In the Land of Make Believe, Anything Goes [updated]

Mark Steyn on the "eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography":

When it comes to conspiracies, I'm an Occam's Razor man. The more obvious explanation of the variable first line in the eternally shifting sands of Obama's biography is that, rather than pretending to have been born in Hawaii, he's spent much of his life pretending to have been born in Kenya.

After all, if your first book is an exploration of racial identity and has the working title "Journeys In Black And White," being born in Hawaii doesn't really help. It's entirely irrelevant to the twin pillars of contemporary black grievance – American slavery and European imperialism. To 99.99 percent of people, Hawaii is a luxury vacation destination and nothing else.

Whereas Kenya puts you at the heart of what, in an otherwise notably orderly decolonization process by the British, was a bitter and violent struggle against the white man's rule. Cool! The composite chicks dig it, and the literary agents.

Read the rest. It seems Breitbart's vetting is bearing some fairly predictable fruit, given Obama's well-established towering narcissism and problematical relationship with the truth.

For more analysis see Erick Erickson's Barack Obama, A Composite Kenyan and Roger Simon's Mystery of the Kenyan Birth. The latter mentions in passing: 

(Obama, of course, is a liar either way.)

I was thinking more along the lines of "phony" or "fraud." When you make things up about the fundamentals of who you are and where you came from, that's some serious pretending. Pathological, even.

The lazy, in-the-tank liberal media gets a good deal of the credit for the ascension of this international-man-of-mystery to the presidency. For recent examples of the Obama media at work, read Michael Walsh's Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Democrats. (And don't miss the musical selection at the end, which makes for a nice little history lesson for the kiddies. Mine enjoyed it immensely.)

Steyn also updates us on US Senate candidate (at least she was last I checked) Elizabeth "Pow Wow" Warren's extended game of make believe:

The recipes from "Elizabeth Warren – Cherokee" include a crab dish with tomato mayonnaise. Mrs. Warren's fictional Cherokee ancestors in Oklahoma were renowned for their ability to spear the fast-moving Oklahoma crab. It's in the state song: "Ooooooklahoma! Where the crabs come sweepin' down the plain." But then the white man came, and now the Oklahoma crab is extinct, and at the Cherokee clambakes they have to make do with Mrs. Warren's traditional Five Tribes recipe for Cherokee Lime Pie.

Hold the mayo! In the few hours since Steyn's column went to press, we've learned that two of her "old Cherokee family recipes" appear to have been copied from the New York Times.

My absolute favorite part (with emphasis added):

Two of the possibly plagiarized recipes, said in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook to have been passed down through generations of Oklahoma Native American members of the Cherokee tribe, are described in a New York Times News Service story as originating at Le Pavilion, a fabulously expensive French restaurant in Manhattan. The dishes were said to be particular favorites of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter.

Were they Cherokee, too? Why not?



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Steyn follows up: Breaking! The House of Windsor is One of the Five Tribes

The Pundette wonders: “Were they Cherokee, too?“

No. But, as Broadway’s first Native American composer, Cole Porter wrote about his Indian blood in his famous song, “I’ve Got Sioux Under My Skin”.

Actually, that last line quoted above briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn’t a threat to one’s sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be anti-racist, but only in America does the nation’s most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first “woman of color” on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor’s favorite crab recipe to a tribal cookbook.

Read the rest.

Thanks very much to Mark for the link.

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My follow-up: The self-made-up man

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Many thanks to Michelle Malkin for the link.

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