Trump's proposition
By Kevin Gabriel
web posted October 29, 2012
Donald Trump has done what the media refuses to do: he has asked that Barak Obama release his college records, applications, and passport information. He has pointed out that the "most transparent" president in American history is, in fact, the most opaque. In return for the release of these records, Mr. Trump has offered to redistribute to a charity of the President's choice $5 million of his personal wealth.
Do you think the President will take him up on this? I wouldn't hold my breath.
It is interesting to hear the media response. Juan Williams wants to know if Mitt Romney will release the next nine years of his tax returns if the President releases the information sought by Mr. Trump. Greta van Susteren wants to know why Trump didn't offer more money. She even suggested that, if Trump would just offer $100 million instead, that would be more like it.
Let's think about this. Trump is asking that the President release information that every president in the recent past as well as every recent candidate has released. In contrast, no one has released 10 years of tax returns or been asked to do so. So what is Juan Williams babbling about? Mr. Obama will release something that everyone has, as a matter of course, released if Mitt Romney will release something that no one, as a matter of course, has released. That seems fair and reasonable.
As for Ms. Van Susteren, she is missing the point. Why should anyone have to offer up a penny in order to entice the President to release his academic records? If the President feels so strongly about transparency, then he would have and should have released them a long time ago. Mr. Trump's offer simply highlights the President's hypocrisy.
Of course, the President's failure to release this information begs the question of why he won't do so. It does not take much of a nose for a story to conclude that there is something in there that the President would rather not disclose. Needless to say, the mainstream media's collective noses can't smell a thing.
For sure, we are going to find out that Mr. Obama is no brain surgeon. There is a liberal myth that this person is possibly the smartest man alive or dead. In fact, one Presidential historian, Michael Beschloss, has made the point that Mr. Obama is our smartest president ever. He claims that Mr. Obama's "IQ is off the charts."
This is beyond ridiculous. How would he know any such thing, even if it were true? What objective measure would he use? Abraham Lincoln, James K. Polk, et al never took the SAT. And Mr. Obama's record is a mystery. What were his SAT scores? I would surmise something pretty ordinary. And I have just as much justification for this guess as does Mr. Beschloss for his inane statement.
We have just learned from Mr. Obama, in an interview with the noted journalist Jay Leno, that, after the seventh grade, he had difficulty with math. Apparently his daughter's 9th grade math (most likely Algebra 1) is beyond him. No wonder he doesn't have any idea what the national debt is!
So we are going to find out that Mr. Obama is not intellectually superior. But there is likely another, more disturbing reason that Mr. Obama doesn't want his college information and passport information released: we are going to see on what basis he was admitted to these institutions. That is, was he admitted as an American or as a foreign student?
We have already seen from a bio put out by one of his early publicists that Mr. Obama was perfectly happy to bill himself as a Kenyan in order to advance his writing career. Did he apply to Occidental as an American or as an Indonesian or as a Kenyan? And, if he applied as an Indonesian, was he, in fact, an Indonesian citizen?
Mr. Trump's challenge raises the issue of just what country Mr. Obama was a citizen of by the time he applied to college. Or, at the least, it raises the question of what country he claimed he was a citizen of at that time. We have every right to know this.
Now, just because he claimed to be a foreigner to help himself get into college doesn't make it true. But an inspection of these college records might well present us with the following alternatives: either this man is not an American citizen or he was willing to tell all kinds of lies – misrepresenting himself as a foreigner – in order to advance his career.
Either way, one has to ask, do we want this man as our President? 
Kevin Gabriel is a freelance writer and consultant living in Massachusetts.