Anybody who knows anything about blurbing and hooking knows you put the good stuff in the first line. In today’s uber competitive market that is where you make or break your pitch. Screw up the first line, and the target audience is unlikely to read the second; they’ll just move on. Sad but true.
So lets look at Acton & Dystel’s hook:
‘‘Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.’
Well my my, there it is. ‘born in Kenya’, prominently displayed, right up front. Sorry, Hook, it was a, if not THE, selling point. Game, set & match; you lose.
And in the alternative reality you wish to inhabit -- the one in which that agency bio is the only thing considered or discussed -- I guess I do lose.
But in the real universe I and most other thinking people inhabit there is this inconvenient (for your argument, that is) thing called "other and more probative evidence." And when that is brought to bear on the question and the larger context of the discussion is entertained, then your argument collapses. But you've been doing your best to play the "if I don't acknowledge it, then it doesn't exist" game. You are quite skilled in that game.
My personal belief, and that is all it is, just an explanation that fits the evidence we do know, is that Obama CLEARLY has citizenship issues, and if his bio dad is Obama Sr, which it probably is because you can see resemblances that are fairly strong with those half brothers, his mom must have given birth outside the USA or he would have been a citizen, no need to fake it or steal SS numbers etc. So Occam’s razor dictates that she gave birth outside our borders.
There is no evidence she lived with Obama ever, or even were much of a couple. And this was 1961. Getting knocked up at 17 was bad all around. A white girl getting knocked up with a married black man’s baby was even too edgy for the communist Dunhams. Especially TW Grandma. They probably sent her where all her high school classmates went when they got knocked up. To the unwed mothers’ homes over the border and a skip away from her Seattle school, in Vancouver, Canada.
The baby was to be given up for adoption and Stanley Ann was to come back from her “vacation” and continue studying in Hawaii. She must have changed her mind and decided to keep him. Thus she shows up in Seattle with a newborn she doesn’t know how to care for, and starts attending college there.
Having never thought about keeping him, the family didn’t realize that laws were such that Stanley Ann’s baby would not be a citizen of America, Stanley being too young to confer it.
There is no reason, no logic, no connection to Obama Sr having taken her to Kenya. She was a young teen, that’s a long trip, and he had a wife and kids there. I do not think Madelyn Dunham would have permitted that.