SaintsBro

OK look, this is the "too long didn't read" thing about the birther thing, for me...the argument is that his mother flew to Kenya and gave birth to him there. OK, interesting argument, let's do that. I'm with you, let's go there.

People forget how difficult and how relatively rare air travel still was in those days. International flights really only started in the late 1950s a few years earlier. Do you know how many different flights she would have had to take to get from Hawaii to Kenya in 1961? Honolulu to California, California to the East Coast, the East Coast (refueling at Gander Bay, Canada) to London, London to maybe Cairo, Cairo to Nairobi. How much would that have cost? And while 8 months pregnant? It would have taken her AT LEAST 21 hours MINIMUM to do it, probably longer, up to two days if the flights weren't timed well, and would cost about $2000 or $13,000 in today's money. It's a fact -- you can look this stuff up about airline prices and routes in magazines of the era and whatnot, to see what things cost and how long it took. It's not conjecture.

And then you would be stuck having your baby in Africa rather than in a modern American hospital in Honolulu. Or you could go the other way around the world to get there — it’s about the same distance either way. Kenya and Hawaii are more or less on the opposite sides of the globe, almost as far apart as two places can be. Birthers act like she could just log into Orbitz and hop on a 747 and be there in Kenya a few hours, forgetting how different a 707 is from a 747, and how expensive and rare flying was in those days.

Flying was a luxury back then, not routine. Ever heard of the phrase "the jet set?" The phrase originated in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and that's because flying and especially intercontinental jet travel at that time were for the super rich, the elite, not for starving students and their pregnant wives.

Do people realize what a production it was to buy international plane tickets from multiple international airlines, from a travel agent back then, with no Orbitz, no faxes, no email, nothing but phone and snail mail? You're not going to believe this if you're under 30, but credit cards were not really used over the phone very much back then, and not very many people had them, especially not starving exchange students. Then the tickets would have to be ordered, printed on the mainland, and mailed back to the travel agent in Honolulu. Yes it was possible for them to go, but really difficult and expensive.

And the theory is that she went to Kenya to meet Obama's parents, and then the Kenyans "wouldn't let her back on the plane to go home" because of her advanced pregnancy. Here is the problem with that. If she was that pregnant, 8 months pregnant, they certainly wouldn't have let her on the plane to begin with, back in America, for her to even get to Kenya. Pregnant women simply did not travel by plane in those days, they mostly didn't travel at ALL back then. This would have been against the advice of her doctors, and against all the mainstream medical science of the day, even just to GET her there. Women who were pregnant "stayed put" in those days, it would be considered a big production to get your 8 month pregnant wife in and out of a restaurant, let alone halfway around the world by plane. It was not like today, where pregnant women exercise, travel, drive, and do all sorts of things.

In those days you boarded a 707 by going up and down steps, those rolling stairway things. No extending walkways out to the plane, and no moving sidewalks in airports like today. Airports typically didn't even have wheelchairs in them back then, it was rare. You think an airline is going to let a pregnant lady walk across the tarmac and up and down 32 steps a bunch of times?

So that is my thing about the birther thing. The "Kenyan-birth" version of the story has some major flaws in it, that nobody has really addressed.