Last updated on July 11th, 2012 at 11:35 am
I found the mother lode of insanity today trending on the Interwebs courtesy of conservative outlet World Net Daily, “Obama’s ‘missing year’ at Columbia found?”
You might think the author — big Birther and alleged plagiarist Jerome Corsi — is fringe, as WND is the tattered frays of the fringe, but these “ideas” are given credence by Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and even the Heritage Foundation. Corsi gives birth to another crazy ball and the conservative media parents nurture it until it becomes a full fledged fact in conservative circles. So hang on, because you’re going to be assaulted with angry words about Obama’s missing Columbia years.
The gist of this Jerome Corsi article is that Obama may have been working as an CIA agent in Pakistan during his 1981-1982 school year and that’s why no one remembers him and he won’t release his transcripts. You might recall this conspiracy theory as it first made itself known on Fox News and the Wall Street Journal in 2008.
Swirling amid the black hole of information are a host of theories about Obama’s whereabouts – particularly during the 1981-1982 school year – including speculation he was working for the CIA in Pakistan.
Cited for evidence are Orly Taitz and Joe Arpaio, both of whom are notorious for being less than sane. The author links to Snopes (alleged to be a pro-Obama website, when in reality, it is a fact checking site, but you can see the connection there) to “prove” his point that no one remembers Obama and thereby bolster his claim that Obama didn’t really attend class at Columbia, but when you click on it, it says in response to the claim that Obama did not attend Columbia (in big bold letters that even a conservative can read): “FALSE”.
Those who have followed the background of President Barack Obama are familiar with the arc of his post-secondary education: After finishing high school in 1979, he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, transferred to Columbia College in New York City (one of Columbia University’s four undergraduate schools) for another two years, graduated from Columbia with a bachelor’s degree in political science, and then (after a five-year interlude during which he traveled and worked as a community organizer) entered Harvard Law School in 1988 and graduated with a law degree in 1991.
It isn’t true that “no one ever came forward from Obama’s past saying they knew him, attended school with him, was his friend, etc.” Those who have attested to having daily personal experience with him during his time at that school include (list on Snopes).
Likewise, other external evidence documents Barack Obama’s presence at Columbia from 1981-83, including:
• An article by Barack Obama published in the 10 March 1983 edition of Columbia’s Sundial school magazine.
• A January 2005 Columbia College Today profile of Barack Obama as a Columbia alumnus.
• A Columbia College press release from November 2008 identifying him as “the first College alumnus to be elected President of the United States.”
Sure, Romney won’t release his tax returns save for one year, but we all know he’s American, I mean, hello! He’s white and he’s Republican. So what if his family lived on a commune in Mexico. White, I tell you. White!
Corsi’s recent June article should have been the end: “Did Barack Obama’s mother pose nude for communist poet and journalist Frank Marshall Davis? Did Obama build his political career on a fairy tale that his father was a Kenyan who grew up herding goats? Was Obama’s goal in writing his autobiography, “Dreams from My Father,” to misdirect Americans away from a deeply disturbing family background and a Marxist political foundation?”
When you find yourself writing that the President’s mother posed nude with a Commie poet and your next sentence is about Kenyan goats, you’ve probably jumped the conspiracy shark.
Jerome’s father was – wait for it — a union public relations director (aka in conservative circles as Hilter’s best friend and also too Commie bastard!). Or maybe the root of his Commie rage is found in the mutual fund he started in formerly Communist Poland for his Minnesota friends that lost $1.2 million. When he was sued, well, he just moved his money over to his wife. So I’m asking if Corsi is a Commie money laundering Marxist with a super duper dirty conscience to whom the ability to scam people comes easily? Just askin’, Jerome. Doin’ my duty as a member of the lamestream media to vet the crazy.
Jerome’s big dream, when he wasn’t scamming real Americans in Minnesota out of their hard earned money, was to run for President on the Constitution Party ticket. Since he’s been referred to as anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic, anti-Semitic, homophobic, and accused of exploiting racial prejudices in an attempt to ‘scare white America'” (Guardian 2008) can you just see him wrapped in our flag, standing next to an almost nude Sarah Palin (guns are clothes, right?), as they wax nostalgia about how easy it is to fleece people out of their hard earned money in our great country? Rah Rah USA!
These same Obama conspiracy theories were floated in 2008 and fact checked and found shame-worthy. But you don’t see that label sticking to any of the outlets that run with them. Can you imagine if, say, Huffington Post ran conspiracy theories about Mitt Romney actually dodging the draft because he had a harem of Che Marxist Socialist wives stashed away on his father’s Mexican commune instead of the real reason he dodged the draft — selling Mormonism to the French like a Real American?
And then, these crazy accusations were backed by the huge founders of all things liberal and then passed on via MSNBC and NPR as reasonable questions if not facts? You can imagine how crazy we’d be. That explains your average Fox conservative.
We’ve got roughly 30 percent of the country living in a fabricated world of lies, surrounded by other people — including leaders, who do nothing to dispel the lies, but in fact lend them credence with vague, public nods to them — dog whistles, if you will.
Now you know how the crazy is born and turns into that angry person who wants you dead for supporting poor people’s right to eat. And since Republicans have been using this crazy as their main weapon of mass destruction (a crazy they deemed too fringey in 2001), we realize they have nothing but the dregs of fringe left. Conservative Republicans are chickens with their heads cut off, nothing left but the screaming and the blind runs into the same birther Kenyan walls they hit in 2008 to no avail.
When you ask them what they don’t like about Obama, they’ll tell you it’s his policies. This is what they mean – that he is Kenyan, that he didn’t go to Columbia, that he wasn’t born here, that he is a Commie, that he is half black. Those are the “policies” they refer to.
It’s bloody and messy and wrong, but that’s our modern day Republican Party. This is what they stir up and nurture, because they have nothing else. It’s not as if they can run on raising your taxes while giving millionaires yet another tax break.
Image: SodaHead
Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.
Sarah is two-time Telly award winning video producer and a member of the Society of Professional Journalists.
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