Someone Tell Roeser about Snopes

It’s really hard to tell how this idiot ever was given any public credence, but he has four questions to Barack Obama:

Barack Obama can end the controversy as well. His office seems to regard any questions of a possible earlier religious commitment as unfair. Not so. If he can answer the question as completely as Kennedy did, he deserves to move up to the next level.

Question No. 1: When you were a youth, you went to a Muslim school for several years. Did you ever embrace the Muslim faith then and later renounce it?

Question No. 2: Do Muslims have any reason to believe that you were once of their faith and have rejected it?

Question No. 3: Was there ever a time when people would have reason to believe you were a Muslim? The fact that Hussein is your middle name is one reason-the name of Mohammad’s grandson whose date of death is regarded as a high holy day in the Muslim faith.

Question No. 4: Do you realize that the Koran specifies that anyone who was a member of the Muslim faith and rejected should be done away with?

The famous internets has already dealt with the issue--as has Obama

Barack Obama’s father (also named Barack Obama) departed Hawaii, leaving his wife and son behind, when young Barack was only two years old. Four years later Barack’s mother, Anna, remarried (to an Indonesian oil company manager), and she and Barack moved to Djakarta, the capital and largest city of Indonesia. In his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama did not provide any detail about the schools he attended in Indonesia, saying only that:

[My mother’s] initial efforts centered on education. Without the money to send me to the International School, where most of Djakarta’s foreign children went, she had arranged from the moment of our arrival to supplement my Indonesian schooling with lessons from a U.S. correspondence course.

Five days a week, she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast, and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.

In his 2006 book, The Audacity of Hope, Obama elaborated on his early schooling, explaining that he attended both Catholic and Muslim schools in Indonesia; not out of any particular religious affiliation, but because his mother wanted him to obtain the best education possible under the circumstances:

During the five years that we would live with my stepfather in Indonesia, I was sent first to a neighborhood Catholic school and then to a predominantly Muslim school; in both cases, my mother was less concerned with me learning the catechism or puzzling out the meaning of the muezzin’s call to evening prayer than she was with whether I was properly learning my multiplication tables.

Confusingly, a 2004 Salon profile of Obama reverses the order in which he attended those schools:

When Obama was 6, Anna remarried. Her new husband was Lolo, an Indonesian oil company manager, and the new family moved to Djakarta, where Obama’s sister Maya was born.

After two years in a Muslim school, then two more in a Catholic school, Obama was sent by his mother back to her parents’ home so that he could attend Hawaii’s esteemed Punahou Academy

So the reason Obama’s office thinks the questions are unfair is because there are only so many ways you can answer the same questions over and over again.