Photo Shop or Not?

I was browsing through the June, 2012 issue of Vanity Fair a couple of weeks ago and came across this picture of Barack Obama and his girlfriend, Genevieve Cook, when he lived in New York City shortly after graduating from Columbia.  The photo accompanied an excerpt from David Marannis' book, Barack Obama: The Story, that was recently published.

Source:Vanity Fair

Am I hallucinating or is this photo obviously photo-shopped?  Obama's head seems to be completely out of proportion to the rest of the body.  If you look closely at the original in the magazine it also appears that there is a wedding band on the left hand of "Obama".

I was curious as to the source of this photo.   There was no credit given in Vanity Fair other than the reference to the Marannis book.  Therefore, I drove over to the local Barnes and Noble to view the photo in the book and see who Marannis credited the photo to. Tellingly, there was no photo credit given even though almost every other photo in the book had a photo credit.

I am not a conspiracy theorist or birther.  I just look at facts, logic and ask questions when things don't seem to add up.

Is the image photo-shopped?   Any expert opinions out there?

If it is, why would someone go to all of the trouble to do this?

Where did Marannis get the photo?  Why didn't he give any photo credit for it in the book?

Why does it seem that there are always more questions than answers when looking at the background of Barack Obama?  They just never seem to go away.  The Marannis book continues the trend by seeming to show that a good part of Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father, "is contradicted by the people and events in his life".

What is especially interesting when you consider all of this is the statement Obama advisor David Axlerod made last week in which he stated that "Mitt Romney is the most secretive candidate since Richard Nixon".

Is he really serious?  We know infinitely more about Mitt Romney's background than Barack Obama and Romney has not been the President of the United States for almost four years.

John Hinderaker of Powerline clearly does not think so in his post Who's Secretive?

Was Nixon a secretive candidate? Not that I recall. It was John Kennedy, not Nixon, who kept secret a serious medical condition (Addison’s disease) that almost certainly would have cost him the election had it become known. And, of course, it was Kennedy, not Nixon, who carried out endless secret dalliances both on the campaign trail and while in office. But let’s compare Nixon with Obama: Nixon didn’t publish a fictional memoir in his thirties to create an essentially false identity for himself. How secretive is that?

The litany of Obama’s non-disclosures is familiar. Unlike other recent presidential candidates, to cite just one example, Obama has kept his college and law school records under wraps. But that is relatively trivial. It seems to me that another instance of Obama’s secretiveness is much more significant: his refusal to release his medical records. Almost all major party nominees in modern election cycles have made their medical records public. (Bill Clinton is the notable exception.) Mitt Romney has said that he will release his. Yet in 2008, Obama did not make public any medical records at all; instead, he produced a one-page letter from a doctor to the effect that he is in good health.

In the end, all of this is just a trivial side show.

We may not know everything there is to know about what shaped Barack Obama into the man he is today. However, in his time in office, we have gotten to know his views, his attitude and his abilities very well.  We don't need to know too much more to know that he has not produced the kind of leadership and results the country needs from its President right now.

Photos can be photo-shopped.  Barack Obama's record and results as President of the United States cannot.