'How did the mainstream media miss this?'

COMMENTARY
From Dr. Tim Stanley, a British historian of the United States:

Whatever you think of Breitbart.com’s punishing vetting process, it has exposed just how little work the mainstream media did in investigating candidate Obama back in 2008. Not all of Team Breitbart’s revelations have been election-deciders, but they have often been stuff that a simple Google would have uncovered. If they revealed tomorrow that he’d had his own cross-dressing-themed sitcom on primetime TV in the 1980s, I wouldn’t be surprised.

The latest find is a fascinating inversion of the birther conspiracy. Breitbart.com has discovered that in 1991 Barack Obama’s literary agent (who also represented New Kids on the Block) published a booklet that included a biography of the future President. The audience was “business colleagues” in the publishing industry and it was designed to promote Obama’s anticipated first book (later abandoned) called Journeys in Black and White. Here’s how it describes the author’s origins.

Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii. The son of an American anthropologist and a Kenyan finance minister, he attended Columbia University and worked as a financial journalist and editor for Business International Corporation.

The key phrase here is “was born in Kenya" – and this bio line was apparently being used as late as 2007.

Read more in the Telegraph.

I've always been reasonably convinced that Obama was born in the United States, and thought the whole birther conspiracy was a silly waste of time and energy by his opponents. The interesting thing about this story is that Obama bears at least some of the blame for this controversy lingering because he apparently fostered the idea that he was born in Kenya in order to sell books.

But we've got a dangerous situation brewing in this country when there's this little vetting of a candidate for president when he happens to share the worldview of the people who are supposed to be doing the vetting. There is no free press in this country if what we recognize as "the press" chooses not to exercise its freedom in hopes that it can become part of the power structure.