Remember when Tom Maguire was a respected Plamologist? These days, not so much.
My official editorial position is that “Obama” is the most tightly controlled brand since Mickey Mouse (and is becoming synonomous with just that), so he is just saving this material (and his law firm billing records, and his college transcripts, and everything else) for his eventual eight-figure book deal.
My back-up guess is that the file includes something embarassing, such as a legal name change from “Barry” to “Barack” while a teenager. The omission of that detail (if true) from “Dreams From My Father” might trigger some clucking.
Joey Maloney
From clucks, maybe.
The Dangerman
It’s driving them stark raving mad that he has a lovely Family, has an adoring wife (that would likely cut him if he ever had an intern issue), is well spoken, is calm in the face of tremendous challenges, somehow gets shit done, and … the list keeps going.
They want a scandal and they got nuthin.
Edit: “Cut” reference for Angry Black Lady; does she still hang in these virtual parts?
cleek
mmm conspiracyturbation…
the more you stroke it, the bigger it gets. and the better it feels.
stroke that conspiracy. stroke it!
dmsilev
I still say that he faked the evidence of his own birth. The secret scandal is that Obama is a Time Lord.
dms
calipygian
The line between snark and insanity is thin indeed:
My head hurts.
Bill E Pilgrim
It would be irresponsible not to expectorate.
Lysana
@The Dangerman:
Last time I asked, I was told she does but is running rather busy lately. I’ve seen nothing to refute that since the last time she posted shortly after I asked.
apl
Whew! For a second there I thought you wrote “Tobey Maguire” – not him too!
aimai
Jesus, is that supposed to be the last word in scary? That “some might cluck?” The guy receives 40 percent more death threats than an ordinary President and keeps on smiling. I think he can handle some clucking.
Also, since when is changing your name from a youthful nickname (“Barry”) to a grown up “Barack” indicative of anything? My cousin Joey, who now prefers to go by Joe or Joseph, would be shocked to discover anyone clucking over it.
Mark S.
Sounds like fascinating reading, especially the billing records. Will Obama put those in the Appendix, or weave them into the narrative?
I want to see Tom Maguire’s birth certificate, because I don’t believe he’s from this planet.
Cat Lady
Yeah, Barack Obama is just the name a half black half white kid of a single mother would choose as a teenager in 70’s Brady Bunch America with future political ambitions to fit right in. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
aimai
Can I just warn everyone: Don’t get off the boat over there. The comment thread is even worse than the original post by Maguire. Those people are certifiably crazy and beyond filled with hate. I feel dirty just having skimmed those comments.
aimai
WarMunchkin
I appreciate the idea that public figures are less entitled to privacy than the rest of us; but why the fuck should he — or anyone else, for that matter — have to release his college transcripts? You have the right to mess up or do well in particular schools or classes without people giving you crap about it.
demkat620
These hearings will be awful. No matter what the evidence shows thy will just keep moving the goalposts.
dmsilev
@aimai: Re: the name change thing, the way I parse it is “what if his legal name really was Barry and he changed it to Barack as an adult?”. Some ugly implications buried there, starting with “Obama lied when he said he was named after his father” and segueing nicely to “he chose to abandon a nice normal American name in favor of an African name”.
dms
Bill E Pilgrim
That really is quite a read.
“Look, I believe that the certificate released by Hawaii proves that he was born there. Why would officials lie about this? However, since certain right wing lunatics continue to believe in conspiracy theories, and the White House and the State of Hawaii won’t devote every minute of every day to disproving those, why clearly there’s something that they’re hiding!”
I bet John McCain would have suspended his entire Presidency and brought the Supreme Court to Panama for a reenactment.
guster
In fairness, I think all questions should be on the table.
I mean, until we have actual evidence about how Mr. Soetoro would _govern_ (at which time, of course, it’d be too late) I think we need to cobble together all possible evidence.
Davis X. Machina
Fascination with Obama’s ex-presidency is often found in terrain hospitable to pumas and other exotic fauna.
The full-fledged version involves Obama deliberately tanking his first-and-only term to get the payoff waiting for him on leaving office four years early. The boodle is a complex mix of deferred bribes from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, the aforementioned book/related media deal, and free tuition for the girls. Waiting eight years makes the free tuition offers moot, which just proves the theory.
I have always assumed this to be a congeries of jealousy — you can’t sell out if no one is buying — projection — if you’d jump on the offer in a second, anyone who wouldn’t is obviously mad — and no small degree of racial stereotyping — bye-bye, Black Jimmy Carter, hello President George Jefferson. Movin’ on up…etc.
Anya
@calipygian: Please tell me that’s a snark!
calipygian
@Anya: I suspect it is snark, I fear that it isn’t.
MattF
Some say that “Obama” is only pretending to be colored.
asiangrrlMN
@cleek: Thanks for the laugh and the smile. I haven’t heard that song in a long time.
Any time I read some shit like this, all I can think is, “He’s blackety-blackety-blackety-blackety-oh-NOEZ!”
aimai
@dmsilev:
I realize that you are just playing devil’s advocate but this whole discussion of “what would people think if…” leads you right down the rabbit hole into insanity. Kind of like the argument I just had with McMegan and some poster over at her site. Everyone there is in hysterics because Obama “promised I wouldn’t have to switch my insurance company” but I do have to switch because under new regs the shitty product I was being sold has been canceled. You can explain until you are blue in the face that Obama isn’t forcing them to switch insurance products but their free market private insurance company is terminating a product it can no longer profit from or sell because its faulty. But they will still repeat the plain language “Obama promised…but” and shriek.
Similarly there is zero chance that the Birth Certificate released by Hawaii already or the birth announcement in the Hawaii newspaper doesn’t contain Barack Obama’s actual given name. These days you can’t *get the birth certificate* at all without giving the child a name–I should know, I had to jump through hoops with both my children because of a homebirth and indecision. They won’t let you leave the hospital without assigning a name and they definitely don’t issue a birth certificate without one.
Even if they somehow “named” him Barry officially Jews will tell you that its quite customary to “honor” a relative with a shared first initial when the original name is considered too ugly and old fashioned to pass the test. To argue that the information already revealed is false as to the given name argues a degree of bizarre precognition on the part of the parents and of Obama himself that just can’t exist in the real world–because who cared what the kid was named? I mean, really, who cared other than his parents. So what would “be revealed” by Barry or Barack choosing one version over another of a given name?
Reading those comments over there just shows that people are capable of taking totally contradictory information and unifying it into a farrago of nonsense as long as the basic theme–spite or love–remains the same. People there are essentially topping each other with more and more crazy embrodieries on a general theme: Dunham and Obama didn’t even know each other. Other people who claimed to have known them didn’t know them. The grandparents were racists who were unaware of the romance. They were unaware of the birth. They moved her to another state to avoid the dangerous Obama boyfriend/father. He’s not the father. He is. Its like the Heisenberg Uncertainity Principle of hate over there. Gives me the fucking willies.
aimai
goblue72
Shorter wingnutarian – [email protected]@ers don’t get to be President.
Shorter shorter wingnutarian – [email protected]@ER!
mem from somerville
Oh, I saw teh best birtherism plot today:
Oh, to see Orly in a musical….well, I’d pay money for that if it was done properly.
Barack Obama detractors, the birthers, face challenge from Hawaii governor
KG
Pretty sure that he couldn’t release his law firm billing records, even if he wanted to First, they don’t belong to him, they belong to his firm. Second, they may be considered privileged communications and therefore can’t be released without permission from his clients. Third, why exactly would his billing records be relevant to anything?
askew
@Davis X. Machina:
I think the fascination with Obama’s post-presidency by PUMAs is based on fear that Obama will replace Clinton as the most-beloved ex-president. As Obama’s achievements in office are quickly overshadowing Clinton’s, they are bitterly clinging to the idea that Clinton will “win” the ex-President battle. The idea is silly, since Carter has already been the best ex-President we’ve had in decades.
aimai
@KG:
Everything old is new again. The whole of the right wing has become a kind of “bricolage” as Levi-Strauss would have put it. They take bits and pieces of old scandals and simply reweave them or patch them together. Hillary Clinton had a “billing” scandal related to her records of work at her law firm. So Obama, too, will have a “billing scandal” even if there is no evidence that there ever was any question or doubt about his billing at his law firm. Just like Obama is a “black Jimmy Carter” or a “black FDR” or health care will be his “waterloo” they are unable to think except in soundbites, myths, and cliches. As someone said on one of these blogs long ago they project so hard onto Obama that they have practically accused him of hiding in his college transcripts that he was simultaneously a) an illegal foreign student, b) an illegal foreign student on illegal scholarship, c) an affirmative action scholarship student who didn’t deserve it, and e) a drunken frat boy from privilige. All of these simply can’t be simultaneously true. And the last one, of course, is simply a repeat of Bush’s reality now twisted and assigned to Obama.
aimai
Hal
This reminds me of that hilarious email that was being sent around when Obama was running for President. I used to read it and laugh at the level of serious inquiry on his school and where he chose to live.
“Why Harvard? What was wrong with Columbia?? His roomates where Pakistani! Why Chicago? What’s wrong with NYC?” and on, and on…
BTW, what is it with using Barry as a pejorative? It seems to have far more meaning to some people than I can put my finger on…
Angry Black Lady
@The Dangerman: I do. I’m sort of on vacation.
Angry Black Lady
@KG: It is absolutely privileged. You’re dead on.
asiangrrlMN
@Hal: Deliberately calling someone by a nickname that is not of his preference is a superiority thing. A person’s name is very important. Insisting on calling someone what you want to call him undermines that person’s autonomy. Or, shorter, it’s a way to be a condescending prick with relative ease.
Dr. Psycho
@asiangrrlMN: Their grandfathers called FDR “Rosenfeld”. Their fathers called LBJ “Jonsonovitch”. It drives them crazy that they can’t make “Barack Hussein Obama” sound any more foreign.
Zuzu's Petals
Do I remember when Tom Maguire was respected for anything.
No.
asiangrrlMN
@Dr. Psycho: Ah. Good point. They can’t make it more foreign, so they just deride him instead.
Zuzu's Petals
Okay, having Maguire’s full post, I can see that he displays his usual laziness and stupidity here.
He assumes that Hawaii state law permits Obama to authorize the release of the original document produced by the hospital, aka the “long form” birth certificate. Of course it actually only permits him to authorize the release of the official document produced by the state dept of vital records, ie, the certification of live birth – which is the only document he himself is authorized to receive.
Hence Abercrombie’s suggestion that a special procedure would have to be authorized for the release of the hospital certificate.
Sheesh, Maguire is just as big a dunce as ever.
Zuzu's Petals
@aimai:
I saw a documentary on his life, and his high school friends called him by his full first name, pronounced with a trilled “r” – just like his sister pronounces it. So if anything he has simply anglicized the pronounciation of his first name.
Zuzu's Petals
@aimai:
I wouldn’t set foot in that cesspool either. Maguire is known for looking up the ISP numbers of commenters he disagrees with.
‘Course he probably looks up the ISP numbers of folks who just browse the page, so there’s that.
Jay C
I suppose it’s too much to expect that unhinged Birthers might actually LOOK at the documents they spend so much time obsessing over – after all, loony-tunes fixation on typefaces/watermarks, etc. is SO much more interesting than seeing what President Obama’s Birth Certificate (or “Birth Certificate”) actually says: On every reproduction of it I have seen, the baby’s name is given, quite clearly, as
“Barack Hussein Obama II” . So there would be (and never would be) any need to change “Barry” to “Barack” – since that was his name anyway.
Of course, if your fundamental premise is that Barack Obama (the 44th POTUS) was “actually” born in Kenya, or Indonesia, or on Planet Mongo or whatever, little details like this are irrelevant….
Zuzu's Petals
@WarMunchkin:
There’s that, and the fact that not a single presidential candidate has ever released his or her transcripts. Reporters got hold of transcripts for Gore, GWB, and Kerry, but they never released them themselves.
JGabriel
I’ll believe Ronald Reagan wasn’t born in Canada, and wasn’t raised as a secret mole to destroy America so the British Crown could RISE AGAIN, when I see PROOF of it!
.
Nellcote
@Hal:
Since it’s his childhood name it’s a way for them to call him “boy” without the obvious baggage.
rikyrah
these folks are crazy
KG
@Angry Black Lady: The only reason I said “may” was because I know from my own practice that when doing motions for attorney fees, billing records are often attached with attorney declarations to justify the award.
doshaburi
They are really obsessed with the “dual-allegiance” issue, Wever TF that is. If you read all the comments, you actually get to one that boils down to:
1. Foreign terrorist hires American hooker to have baby.
2. ???
3. Red Dawn!