author is rightly implying oddity that the story is missing. Compare this with the nativity stories of Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy, Reagan, etc. The principle carriers of the stories are not the birth records but the people surrounding the event, who were able to release that memory to the public domain once the significance of the individual was realized.
No, there is something odd here, something missing, and it cannot be dismissed by the abandonment of logic or traditional methods of historical discovery. Oral tradition is important, and at present is no friend of the President's official narrative.
“It is the nature of circumstantial evidence that no single fact is persuasive by itself, but the totality of the facts will compel a reasonable person to reach a given conclusion.”
We aren’t talking about circumstantial evidence. We’re not even talking about evidence. The issue is a lack of evidence. Which can, of course, can be used for surmise, but is not, and never will be, itself evidence.
My mother has a birth story for each child.
My story, I was born in the hallway of the Hospital. Never made it to the Delivery room. I almost popped out in the elevator. No Doctor actually “delivered” me. He just cut the cord and signed the papers.
My Brother, it was a Death defying race in the snow to the hospital... and so on...
Obama has no American birth narrative. None. Just a Grandmother in Kenya who says he was born there.
No, there is something odd here, something missing, and it cannot be dismissed by the abandonment of logic or traditional methods of historical discovery. Oral tradition is important, and at present is no friend of the President's official narrative.
Good, common-sense summary.