Selma Got Me Born - LIAR, your parents felt safe enough to have you in 1961 - Selma had no effect on your birth, as Selma was in 1965.
This criticism is based on an overly-literal interpretation of Barack Obama's 2007 speech in Selma, Alabama, which we covered in a separate article.
Father Was A Goat Herder - LIAR, he was a privileged, well educated youth, who went on to work with the Kenyan Government.
These attributes are not mutually exclusive:
Barack Obama's (biological) father was all of these things at different times in his life, as Obama described in his book, Dreams from My Father:
[My father] was as African, I would learn, a Kenyan of the Luo tribe, born on the shores of Lake Victoria in a place called Alego. The village was poor, but his father — my other grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama — had been a prominent farmer, an elder of the tribe, a medicine man with healing powers. My father grew up herding his father's goats and attending the local school, set up by the British colonial administration, where he had shown great promise. He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he had been selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States.
Father Was A Proud Freedom Fighter - LIAR, he was part of one of the most corrupt and violent governments Kenya has ever had.
We are unaware of Barack Obama's ever having claimed his father was a "proud freedom fighter."
Obama has written (and spoken) at length about his father's returning to Africa from America to work for the Kenyan government, with that country's political turmoil eventually leaving him a "bitter drunk" and "a defeated, lonely bureaucrat."
My Family Has Strong Ties To African Freedom - LIAR, your cousin Raila Odinga has created mass violence in attempting to overturn a legitimate election in 2007, in Kenya. It is the first widespread violence in decades.
As we discussed in a separate article, Kenyan politician Raila Odinga has recently claimed to be Barack Obama's cousin, but there is no substantive evidence documenting his claim, and the two men share no meaningful familial connection.
My Grandmother Has Always Been A Christian - LIAR, she does her daily Salat prayers at 5am according to her own interviews. According to the New York Times: "I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith," Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.' Not to mention, Christianity wouldn't allow her to have been one of 14 wives to 1 man.
The author seems to be unaware that Barack Obama, like most people, has two sets of grandparents. Obama was speaking of his maternal grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, not his paternal grandmother.
My Name is African Swahili - LIAR, your name is Arabic and 'Baraka' (from which Barack came) means 'blessed' in that language. Hussein is also Arabic and so is Obama.
The author seems to be unaware that many Swahili words and names are of Arabic origin (just as many English words originated with other languages). "Barack" is a Swahili name that entered the language via historical trade and cultural ties with Arabia.
I Never Practiced Islam - LIAR, you practiced it daily at school, where you were registered as a Muslim and kept that faith for 31 years, until your wife made you change, so you could run for office.
The topic is already covered in our separate article about the (false) claims that Barack Obama is a Muslim.
My School In Indonesia Was Christian - LIAR, you were registered as Muslim there and got in trouble in Koranic Studies for making faces (check your own book).
The author seems to be unaware that Barack Obama attended more than one school in Indonesia, one of which was a public school that included Islamic religious instruction among its curriculum, and one of which was a private Catholic school.
I Was Fluent In Indonesian - LIAR, not one teacher says you could speak the language.
We are unaware of Barack Obama's ever having claimed he was "fluent" in any Indonesian language (beyond the level of competence that could reasonably be expected of the non-native child speaker he was at the time he lived in that country). He did acquire (and apparently still has) a passable command of Bahasa, as Time magazine noted in a 2007 article:
When prominent Indonesians visit the U.S., the first person they want to meet is Obama, says Parnohadiningrat Sudjadnan, the Indonesian ambassador to the U.S. "Back home people think of him as one of us, or at least one who understands us," he says, adding that they are delighted to find that Obama speaks passable Bahasa, the language spoken in Indonesia and Malaysia.
Because I Lived In Indonesia, I Have More Foreign Experience - LIAR, you were there from the ages of 6 to 10, and couldn't even speak the language.
Barack Obama did live in Indonesia for four years as a child, and he could in fact speak the local language passably well. Whether his time in that country provided him more "foreign experience" is argumentative, but Obama himself is far from the only person to suggest that it might:
Some would argue that his childhood experiences, as well as his mixed heritage (his father was Kenyan, his mother from Kansas), gives him a better inner compass on foreign policy than most Americans. They cite the pioneering work of Ruth Hill Useem, the late sociologist of Michigan State University, who spent her career studying what she called Third Culture Kids — the millions of U.S. children (an estimated 20 million since the advent of mass air travel) who have been carted abroad by their missionary, diplomatic, corporate or military parents. These frequent-flier kids don't spend enough time in their adopted countries to become fully bicultural, but they take pieces and add it to their home values and traditions — creating millions of "Third Cultures." Studies have shows that kids who have spent time abroad are more likely to go to college, to relate to one another despite the influences of vastly differing cultures, and to latch on to one aspect of their culture — in Obama's case African Americanism.
I Am Stronger On Foreign Affairs - LIAR, except for Africa (surprise) and the Middle East (bigger surprise), you have never been anywhere else on the planet and thus have NO experience with our closest allies.
Barack Obama has lived in, traveled to, or otherwise spent time in countries in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Whether his experiences make him "stronger on foreign affairs" is argumentative, but again, Obama himself is far from the only person to suggest that it might:
"Living abroad does give you a wider view of the world," says Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Adviser under Jimmy Carter, and a Polish-American who spent four years as a child living in Germany with his diplomat father. Obama is "a person with genuine sensitivity of world affairs," says Brzenzinski, who is supporting Obama. "It's not the conventional mouthing of culture sensitivities." Brzezinski points to Obama's greater willingness to meet leaders of hostile nations and his early resistance to the war in Iraq as examples of his superior intuition on foreign policy.
A Life Magazine Article Changed My Outlook On Life - LIAR, Life has yet to find the article you mention in your book. It doesn't, and never did, exist.
In Dreams from My Father, Barack Obama writes of a childhood experience occurring on a day when his mother dropped him off at a library on her way to work, and he began thumbing through issues of LIFE magazine:
Eventually I came across a photograph of an older man in dark glasses and a raincoat walking down an empty road. I couldn't guess what this picture was about; there seemed nothing unusual about the subject. On the next page was another photograph, this one a close-up of the same man's hands. They had a strange, unnatural pallor, as if blood had been drawn from the flesh. Turning back to the first picture, I now saw that the man's crinkly hair, his heavy lips and broad fleshy nose, all had this same uneven, ghostly hue.
He must be terrible sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybem or an albino — I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money. He expressed some regret about trying to pass himself off as a white man, was sorry about how badly things had turned out. But the results were irreversible. There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person.
I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page. Did my mother know about this? What about her boss — why was he so calm, reading through his reports a few feet down the hall? I had a desperate urge to jump out of my seat, to show them what I had learned, to demand some explanation or assurance. But something held me back. As in a dream, I had no voice for my newfound fear. By the time my mother came to take me home, my face wore a smile and the magazines were back in their proper place. The room, the air, was quiet as before.
That no matching article may yet have been found in the pages of LIFE magazine does not mean that Obama saw no such article; it may simply mean that, writing decades after the fact, he misremembered the title of the magazine he was viewing.
I Won't Run On A National Ticket In '08 - LIAR, here you are, despite saying, live on TV, that you would not have enough experience by then, and you are all about having experience first.
Senator Obama never stated categorically that he would not run on a national ticket in 2008. He at one time said that he had "no plans" to run for national office in 2008, the standard response virtually all politicians give to press inquiries when they have not yet formulated (or do not wish to reveal) their plans for upcoming elections.
I Was A Professor Of Law - LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Barack Obama was indeed a professor at the University of Chicago's Law School, a fact verified by that institution itself:
The Law School has received many media requests about Barack Obama, especially about his status as "Senior Lecturer."
From 1992 until his election to the U.S. Senate in 2004, Barack Obama served as a professor in the Law School. He was a Lecturer from 1992 to 1996. He was a Senior Lecturer from 1996 to 2004, during which time he taught three courses per year. Senior Lecturers are considered to be members of the Law School faculty and are regarded as professors, although not full-time or tenure-track. The title of Senior Lecturer is distinct from the title of Lecturer, which signifies adjunct status. Like Obama, each of the Law School's Senior Lecturers has high-demand careers in politics or public service, which prevent full-time teaching. Several times during his 12 years as a professor in the Law School, Obama was invited to join the faculty in a full-time tenure-track position, but he declined.
I Was A Constitutional Lawyer - LIAR, you were a senior lecturer ON LEAVE.
Between 1993 and 2002, Barack Obama worked as a civil rights lawyer with the Chicago law firm of Miner, Barnhill & Galland.
I Didn't Run Ads In Florida - LIAR, you allowed national ads to run 8-12 times per day for two weeks - and you still lost.
In August 2007, major Democratic candidates signed a pledge to not campaign in Florida because that state had moved its primary election up to 29 January 2008, one week earlier than the Democratic national rules allowed. In January 2008, the Obama campaign launched national television advertisements on CNN and MSNBC that were also shown in Florida. Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton maintainted that they had asked CNN and MSNBC to pull Florida from the ad buy, but those networks said they could not.
I Won Michigan - LIAR, no you didn't.
Senator Obama never claimed to have "won" Michigan, save for an interview in which he misspoke and mentioned the wrong state name. In accordance with the agreement mentioned in the previous entry, Barack Obama's name didn't even appear on the Michigan ballot.
I won Nevada - LIAR, no you did not.
Senator Obama didn't claim to have "won" Nevada (a state that holds caucuses rather than direct-election primaries); he noted, correctly, that although Senator Hillary Clinton tallied more overall votes at the Nevada caucuses, he actually picked up more national delegates from that state:
Mitt Romney took Nevada's Republican caucuses, while Democrats debated whether their party had rendered a split decision. New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton won the vote count among those at the caucuses, but Illinois Sen. Barack Obama claimed a slight advantage in national convention delegates on the strength of his showing in rural areas.
Obama said in a statement released by his campaign that he came from 25 points behind and nearly beat Clinton today because he did well across all of Nevada — "including rural areas where Democrats have traditionally struggled."
Obama's campaign said his performance in rural areas of the state helped him win a total of 13 national convention delegates, versus 12 for Clinton.
I Don't Take PAC Money - LIAR, you take loads of it.
Senator Obama didn't say that has never accepted money from political action committees. (He used PAC money in his previous U.S. Senate and Illinois state Senate races.) He pledged that he would not accept PAC money for his 2008 presidential bid, a pledge that he has upheld.
I don't Have Lobbysists - LIAR, you have over 47 lobbyists, and counting.
Senator Obama did not claim that he doesn't "have lobbysists" [sic]. He stated that he does not employ federally registered lobbyists, and that if he were elected President his administration would not include any such lobbyists.
My Campaign Had Nothing To Do With The 1984 Ad - LIAR, your own campaign worker made the ad on his Apple in one afternoon.
A widely-circulated spoof of Apple Computer's famous 1984 television advertisement for their (then-new) Macintosh computer was not created by an Obama campaign worker. It was, as explained in a statement issued by the managing director of Blue State Digital (a firm contracted to provide technology services to the Obama Campaign), created without authorization by an employee of that company:
Statement from Thomas Gensemer, Managing Director, Blue State Digital
On Wednesday afternoon, March the 21st, an employee at our firm, Phillip de Vellis, received a call from Arianna Huffington of "The Huffington Post" regarding the "1984" video currently circulating online. Initially, de Vellis refused to respond to her requests. He has since acknowledged to Blue State Digital that he was the creator of the video.
Pursuant to company policy regarding outside political work or commentary on behalf of our clients or otherwise, Mr. de Vellis has been terminated from Blue State Digital effective immediately.
Blue State Digital is under contract with the Obama Campaign for technology pursuits including software development and hosting. Additionally, one of our founding partners is on leave from the company to work directly for the campaign at headquarters.
However, Blue State Digital is not currently engaged in any relationship with the Obama Campaign for creative or non-technical services.
Mr. de Vellis created this video on his own time. It was done without the knowledge of management, and was in no way tied to his work at the firm or our formal engagement [on technology pursuits] with the Obama campaign.
I have spoken with David Plouffe, Sen. Obama's campaign manager, to inform him of this action and am appreciative of his understanding and ongoing support of our work.
I Have Always Been Against Iraq - LIAR, you weren't in office to vote against it AND you have voted to fund it every single time, unlike Kucinich, who seems to be out gutting you Obama. You also seem to be stepping back from your departure date - AGAIN.
Senator Obama expressed opposition to the war in Iraq well before he gained a seat in the U.S. Senate in 2004. (The vote that authorized U.S. military action in Iraq was held in 2002.) He has since voted in the Senate to authorize funding for that war, for reasons he defended in a February 2008 Democratic debate:
The two Democrats exchanged pointed words over each other's records on the war in Iraq, which contrast sharply even as economic and domestic concerns become dominant in the race. Clinton voted in 2002 to authorize the invasion, which Obama opposed from the start. After Obama again touted a high-profile antiwar speech he gave in Chicago before the war, Clinton pointed out that he, like her, had subsequently voted for war funding, and that their records on Iraq were similar since he came to the Senate in 2005.
"When it wasn't just a speech, but it was actually action, where is the difference?" she said. "Where is the comparison that would in some way give a real credibility to the speech that he gave against the war?"
Obama shot back: "Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out."
