Pat Boone Joins the Birthers
By David Weigel 6/29/09 2:57 PM
The aging song stylist uses the latest edition of his Newsmax.com column to demand the president’s birth certificate (it’s here, by the way), repeating some rumors about the conspiracy theory that were debunked months ago.
[A] widely known and experienced investigator, Dr. Jerome Corsi, flew to Kenya in search of a certificate of birth he had reason to believe existed there. But he was detained and stonewalled by Kenyan officials. He couldn’t obtain confirmation but received no denial. He was just ordered to leave the country.
During that same time, some reported seeing a videotaped proclamation by his paternal step-grandmother that she was in the delivery room and saw Barack H. Obama born in Mombasa, in what is now Kenya!
Boone, unlike most people who repeat this myth, gets Sarah Obama’s relationship to the president correct, but the video in question doesn’t say anything like this. Also, this is somewhat new to me:
Many, who know more than I do about what actually happened, notably the United States Justice Foundation, have surmised that baby Obama’s mother, about to have her child in Kenya, had booked a flight to Hawaii but was prohibited from flying because delivery was so imminent. But soon after baby Barack was born, USJF theorizes she flew with him to Oahu and obtained some kind of “record of birth” as if he’d been born there.
There is no record or anecdote of Ann Dunham ever traveling to Kenya with her soon-to-be-estranged husband Barack Obama Sr., but the idea of a very pregnant 18-year-old woman taking a transatlantic flight makes perfect sense to Boone et al.
Sauce For those of you who don't know, Pat Boone's stardom comes from the fact that he spent most of the fifties doing horrible bland cover versions of R&B songs by black artists, because black music performed by actual black people was JUST SO THREATENING.