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“Burgerism is the new birtherism,” proclaims the Telegraph, a lame quip now making the rounds. Burgerism is Trump’s part-time gig at McDonald’s, as John notes, now drawing pushback from Democrats. On the other hand, “birtherism” might prompt people to wonder, like Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, “what’s that from?”

Back in 2008, a Hillary Clinton staffer circulated a rumor that rival candidate Sen. Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore ineligible to be president. This spawned the charge of “birtherism,” which was also a dodge. The key issue wasn’t his place of birth but the identity of the father. Dreams from My Father claims the father is the Kenyan Barack Obama, once a student at the University of Hawaii. But there’s a problem. The Dreams author was born in 1961, and in his writings from 1958 to 1964, now housed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, the Kenyan Barack Obama makes not a single mention of an American wife and Hawaiian-born son.

“At no point does he mention marrying [Ann] Dunham, nor the birth of Barack Obama Jr on August 4, 1961, notes the Daily Mail. “Even in a grant application form written during his time at Harvard in 1963, he leaves a section asking about marital status and number of dependents blank.” So no surprise that the president never bothered to read the material, and there’s another issue in play.

The American Obama doesn’t look much like the Kenyan but he’s the spitting image of the black poet “Frank” from Dreams from My Father. Frank is Frank Marshall Davis, the Stalinist who dedicated much of his life to the all-white dictatorship of the Soviet Union. Davis made his mark in Chicago, where the Dreams author geared up as a community organizer. As Paul Kengor noted in The Communist, his political views were pretty much the same as Frank’s. See also this author’s Barack ‘em Up: A Literary Investigation, and Yes I Con: United Fakes of America, but there’s more to it.

As David Garrow clarified in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father is a novel and the author a composite character. As Tablet’s David Samuels explains, “there was something about this fictional character actually becoming president that helped precipitate the disaster that we are living through now.” If anybody thought that disaster would continue under Kamala Harris, it would be hard to blame them.

Meanwhile, Martha’s “where’s that from?” query was about the movie in which Bette Davis proclaims, “what a dump!” George (Richard Burton) didn’t know but it’s from Beyond the Forest from 1949, and here is Davis doing the honors in fine style. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf appeared in 1966, with Sandy Dennis as Honey and George Segal as Nick. Segal died in 2021, the last cast member to pass away. They don’t make movies like that anymore.