Turns out that a number of fringey folks, including one Andy Martin and prominent wingnut Jerome Corsi (of “Unfit for Command” fame) have been assiduously peddling the theory that Ann Dunham and Barack Obama, Sr. never actually got married. Said Martin, in July of 2008 (not long before Brown taped the interview posted above):
Barack Obama, Senior, and Anne Dunham never married. Obama knows this fact. This is also why he keeps his white grandmother a virtual prisoner; she knows too, and she won’t lie.
Through the past several decades Obama has pretended he ‘didn’t know’ the facts about his illegitimate birth. He thought he could get away with the big lie. And he almost did get away with it….
His mother was promiscuous and had a child out of wedlock, in 1961, when that was still scandalous behavior. Is this Obama’s idea of ‘family values?’ Obviously, he has been deceiving the American people and hoping his advertising lies could overcome the truth. He has failed.
Corsi, for his part, has been keeping the faith even post-election. This post at World Net Daily, “Was Obama’s birth out of wedlock?”, is from September of 2009:
Was President Obama born out of wedlock in 1961? … As WND has previously reported, the only documentation for Ann Dunham’s marriage to Barack Obama, Sr., comes from their divorce documents that list the marriage date as Feb. 2, 1961…. No wedding certificate or photograph of a ceremony for Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. has ever been found or published.
Etc. etc. Oh, and one more thing about World Net Daily: there, the Brown campaign actually is running advertising. It’s got the “Paid for by the Scott Brown for U.S. Senate Committee” logo on it, and it’s not a Google ad (though those are present on the page as well). If you want WND’s full birther rundown, with Scott’s ad running alongside it, here ya go (screenshot here). I was wrong about the other one; I’m not wrong about this.
In addition, there were some very complicated (and, needless to say, quite peculiar) theories floating around back in 2008 to the effect that, even if Obama’s parents did get married, the marriage might have been invalid. Here’s one of them, from August 11, 2008, just a couple of weeks before Brown taped the above interview:
When he was 18, Barack Obama Sr. married a woman named Kezia and had four children with her. Two of them later returned to Kenya from the United States. He never divorced her. In the US, polygamy is illegal. If you are already married, regardless of where you got married, all subsequent marriages are invalid. This is the case with the marriage of Stanley Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. in February 1961. Barak Obama Jr. was born out of wedlock.
One amusing irony of this particular “out of wedlock” theory is that its creator is actually using it to argue that Obama is eligible to serve as president. In a nutshell, the incredibly convoluted theory is that even if Obama was born in Kenya or somewhere else, the fact that his mother was not legally married when she gave birth to him means that, under U.S. law in effect at the time, Obama nonetheless acquired U.S. citizenship at birth by virtue of his mother’s American citizenship. Whereas, if she had been legally married to Obama Sr. but gave birth out of the country, Obama Jr. wouldn’t have been a “natural born citizen” because a different law would have applied. Whew.
Did Brown know about any of this stuff? Did he take it seriously? Is that why, when someone else says that Obama’s mother was married when she gave birth to him, Brown says “I don’t know about that”? And if not, then what?
Good thing Obama is coming to town tomorrow. Maybe he and Scottie can have a beer summit and clear the whole thing up.
Again, can’t we do better than this? And the ads are served by Google and Adify. So it’s still not clear he’s choosing this particular wingnut site to advertise on. But really, it still feels like one little nitpick after another.
You don’t think it’s significant that some of Brown’s ideas seem to be on all fours with some of the fringiest elements of the right?
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p>Well, OK. But I do.
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p>As for the ads, the one I pointed to is definitely not a Google ad. Brown owned up to having purchased ad space on Newsmax, which he then took down after we ran the piece about the military takeover column. No reason to think he wouldn’t also have bought space on World Nut Daily.
That’s what his base reads.
We have spent decades avoiding “one little nitpick after another”. In our silence, the rightwing has built a monstrous castle of lies and populated it with an army of liars.
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p>We must stop tolerating the lies and the liars who spread them.
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p>This is a serious election to high elected office. Scott Brown has demonstrated that he has zero regard for the truth. An employer doing routine validation of a job candidate’s claimed background who discovered a long trail of mis-representations like his would surely terminate the hiring process.
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p>The web is filled with lunatics who spout all sorts of crazy ideas, and other lunatics who publicize them.
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p>Surely we don’t knowingly elect them to the US Senate.
I honestly don’t think its a big deal for someone to be born out of wedlock, it doesn’t reflect poorly on them. Similarly I could care less if my President was a Muslim. But for the record Barack Obama is neither one of those things and Brown should stop saying he is.
What a d-bag.
Kenyan, Muslim deliberately installed by evil globalists to destroy America on purpose.
…in the State Senate was under the leadership of people like Brian Lees and Richard Tisei. In Washington he would be listening to Mitch McConnell and Jim Inhofe. Nutcake central.
You think the average voter could care less about this? Or is it supposed to fire up the base?
Commenting on the opposition’s blog looks desperate. Desperate, I tell you! The average voter says it’s desperate!
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Brown’s insinuations were in the first place? Oh wait, baseless insinuations have been such a part of the conservative narrative since the Clinton years that we’re supposed just accept them.
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p>Let’s see…It’s fine for a conservative to make bogus suggestions that cast aspersions on his opponent. But not fine when he gets called on them.
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p>If Brown hadn’t put this garbage out there, you wouldn’t be seeing it.
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p>http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com…
Krugman asks a question today – does the Democratic Party have access to the Outrage Machine?
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If you polled people on this question it wouldn’t surprise me that a lot of people think that Obama was born out of wedlock. When the news reports made reference to Obama’s background they’d say that he was raised by a single mother or a teen mother. It isn’t a stretch to also get it in one’s head that he was born out of wedlock. It has nothing to do with any kind of birther conspiracy.
but “bastard” status is still a powerful slur among a lot of older populations, especially religious ones. Maybe it’s not as strong an insult to younger generations.
Do we really want to defend some kind of moral distinction between Obama’s mother and Bristol Palin, like Brown’s opponent in this clip is doing? If I heard someone try to make that case I would chuckle too, knowing what we know about Mr. Obama Sr. Are we looking to revive the stigma on illegitimacy now? Is that what’s going on?
There was no question about Bristol Palin’s marital status and except for the hypocrisy angle, I do not recall seeing high level Democrats making an issue of it.
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p>We see a Republican trying to score points by making insinuations about the marital status of Obama’s mother.
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p>The point isn’t to argue the morality of an out of wedlock birth. The point is what Brown is willing to lead the public to believe in order to score political points.