Ever since Dan Rather tried to pawn off on the public hoax documents purportedly about George W. Bush’s National Guard service, it’s hard to take on faith pictures of pieces of paper. But let’s take a step back away from the minutia of the birth certificate controversy and just think for a moment about whether the idea that Obama was born in Kenya makes any sense.
Has anybody advocating this actually looked at a globe and thought about what a trip from Honolulu to Nairobi would have been like on a first-generation jetliner in 1961?
Hawaii and Kenya are on almost exact opposite sides of the world. The Boeing 707 had a range of only 3700 miles, so the outbound portion of their supposed trip would have looked something like this:
A flight from Honolulu to the West Coast.
Then a flight from the West Coast to the East Coast.
Then from the East Coast to a refueling stop at Gander in Newfoundland.
Then Gander to London.
Then London to somewhere to the south (Cairo?).
Then on to Nairobi in one or two more segments.
(The Great Circle distance going the other way around the world is slightly less, but there would have been even fewer flights available.)
They would have been in transit for, say, 100 hours each way.
It would then have taken a day or two on buses to get to the Obama family farm near Lake Victoria.
Two round trip tickets for this ambitious expedition would have been prohibitively expensive for anyone, let alone two young students.
Barack Sr. only got from Kenya to Hawaii in the first place due to the famous Tom Mboya Airlift, an expensive Cold War project funded by Americans to woo the next generation of Kenya’s elites away from Soviet influence.
Not surprisingly, there’s little evidence that Obama Sr. ever went home to Kenya during his four years in America. It was just too expensive.
It’s especially unlikely that he would have taken his heavily pregnant bride on such a grueling trip to Kenya.
Besides the difficulties of travel for a pregnant woman, Obama Sr. had a little problem that would have dissuaded him from taking his new wife to see the folks. See, back in Kenya, he already had a wife—Keiza, and two kids, Roy and Auma.
His bigamous marriage to Obama’s mother was a criminal act in Hawaii. Fortunately, for Barack Sr., the state of Hawaii didn’t know about his other wife.
Granted, polygamy is legal (indeed, is fashionable) in Kenya. But it seems highly unlikely that Obama Sr. would have been in any hurry to open the can of worms that his bigamy entailed while he was still living in America.
Also, Obama Sr.’s father, Onyango Obama, a wealthy, politically influential landowner, had opposed his son’s marriage to a white woman on racial grounds. So, why would the young man go looking for face-to-face trouble with his famously strong-willed father?
All points are valid, but lets also look at an unconventional person named Stanley Ann Dunham. First of all, Barack Sr married a white woman (Ruth Ndesandjo)after Stanley, so he apparently wasn't too afraid of what his father thought of it. Second, Stanley also moved to Indonesia, a third world country, because she was JUST that way. She was the type who liked to thumb her nose at convention and experience the wilder side of life. A trip to meet her exotic husband's exotic tribal family would have been FABULOUS for a person of her nature. And she was 18, pregnant or not. At 18, I took on adventures I wouldn't dream of now.
So if we are going to look at improbabilities, we must also look at the possibilities as well.
It’s no use. No one is listening to logic.
For example, if Obama was not born in Honolulu, then the COLB is fraudulent. The Hawaiian state authorities have falsified their records. If they did that, what would stop them from altering the appearance of a copy of a birth certificate with the state seal? That’s why if they did produce a copy of the original birth certificate, it wouldn’t stop speculation.
Also, Obama clearly produced something in the past that enabled him to get a social security card, a driver’s license and a passport. If Hawaii has a policy of issuing only COLBs to their citizens, this document must have been accepted as sufficient by state and federal authorities. Why should something more be required at this point? Either you can trust the state of Hawaii or not. If not, the fix is in no matter what. Unless you can get sworn statements from witnesses that claim to have personal knowledge of those flights from Kenya to Hawaii within a very narrow time frame, the document issue is closed.
That all makes sense. So why does Obama put up a forged certificate and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hide a $10.00 piece of paper and refuse to release any corroborating evidence to his citizenship status when a small, but vocal group of people keep spreading the information that he is not a legitimate president?