From today through Election Day, November 6, 2012, we will vet this president--and his rivals.

We begin with a column Andrew wrote last week in preparation for today’s Big relaunch--a story that should swing the first hammer against the glass wall the mainstream media has built around Barack Obama.

Years of persecution made the Apalachee wary in their dealings with outsiders. Rather than claiming tribal heritage on legal documents and in public, children were forbidden to talk about their ethnicity and were instructed never to ask about “the land” or the lawsuit once filed against the government. Paper records were periodically destroyed and increasingly in civil and church records, members self-identified as white when they were counted at all.

Before his death in 1956, Oscar Vallery instructed his son to burn all his possessions. “Whenever he died, his son took his kids over there and they built a big fire. He had books and papers, he even had his old Civil War uniforms. He didn’t want . . . people to know who they were” (GB interview, 10 March 1998). The tradition of burning important paper records was a common response to the persecution the Apalachee had endured. When asked if she had documents which might substantiate her heritage, Oscar Vallery’s granddaughter stated, “I burnt everything me and my daddy had. I burnt them when my children were all very young so no one could see them” (EH interview, 21 March 1998). Oscar Vallery was buried near Bayou Camite in the Brossette Cemetery belonging to his wife’s family.

But only a fool thinks that if horrible secrets aren't revealed, then the "vetting" never really happened at all.

Fox News President: ‘We Still Don’t Know Anything About Obama’

By Annie-Rose Strasser on May 22, 2012 at 11:46 am

In a guest lecture at Ohio University Monday night, Fox News head Roger Ailes touched on media bias, the Obama administration’s legitimacy, and whether comedian Jon Stewart would be on air without Fox News.

During the event, titled “FOX News: Past, Present and Future,” Ailes argued that US voters still don’t know anything about Barack Obama — a line commonly repeated by conservative commentators and far-right legislators:

The media's failure is all the more glaring, given that the forgotten photograph has been in plain view for fifteen years. It appeared on the front page of Chicago's Hyde Park Herald on July 9th, 1997, and was taken by legendary photographer Nancy Campbell Hays.

[...]

Since 2009, the ridicule of Tea Party signs and costumes has been so constant from Obama, the mainstream media, and the left that Glenn Beck encouraged people to stop dressing up so as not to give them an excuse.

It didn't work, though. The NAACP still saw the costumes as part of a disturbing, nationalist impulse:

So, by the NAACP's logic, it would appear that Barack Obama is an over-arching nationalist, and perhaps a racist, antisemitic nativist as well.

In late 2008—long after the election—the media revealed a long-forgotten article written by Barack Obama while at Columbia. Obama wrote the March 1983 article, “Breaking the War Mentality,” about two campus groups, Arms Race Alternatives (ARA) and Student Against Militarism (SAM). Ben Smith of Politico (now at Buzzfeed) told readers that Obama’s views reflected the “very conventional campus liberalism of the time.”

Wrong. Smith and the media failed to investigate what the activists at SAM were actually doing: encouraging students to break the law by not registering for the Selective Service and harassing military recruiters.

Obama wrote that SAM “was formed in response to the passage of the registration laws in 1980.” Obama noted that the activists had “fostered awareness and practical action necessary to counter the growing threat of war.” That “awareness” and “practical action” went beyond mere protest, or encouraging students to break the law. SAM also wanted to break the military itself by sapping it of support—as Obama must have known from contemporaneous articles in the Columbia Spectator and from campus politics.

[...]

While Obama did register for the draft in Honolulu, Hawaii on September 4, 1980, far out of sight of his fellow student radicals at Occidental or Columbia, he backed SAM’s program.

The Vetting: Obama Decried 'Spread of Militarism,' Lauded Anti-Selective Service Group at Columbia

Given Obama's anti-military views at the time, and given how quickly President Obama has been slashing defense spending and downgrading U.S. military capabilities, it's worth wondering whether he still shares that view, despite many campaign-friendly photo-ops with the troops.