Update:

The New York Times reports:

“Due to the new spread of the Delta variant over the past week, the President and Mrs. Obama have decided to significantly scale back the event to include only family and close friends,” Hannah Hankins, a spokeswoman for the former president, said in a statement Wednesday morning. “He’s appreciative of others sending their birthday wishes from afar and looks forward to seeing people soon.”

The Delta variant is not news. But the cascade of criticism the Obamas experienced is news.

Forget about the violation of COVID protocols — those are a passing fancy on the left.  Barack Obama's sixtieth birthday bash this coming weekend threatens to violate just about every progressive virtue the Obamas and their woke pals have ever signaled.

Officially, Obama's birthday falls on August 4.  As I will explain, that may not be the real date, but the "optics" problem facing Barry and his bourgeois buddies is a more pressing one.

As planned, some 475 invited guests and at least 200 worker bees will swarm the Obamas' waterfront estate on Martha's Vineyard, a tony little island off the coast of Massachusetts.  In addition to their vax cards, I suspect the worker bees and even the guests will have to show a photo ID.  Apparently, birthday invites are more vulnerable than ballots in Obama world.

On a side note, rumor has it that the ever-cautious Georgia congressman, Hank Johnson, passed on the invite for fear that the whole island would become so overly populated that it would tip over and capsize.

Among the invited guests are George Clooney, Steven Spielberg, and Oprah.  I could be wrong, but my guess is that these and the Obamas' other jet-setting friends are not going to fly commercial.

The Obamas bought this nearly 7,000-square-foot waterfront home in the fall of 2019.  They paid nearly $12 million for their new digs.  No big deal.  They had pocketed a reported $65 million advance for their respective memoirs from Penguin Random House.

In his 2020 memoir A Promised Land, Obama worries that he did not do enough to deal with "America's escalating inequality."  He wonders if he should have tried "to exact more economic pain" on corporate America in the hope of creating a more just economic order.

"The thought nags at me," insists Scrooge McWoke.  That thought might have nagged a little less if Obama had bought a three-bedroom cottage on Lake Michigan and spread the wealth around, but then again, how do you entertain 475 people in a three-bedroom cottage?  What if it rains?

Back at Martha's Vineyard, Obama and his guests will enjoy a glorious view of a barrier beach and the ocean beyond.  This view might have soothed the troubled soul of the ordinary nouveau riche, but it had to nag Obama even more than his anxieties about inequality.

What's weird, given his beachfront property, is that in his new memoir Obama is downright paranoid about climate change. He writes:

By the time I was running for president, the clear consensus among scientists was that in the absence of bold, coordinated international action to reduce emissions, global temperatures were destined to climb another two degrees Celsius within a few decades. Past that point, the planet could experience an acceleration of melting ice caps, rising oceans, and extreme weather from which there was no return.

If we are to take Obama at his word, his anxieties make Hank Johnson's seem sensible.  "Reading the literature," writes Obama, "I pictured caravans of lost souls wandering a cracked earth in search of arable land, regular Katrina-sized catastrophes across every continent, island nations swallowed up by the sea."

Apparently, the fear of islands being swallowed up did not worry him enough to relocate to his imagined Kansas homeland.  "Geez, he really did stop the oceans," wrote one wry blogger in a headline Obama totally deserved.

Now wallowing in F-you money, Obama can afford to ditch his beliefs, such as they are or seem to be.  After all, a man turns 60 only once.  Or does he?  In my deep dive into Obama's past for my new book, Barack Obama's Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, I came to the conclusion that Obama may have actually turned 60 several months ago.

What I discovered is that Obama's three-year resistance to producing his birth certificate was no casual thing.  To fight off curious litigants, Obama hired the big guns at the Dems' go-to, Deep State law firm, Perkins Coie.

The evidence strongly suggests that Obama was trying to conceal not the where of his birth, but the when.  It seems highly likely that when his grandparents abruptly pulled up stakes in the summer of 1960 and moved from Seattle to Hawaii, Obama's mother Ann Dunham was already pregnant by a Black man.

Until the time he ran for president in 2007, Obama may have believed the origins story he had been fed since childhood. That story that would get him elected only if preserved.  In David Axelrod, Obama had the best dumpster-diver in the business.  As in any campaign, Axelrod would have dug up the dirt on his own candidate before the opponents did.

Beyond caring about appearances — the birthday party makes that clear — Obama no longer has a need for his presumed "father" or his living African relatives.  They have felt the sting.  The best man at Obamas' wedding, Malik Obama, voted for Donald Trump in 2016.  Don't expect to see him or the other kin at the bash.

In 2011, embarrassed by Donald Trump's prodding, Obama commissioned the Perkins Coie attorneys to produce a birth certificate.  Five years later, they outdid themselves.  They produced the Steele dossier.

Jack Cashill's new book, Barack Obama's Promised Land: Deplorables Need Not Apply, is now available wherever you buy books.

Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

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