Last week even Mark Levin (previous “birther” basher) was denouncing Barry's false bio narrative as exposed most recently by Maraniss. This opens to possibility that even Levin might have concluded that he might have to walk back his previous position and consider new evidence (Arpaio Posse July 17?) that Barry's birth location bio narrative was fraudulent.
"Until we can approach all human problems," he once remarked, "with the clinical aloofness and cynical contempt of a doctor examining a guinea pig strapped to a board, we have little chance of getting at the truth."
His "philo"sophy that crimes can't be solved by deductions based merely on material clues and circumstantial evidence gives an alternative approach to finding out the truth.
"The great trouble with you chaps, d' ye see, is that you approach every crime with a fixed and unshakable assumption that the criminal is either half-witted or a colossal bungler. I say, has it never by any chance occurred to you that if a detective could see a clue, the criminal would also have seen it and would either have concealed it or disguised it, if he had not wanted it found? And have you never paused to consider that anyone clever enough to plan and execute a successful crime these days is, ipso facto, clever enough to manufacture whatever clues suit his purpose?"
As Vance disagrees with NY District Attorney Markham that crimes are not witnessed by outsiders, we can draw several parallels to this mind-bender before us:
"That's your fundamental error, don't y' know," Vance observed impassively. "Every crime is witnessed by outsiders, just as is every work of art. The fact that no one sees the criminal, or the artist, actu'lly at work, is wholly incons'quential. The modern investigator of crime would doubtless refuse to believe that Rubens painted the Descent from the Cross in the Cathedral at Antwerp if there was sufficient circumst'ntial evidence to indicate that he had been away on diplomatic business, for instance, at the time it was painted. And yet, my dear fellow, such a conclusion would be prepost'rous. Even if the inf'rences to the contr'ry were so irresistible as to be legally overpowering, the picture itself would prove conclusively that Rubens did paint it. Why? For the simple reason, d' ye see,that no one but Rubens could have painted it. It bears the indelible imprint of his personality and genius—and his alone."
"There is one infallible method of determining human guilt and responsibility," Vance explained; "but as yet the police are as blissfully unaware of its possibilities as they are ignorant of its operations. The truth can be learned only by an analysis of the psychological factors of a crime and an application of them to the individual. The only real clues are psychological—not material. Your truly profound art expert, for instance, does not judge and authenticate pictures by an inspection of the underpainting and a chemical analysis of the pigments, but by studying the creative personality revealed in the picture's conception and execution. He asks himself: Does this work of art embody the qualities of form and technique and mental attitude that made up the genius—namely, the personality—of Rubens, or Michelangelo, or Veronese, or Titian, or Tintoretto, or whoever may be the artist to whom the work has been tentatively credited."*
Many here have been expert at applying Vance's methods and others dig for every scrap and shred of proof. We need both!
I return to the following questions, starting in the early 1960s, which is a long time ago. People thought and reacted very differently, but human nature is often predictable. Suspend for a moment that anyone in his young life was grooming him specifically to become who he is today and take yourself back to that time and place:
Now fast forward to today. Clues may have been planted for the exact purpose of misleading us. But why? Why couldn't his nativity story simply be a run-of-the-mill, heard a million times, broken family story? If it's a case of his lineage being so important then we must look into the people at the heart of this mystery. But if he is not the direct descendant of a political outlaw, what else could be so nefarious in this man's past that anyone would care about today? We have heaps of evidence about the direction in which the man is taking the country! So if it isn't the wrong father, the most glaring thing would be that he is not ELIGIBLE.
And if there was an attempt to cover this problem up once people started asking, then it has become a very tangled web. Because everyone knew that his father was born in Kenya when he was put on the ballot. Is this all just a case of tying to get a birth certificate to "match" that claim? Because both the Certificate and the Certification are proven forgeries. Could it just be this simple? He tried to make a lie out of a simple truth: Unwed mother. Father unknown.
I could continue down this vein if anyone is interested. I think his books hold many, many insights to the personality, though there is strong speculation that he didn't write them. Maybe all the clues are in his children's book!
Meanwhile, thank you for all of the hard work you do here.
*Excerpted from, "The Benson Murder Case," Van Dine, S. S. Published: 1926