HOT AIR (VIA 4RWWS):
Let’s go to the (rough) partial transcript [THIS IS WHAT OBAMA SAID]:
"What happened in Selma, Alabama and Birmingham also stirred the conscience of the nation. It worried folks in the White House who said, “You know, we’re battling Communism. How are we going to win hearts and minds all across the world? If right here in our own country, John, we’re not observing the ideals set fort in our Constitution, we might be accused of being hypocrites.” So the Kennedy’s decided we’re going to do an air lift. We’re going to go to Africa and start bringing young Africans over to this country and give them scholarships to study so they can learn what a wonderful country America is.
This young man named Barack Obama got one of those tickets and came over to this country. He met this woman whose great great-great-great-grandfather had owned slaves; but she had a good idea there was some craziness going on because they looked at each other and they decided that we know that the world as it has been it might not be possible for us to get together and have a child. There was something stirring across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks are willing to march across a bridge. So they got together and Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don’t tell me I don’t have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don’t tell me I’m not coming home to Selma, Alabama."
A Kennedy program helped bring Obama’s father to the United States? Really? According to Obama’s first book,
He eventually won a scholarship to study in Nairobi; and then, on the eve of Kenyan independence, he was selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States, joining the first large wave of Africans to be sent forth to master Western technology and bring it back to forge a new, modern Africa.
In 1959, at the age of 23, he arrived at the University of Hawaii – the first African student there.
1959. Two years before JFK was inaugurated.
As for his parents getting together in part because of what was stirring from Selma, Bloody Sunday happened on March 7, 1965. Obama was born August 4, 1961.
In fairness, he does link Selma to Birmingham a minute or two earlier in the clip — but even if you stretch the timeline to account for that, the major civil rights events in Birmingham happened in 1963, still two years after he was born.
Maybe he meant Montgomery?
Update: The Obama camp is already spinning his convenient lie:
Obama was born in 1961, four years before the march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. But spokesman Bill Burton said Obama was “speaking metaphorically about the civil rights movement as a whole.
It is absurd to claim that Selma events led to Obama's conception, but his father, so far as I can tell, did get here via a Kennedy program. The Kennedy airlift was so named because Kennedy pushed for it as a Senator, and because his family's foundation was involved in funding the airlift. As for the Selma talk, you could claim that Obama, as a black American, would never be allowed to get as far as he has without the events at Selma, but that I think that would be being too charitable to what is clearly just an attempt to link himself personally to historic events.
ReplyDeletethis link corroborates that sen jfk was involved just before being elected:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jfklink.com/speeches/
jfk/aug60/jfk170860_airlift.html
NEVERTHELESS: Obama's narrative is a LIE and pure demagoguery.
his parents meeting/marrying had NOTHING to do with Selma.