--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, brian64705 <no_re...@...> wrote: > > Judy, well yes, I did. I found the tone of the article > offensive in accusing anyone who asks questions on this > a "liar".
I found the repeated "liar" designation unnecessary too, although it doesn't seem to be *inaccurate*. I was a lot more interested in the facts the article documented. <snip> > So the testimony of the grandmother is disputed by another > Obama relative. Does not make her wrong. Two things here. We don't actually know what the testimony of his grandmother *was*; we know only what the translators said it was, and they apparently had different stories. > Only that one of them is not telling the truth. Or that at some point one of the translators got confused, either in translating the question or in translating her response, or that the grandmother got confused and didn't realize quite what she was being asked. What's telling to me is that the birthers *omit* the part of the transcript in which the translator Ogombe repeatedly insists Obama was born in Hawaii and that this is what the grandmother actually said. In contrast, the Salon article quotes *both* the Ogombe part of the transcript *and* McRae's affidavit and goes into the whole sequence of events in detail. The Salon article, in other words, gives you all the facts and lets you make your own judgments. The birthers *withhold* some crucial facts. > One has to look for motives. What motive would the > grandmother have in saying Obama was born in Kenya? If that's what she said. Both the Salon piece and a piece in Slate that's also linked in the ConWebWatch article say she was asked whether she was present at his birth, not explicitly whether he was born in Kenya. > And what motive would this Ogombe have in saying he > was born in Hawaii? What motive do the birthers have in omitting that part of the transcript? > Seems to me the grandmother had nothing to gain other than > her own maternal pride in her grandson. Maternal pride has led more than one mother to adjust the facts to bolster that pride (often on the basis of wish-fulfillment rather than intent to deceive), first of all; second, she's quite elderly; and third, the whole thing could easily be due to some misunderstanding created in the process of translation. > Whereas Ogombe may be more shrewd and understand the > political significance of the question, hence he defends > the official story. But that would go against his *national* pride. > Same with the Kenyan Ambassador. He seems to me to be > innocently reflecting the common perception in Kenya that > Obama was born there. It may well be a "common perception in Kenya" without being a fact. It would be interesting to know what the Kenyan media have to say about this. In any case, his accent is so thick and the audio so bad that it's hard to know exactly what he said, whether he actually assented to the notion that Obama was born there, or was merely acknowledging Kenyans' pride in him and the intention to build some kind of commemorative monument. Or perhaps he was being excessively diplomatic, not wanting to contradict the person speaking to him. Or he had his own ulterior motives for supporting the idea that Obama was born in Kenya. Or it could have been a language problem. The interviewer, it seemed to me, was disingenuous in the way he asked the questions; they were formulated as if it were established fact that Obama was born in Kenya. So that's a strike against him in my book. The way he appeared to take the Kenyan birth as a certainty may have confused the ambassador if the ambassador knew Obama wasn't born there, and he may have assumed he had simply misheard what the guy was saying. > This does not make one person right or wrong. Someone is > not telling the truth. The birthers, in this case, are *hiding* the truth that Ogombe disputed the born-in-Kenya notion. And to my mind, they're vastly overstating the conclusiveness of what the grandmother and the ambassador said. > So people can chose who they want to believe. I'm much more inclined to believe those who lay everything on the table. > It is not conclusive either way and will not be so until > a long form birth certificate appears, and/or someone > present at the birth can testify. Again, there's *so* much hard evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii, and *none* that he was born in Kenya, that it should be conclusive without either of those two pieces. I'm not going to argue this any more with you. I just wanted to give you an idea of how I go about analyzing issues like this.
