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Authors write their own bios, and after it’s printed they are asked to review it for accuracy. This is specifically true of the literary agency in question and of the industry as a whole.

The bio that ends up on the book jacket? This was promotional material. The book may not have been written yet, for all I know. The employee may have guessed based on what she thought she remembered.

I guess Obama could have been another possible the source of the error, making different claims at different times. He could even have written the part about his father being Kenyan Finance Minister.

I got into the discussion just to say that if there was an error made, it was most likely to involve material that was already known to the employee about Hawaii and Kenya, rather than pull in something new about Obama being born in Sweden or France. In other words, if she did make a mistake, this was the logical one to make.

This is not a bio that was included on a book jacket. Even if it was, however, the facts would have come from the author. No literary agency employs detectives or even fact checkers to learn [on a cold case basis] about prospective authors. They ask new and would-be authors to write their own bios and submit them w any sample chapters, book proposals or other materials related to publication. The idea that standard practices were waived in one case only, Obama’s, is bizarre and irrational. He would have provided the agent w his biographical facts AND he would have been asked to review the final draft; there's just no way around it.

I got into the discussion just to say that if there was an error made, it was most likely to involve material that was already known to the employee about Hawaii and Kenya, rather than pull in something new about Obama being born in Sweden or France. In other words, if she did make a mistake, this was the logical one to make.

So why would it be logical for the publisher to make that guess about an unknown author back then?

Obama himself was most certainly the source of the “error.” Other authors with the same agency have come forward and stated that this firm requests the bios from their authors. Also, the bio went through multiple revisions between ‘91 and ‘07! Are we to believe that, in all these revisions, Obama himself had no input and that never once in those sixteen years did he actually read one of these bios?

The exceedingly inconvenient fact for Team Obama is that he either lied about a Kenyan birth, or lied about a Hawaiian birth. Either way, he’s a giant liar, and of all things, about his own nativity! Obama is the original Birther.