debunking Jerome ‘Bigot’ Corsi’s Smear Attack Book: ‘The Obama Nation’

Chapter 2: Factual Inaccuracies In Corsi’s Book

Corsi’s book is rife with inaccuracies. He claims to have 700 footnotes and yet he gets some of the most basic facts about Barack Obama wrong—like the year the Obamas were married. Corsi writes throughout his book that Obama has refused to acknowledge details about his life, but a quick search through Obama’s two thorough books shows that, despite Corsi’s claims, Obama does in fact talk about his sister’s birth and did dedicate “Dreams from My Father” to his family, for example. But Corsi makes more troubling inaccurate claims as well, such as saying that Obama gave a million dollars to a Kenyan politician, when numerous outlets have shown that to be a lie. And Corsi’s claims that Obama would leave the country unsafe by destroying the military are spurious and untrue. While these are certainly not all the inaccuracies in the book, they include some important points we thought should be pointed out.


LIE: “Nowhere in the autobiography does Obama disclose that his wife-to-be accompanied him to Africa on the 1992 trip.” [p 25]

REALITY: OBAMA WROTE ABOUT TAKING MICHELLE TO KENYA

Obama: “After Our Engagement, I Took Michelle To Kenya…” Obama wrote in Dreams, “After our engagement, I took Michelle to Kenya to meet the other half of my family. She was an immediate success there as well, in part because the number of Luo words in her vocabulary very soon surpassed mine. We had a fine time in Alego, helping Auma on a film project of hers, listening to more of Granny’s stories, meeting relatives I’d missed the first time around.” [Dreams, p 439]


LIE: “Obama failed to discuss his father’s alcoholism and polygamy in his autobiography.” [p 24] “Obama’s story of his father’s life is dense, presented in anything but a straightforward manner, often glorified or embellished so as to mask much of the harsh and, for Obama, probably painful truth.” [p 37]

REALITY: OBAMA WROTE EXTENSIVELY ABOUT HIS FATHER’S FLAWS IN “DREAMS”

Obama Wrote About His Father’s Drinking Throughout Dreams from My Father. Obama writes Auma said, “At the time, I just saw that life at home became very difficult. The Old Man never spoke to Roy or myself except to scold us. He would come home very late, drunk, and I could hear him shouting at Ruth, telling her to cook him food. Ruth became very bitter at how the Old Man had changed… Finally Roy just left. He just stopped coming home and started living with different people. So I was left alone with the Old Man. Sometimes I would stay up half the night, waiting to hear him come through the door, worrying that something terrible had happened. Then he would stagger in drunk and come into my room and wake me because he wanted company or something to eat. He would talk about how unhappy he was and how he had been betrayed. I would be so sleepy, I wouldn’t understand anything he was saying. Secretly, I began to wish that he would just stay out one night and never come back.” [p 216-217]

Obama Wrote He Asked Himself If His Father Was “A Bitter Drunk.” “Now, as I sat in the glow of a single light bulb, rocking slightly on a hard-backed chair, that image had suddenly vanished. Replaced by . . . what? A bitter drunk? An abusive husband? A defeated, lonely bureaucrat? To think that all my life I had been wrestling with nothing more than a ghost!” [p 220]

Obama Wrote His Father’s First Wife Was Kezia, Mother To Four of His Children. Obama’s father’s wife was Kezia Obama. Before he left Kenya, he fathered Auma and Roy with Kezia. After he had returned to Kenya years later, she also gave birth to Bernard and Abo. [Africa News, 8/15/04; Dreams from my Father, p 316, p 335]

Obama Wrote His Mother Said There Was No Legal Documentation That Could Show a Divorce From His First Wife. In Dreams From my Father, Obama writes that his mother Ann Dunham said, “your father’s first wife...he had told me they were separated, but it was a village wedding, so there was no legal document that could show a divorce.” [Dreams from my Father, p 126]

Obama Writes That His Father’s Third Wife Refused To Life With His First Wife. In Dreams from my Father, Obama writes that one of his relatives said, “once Barack [Sr.] agreed to marry Ruth, she could not accept the idea of his having Kezia as a second wife.” Ruth was the mother to Mark and David. [Dreams from my Father, p 213, p 423]

Obama Wrote Obama Sr. Fathered His Last Child With an Unnamed Woman. Obama writes that before he died, Obama Sr. “had just fathered another son, George, with a young woman he was living with.” Obama writes that his sister Auma said, “The Old Man’s last girlfriend, the mother of our baby brother, George— she wanted everything.” [Dreams from my Father, p 265-266, p 218]



LIE: ”We find there is even uncertainty whether Stanley Ann and Obama Senior were ever married in a church. No marriage license for this first marriage surfaces in any of the now-growing volume of research being done...Yet even this remains murky.” [p. 44]

REALITY: CORSI ADMITS ON THE SAME PAGE THAT OBAMA’S PARENTS HAD A LEGAL AMERICAN MARRIAGE

TIME Reported On Obama’s Parents’ Divorce Records. TIME reported, “On Feb. 2, 1961, several months after they met, Obama’s parents got married in Maui, according to divorce records.” [TIME, 4/9/08]

Corsi Cites Time Story To Say “Divorce Papers Confirm…” Corsi wrote, “Other sources say divorce papers confirm that a civil ceremony was held on Maui, on February 2, 1961, when Ann was three months pregnant with Obama.” Corsi cites the April 9th, 2008 Time story for his reference to Obama’s parents’ wedding. [p. 44]

Corsi “Baselessly” Suggests That Barack Obama Sr. Divorced Ann Dunham “Following The Prescripts Of Islamic Sharia Law.” “Corsi baselessly suggests that Obama’s father, Barack Obama Sr., may have divorced his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, ‘following the prescripts of Islamic sharia law.’ Corsi’s sole source for this statement is a blogger who made the claim in a March 20 post, which featured the false headline, “BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA WAS MUSLIM FOR 31 YEARS” and misstated Obama’s mother’s name as ‘Shirley Ann.’ The blogger Corsi cited, ‘Majalah Bulanan Kumunitas Indonesia Di Edmonton,’ provided no substantiation for the claim that ‘the senior Obama divorced Dunham according to Sharia law.’” [Media Matters, 8/4/08]


LIE: “Obama devotes the entire second chapter of his autobiography to his time in Indonesia, but remarkably, he makes no reference to Maya’s birth.” [p 48]

REALITY: OBAMA DID MAKE REFERENCE TO HIS SISTER’S BIRTH

Obama: “My Mother And Lolo Would Remain Cordial Through The Birth Of My Sister, Maya…” Obama wrote, “Such arguments were rare, though; my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya, through the separation and eventual divorce, up until the last time I saw Lolo, ten years later, when my mother helped him travel to Los Angeles to treat a liver ailment that would kill him at the age of fifty-one.” [p 47]

Corsi “Falsely” Claims That Obama Did Not Mention The Birth Of His Sister In Dreams. “Corsi falsely claims that Obama does not mention the birth of his half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, during the chapter in Dreams in which he discusses his time living in Indonesia. Corsi writes: In the midst of the personal drama being played against the background of this Indonesian turmoil, on August 15, 1970, Obama’s half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born to his mother and stepfather. Obama devotes the entire second chapter of his autobiography to his time in Indonesia, but remarkably, he makes no reference to Maya’s birth [Page 48]. In fact, on Page 47 of Dreams, in the chapter discussing his time in Indonesia, Obama writes that ‘my mother and Lolo would remain cordial through the birth of my sister, Maya.’” [Media Matters, 8/4/08]


LIE: “Obama did not dedicate Dreams from My Father to his mother, or to his father, Barack Senior, or to his Indonesian stepfather. Missing from the dedication are the grandparents who raised him in Hawaii, especially during the years his mother abandoned him to return to Indonesia to be with Lolo.” [p 49]

REALITY: OBAMA DID DEDICATE HIS BOOK TO HIS FAMILY

Obama Wrote That He Owed “The Deepest Gratitude” And “Dedicated” His Book To “My Mother, My Grandparents, My Siblings, Stretched Across Oceans And Continents.” “It is to my family, though -- my mother, my grandparents, my siblings, stretched across oceans and continents -- that I owe the deepest gratitude and to whom I dedicated this book. Without their constant love and support, without their willingness to let me sing their song and their toleration of the occasional wrong note, I could never have hoped to finish. If nothing else, I hope that the love and respect I feel for them shines through on every page.” [Dreams From My Father, p xvii]


LIE: “According to the blog, his religion was listed as Islam.” [p 53]

REALITY: RELIGION OF THE FATHER WAS WHAT WAS LISTED

Obama’s Parents Registered Obama As A Muslim For “Convenience” Because It Was The “Common Practice…To List The Father’s Faith.” Obama’s stepfather was nominally Muslim. ‘At the public school, which welcomed pupils of various faiths, Obama’s parents registered him as ‘Muslim’ only for convenience. The Indonesian Communist Party had just been destroyed, and atheistic Marxism outlawed. Pupils were required to state an affiliation with a major world religion. When enrolling a child, the common practice was to list the father’s faith.’” [Mercury News, 2/1/2007]

Obama Was Registered As The Religion Of His Stepfather. Israella Dharmawan said Obama “was registered as a Muslim because his father, Lolo Soetoro, was Muslim.” [Los Angeles Times, 3/16/07]