Justin's Political Corner
This is what I see as the most hilarious episode to come out of CPAC 2013. A panel hosted by Breitbart.com known as “The Uninvited” Panel (Because even the regular crackpot Republicans didn’t want them there) had quite a moment when Orly Taitz wanted to discuss Obama’s citizenship. “Creeping Sharia” Islamaphobe Pamela Geller wasn’t about to have any of it, after all, she was there to discuss the threat of Creeping Sharia. (Oddly, many of the people raising the alarm about Sharia share the anti-homosexual, misogynist, religiously intolerant attitudes of Sharia.)
Orly Taitz, better known as the “Birther Queen,” was rebuked by blogger Pamela Geller during Saturday’s panel, introduced by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) as “the world experts on global jihad.”
Geller snapped at Taitz after she asked multiple questions about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
“I think there’s enough substance on this panel, I mean how many topics can you handle,” Geller said, “Inappropriate. really.”
Taitz gathered up her things in a huff, perhaps to go in search of more like-minded individuals.
Also, not seen in this video (However if I find footage, you’ll be the first to know) when Rep. King introduced the panel he told the group that gathered that the FBI has “scrubbed out” derogatory references to “Islam” or “Muslims” because their Muslim advisers told them they had to. And of course he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to talk illegal immigrants, who he referred to as “undocumented Democrats.”
Former Bush Attorney General Michael Mukasey was also on hand, and warned of Islam’s “need to impose sharia on the world,” noting that “there has been a systematic purging of references to Islamism, lest offense be given to Muslims.” He then asked where is the government finding out what will offend Muslims, groups like CAIR and ISNA, “both of which are branches of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
“The vast majority of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims adhere to a view of their religion that agrees on the need to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on the world,” he said.
My mind finally numbed a bit through all of the commentary from speakers with all of the details of how the Muslim Brotherhood is ruling the world — or maybe it’s just America — it was hard to keep up with all of the spinning. But, there was a bit more humor with crying over being called “The Uninvited,” and Pamela Geller’s tears over her “truth is the new hate speech” drivel.
If Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon was under the impression that giving anti-Muslim activists Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and Frank Gaffney a rather public platform at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference after the organizers at the American Conservative Union banned them from direct participation would leave them feeling chastened or even grateful for the opportunity, Robert Spencer disabused him of that notion within moments of beginning his address. Rather than touching upon the nominal topic of his speech, “Why I am not a conservative,” Spencer lit straight into the exact kind of personal attacks against ACU board members Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan that not only got him banned but from which Bannon had specifically asked him to refrain.
“There’s no ‘personal attack,’” Spencer claimed after Bannon tried to steer him back to his speech topic because, he stated, he wasn’t personally acquainted with either Norquist or Khan. “What I do know is that they’re completely in bed with the same people Barack Obama is listening to to press the Muslim Brotherhood-positive foreign policy of the United States, and domestic policy as well.”
It was the sort of red meat that only about sixty percent of the once-capacity crowd had stuck around for more than an hour of painfully boring speeches to hear — and they ate it up, giving Spencer a standing ovation at the end of a short speech in which he also claimed “the United States government has sold out to the Muslim Brotherhood” and that, “This is not about me.”
Geller was next up to the microphone, which she used to claim that God himself had a hand in her being given the opportunity to speak at CPAC despite her banishment. “The media is self-enforcing the sharia,” she asserted to the audience by not giving enough coverage to what she called jihadist attacked inside the United States. But while she encouraged others to do the same, she warned them, “You are a ‘racist Islamophobic anti-Muslim bigot’ if you touch this subject.”
Despite her concerns about the “libel” of such statements about her motivations, Geller used her time to explain more about her suit against the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, which first denied her the ability to run anti-Islam subway ads and then were forced to do so by a lawsuit she brought based on the First Amendment. “You know why I had to sue?” she asked the audience rhetorically. “Because I’m insulting the savages, that’s why,” she finished to nervous titters.
She also called out the “My Jihad” counter-campaign against her ads by the Council on American-Islamic Relations that seeks to educate Americans that “jihad” does not inherently mean religious war. “This so so bizarre and so insulting and so offensive to the intelligence of the American people,” she said, “But this is the war, you see. The war is in the information battle space. The war is in the war of ideas. And we are being completely shut out by our own,” by not being allowed to host panels on it at CPAC.
“Now, am I saying that [ACU Board Member]Suhail Khan is as bad as al-Awlaki?” she asked her audience. “He’s worse! Listen to me! He’s worse because look what he’s done to this conference. Look at the effect that they have had on this conference. That was stealth jihad, that’s what that was.”
Frank Gaffney, whose presentation was nominally about the problems with reducing America’s nuclear arsenal, used the question-and-answer session to join in the attacks on Norquist and Khan, claiming that Norquist — who is the anti-tax advocate behind Americans For Tax Reform — was the “protege” of a Muslim convicted of supporting al Qaeda and that it was at Norquist’s insistence that Karl Rove brought Khan into the White House during the Bush Administration despite the fact that Khan supposed is “a prince of the Muslim Brotherhood.”
The problem with CPAC organizers not apparently aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, according to Spencer, is that “people are very anxious not to appear bigoted and racist and so they court Muslim groups that they believe to be moderate — and I’m not saying that there are no moderate Muslims and no Muslims that don’t want to kill us, I’m very glad that there are Muslims that don’t want to kill us and I know that there are lots of them. The thing is, though, that there are many groups that are not moderate at all, that have the same goals as the al Qaeda groups and all the others that are involved in violent jihad but they are just achieving those goals by different means.”
“This is manifest and obvious in all kinds of ways,” he added. “The infiltration is very great and its very sophisticated and people for the best of intentions fall for it. We have to be more alert and more aware.”
But it was when birther Orly Taitz stood up and lectured the panelists about not allowing her and her followers to discuss Obama’s supposedly real citizenship that Geller echoed the views of more than one CPAC attendee about the whole thing: “It’s inappropriate,” she said.
h/t: The Raw Story
Pamela Geller believes America is at war. Not a figurative one or an ideological one, but a literal one that calls for guns and missiles and planes and tanks and troops. One that has and will cause the deaths of innocents, of men, women, children, and, eventually, of nations.
She believes we are in a worldwide war between good and evil itself. She believes we are losing.
She believes, truly believes, that this evil—Islam—is upon our shores and that the time it takes for Islam to overrun what she calls the greatest country in the history of mankind can be measured not in decades or years but in months. She believes the re-election ofPresident Barack Obama on November 6 has all but assured it.
Geller, 54, one of the most polarizing women in the country, is but a foot soldier in this war—a cog, but a large one that grows larger every day. When I meet her at an upscale coffee shop blocks away from her tony midtown apartment, she is in full combat gear.
“You’re a kid!” she cries when I reach out to shake her hand. Her Long Island accent, thick from her childhood, is distracting from the start. I’m not a kid, but I decide it doesn’t matter, because she’s absolutely giddy. Geller’s mouth is parted in a silent laugh, and she raises both of her hands like she doesn’t know whether to hug me or touch my face. I feel like a baby Labrador. It’s not a terrible feeling.
We buy coffee and take a table near the back of the shop.
There’s a reason why Pamela Geller’s name is almost invariably preceded by “The Beautiful” at her speaking events. Today, she’s wearing a chic leather jacket over a form-fitting black turtleneck, and her trademark diamond-encrusted “Love” charm is hanging from a necklace. She’s wearing loose curls, tawny locks falling over her shoulder. It’s almost December, and even though she posts 10 to 15 times a day from home on her wildly successful blog, atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com, her golden skin is still sun-kissed, and her large light-brown eyes peer from behind impossible eyelashes that rest upon her sculpted cheekbones whenever she blinks or winks or bats her eyes at the kid 30 years her junior.
She’s viewed by “leftists,” as she calls her critics, as a monster, the animalistic id of the racist, paranoid right, a supremacist leader of arguably the most extreme wing in the Tea Party, who knowingly interacts with bigots and xenophobes. She’s the face, literally, of theSouthern Poverty Law Center’s national anti-Muslim hate-group page. Of the six New York City anti-Muslim groups listed on the page, she founded three of them herself (Stop the Islamization of America, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, and her blog, Atlas Shrugs). Most recently, she has drawn ire for a series of public-transit ads she has run in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Most read: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.”
Geller fights her war on two fronts. The first is against Islam itself, which she calls “the most radical and extreme ideology on the face of the earth.” The second is against Barack Obama. Geller, a secular Jew, is a pro-choice, pro-marriage-equality Manhattanite raised by liberal parents. But when it comes to the president, Geller holds nothing back. She has devoted the past four years of her life to fighting his re-election, because the war is already here, and we’ve already lost if the most powerful man on the planet is, as she calls him, “an Islamophiliac”: a lover of Islam.
She helped launch the birther movement before the president was even elected. And in a 2009 blog post, she wrote that Obama had slept with a crack whore and posted nude photos of Obama’s mother, supposedly taken in 1960 by alleged black communist Frank Marshall Davis. They turned out to be fakes. Keith Olbermann has twice named her Worst Person in the World. In 2010, she led protests against the Islamic community center near Ground Zero and published a book with her openly anti-Muslim partner in crime, Robert Spencer, called The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America. She stops short of calling Obama a Muslim in public, though she tells me, “He clearly favors Islam.”
Looking at her now, though, she doesn’t seem like a monster. I know it’s all for show, of course, her beauty and her charm. They’re her main weapons in the war, along with her website, and how she has been able to navigate and thrive in the far-right, old-white-man-dominated world of the Tea Party and the American anti-Islam movement. When you’re a symbol, appearances matter. And her very appearance, the fact that someone like her—a pretty, secular, socially liberal New Yorker—would be on the front lines of the war, adds credibility to the cause.
“They say I’m a racist, Islamophobic, anti-Muslim bigot,” she complains to me, about me, about the liberal media.
“So where would you consider yourself on that spectrum?” I start.
What I’ve always said,” she explains, bristling. “I’m anti-jihad.” Jihad is Arabic for “struggle,” though Muslim extremists and their enemies alike have taken its usage in the Koran to mean “holy war.”
“They’ve never described me that way. Ever. They’ve never described me as anti-jihad. They say I’m anti-Muslim. I’m not anti-Muslim.
“I don’t see how anyone could say I’m anti-Muslim,” she says. “I love Muslims.”
Geller’s war started on a Tuesday. It was beautiful outside, so, naturally, Geller, a rich housewife and a mother to four daughters, was on the beach on Long Island’s South Shore. She was staring to the west, toward Manhattan. A skyscraper was burning.
She ran inside her house and turned on the television. Anchors were reporting that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. She ran back outside, mouthing the same thing millions of Americans were echoing across the country. “What moronic …” Then she saw the second plane hit. That’s when she knew what was happening, when Geller’s world fell apart.
Before 9/11, Geller’s life was uneventful. She was the quintessential New York trophy wife: She grew up traveling to and from the city, moved there after dropping out of Hofstra, worked in the city, married rich, had kids, and retired to Long Island to raise her children. She passed the days reading Details and studying up on music, art, and fashion. A few years later, she would have been perfect material for The Real Housewives. (She would receive close to $10 million after divorcing her husband in 2007 and collecting life insurance from his death in 2008.)
The terrorist attacks traumatized her.
My premise was false,” Geller says. In a single morning, America’s façade of invincibility was shattered. Geller stood by, useless and helpless, as nearly 3,000 innocents were slaughtered. She was so out of touch she’d never heard of Osama bin Laden before.
Two planes hit the towers, and one hit the Pentagon. A fourth, United Airlines Flight 93from Newark to San Francisco, was hijacked as well and steered toward Washington, D.C. But the passengers fought the jihadi terrorists, and the plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Forty-four people died, including the four hijackers, but the passengers saved hundreds of lives in the process, maybe more.
“The idea that those passengers on that plane all got together—that was a distinctlyAmerican response,” Geller tells me. “They didn’t need anyone to save them. They tried to save themselves.”
“Do you think that was distinctly American?” I ask.
“Yes,” she says. “I do.”
“You don’t think someone in”—I pick a random country—”Brazil or something would have done the same?”
“I don’t know,” Geller says. “But to me, it’s an exemplar of American exceptionalism. It’s not an elitist thing. American exceptionalism is individual exceptionalism. It’s the exaltation of the individual. If you give an individual the freedom to be free, this is what they will do.
“America was the first moral government in the history of the world based on individual rights,” she says. “There were definitely mistakes made—the idea of slavery—but if you go back and read the establishment of the United States … the problem was you couldn’t get those Southern states to go along,” she says. “That’s why compromise is not necessarily a good thing. Because in any compromise between good and evil, evil profits.”
The 9/11 attack was the most evil thing Geller could imagine. She felt we were at war with a group of people who played by a different set of rules. Savages.
She had to do something. So she learned about Islam, jihad, and sharia, the religion’s code of law. Growing up, she was largely apolitical but always championed women’s rights. She was particularly disturbed by women under sharia who were treated as second-class citizens. She read about women and young girls alike being beaten, raped, murdered. But the more she studied the religion, the more social issues took a backseat to her belief that Islam itself needed to be defeated.
“All these other issues are luxuries. I mean, if you ain’t got your head,” she says, “what’s abortion gonna do for you?”
America slowly healed, but Geller had fundamentally changed. She says she was reborn. Along with it came a visceral fear.
“It’s not some jingoism,” she says. “It’s your country. Where you gonna go? You won’t like what comes after America.”
She began to read and comment on conservative blogs, especially Robert Spencer’s. Spencer is an anti-Muslim author decried by many as a bigoted mudslinger. In 2004, a fellow commenter sent her a template for a blog.
“They said, ‘Start blogging.’ And I was like: ‘Blogging? I don’t know anything about blogging,’” Geller says. “Then I remembered this: ‘Shut up and start writing.’ That’s what I did. I shut up and started writing.” A self-professed capitalist, Geller named it Atlas Shrugs after Ayn Rand’s book. “And I’ve never stopped. I’ve literally never taken a day off.”
Her readership grew slowly, helped by her willingness to blog about news the mainstream media wasn’t covering. In 2008, she published cartoons of Muhammad from a Danish newspaper. Her readership increased tenfold, she says, because when the cartoons made international headlines, her blog was one of the only websites to run them.
Geller’s activism didn’t begin until 2007, when she teamed up with Spencer and others to attempt to close Khalil Gibran International Academy, a Brooklyn dual-language middle school that planned to teach Arabic. The coalition saw it as a front to indoctrinate preteens in Islam. They didn’t close the school, but they were able to pressure the would-be school principal to resign. It was a small victory, but it was a victory nonetheless.
Geller, still largely unknown, was hungry for more. She saw evidence of “creeping sharia” everywhere. She was firmly a part of the war against what she called an Islamic “world takeover.” The only problem is, if you believe you’re in a war—an actual war—it’s easier when there’s a visible enemy to fight.
Then a brown guy whose parents had the lack of foresight to name him Barack Hussein Obama ran for president of the United States. Geller finally had her enemy.
In October 2008, when it was all but a lock that America would have its first African-American president, Geller took to Atlas Shrugs. “Conventional” birth certificate birtherism had already started a year before, but no one expected what came next. One of her readers, a conspiracy theorist named Rudy Schultz, had conjured a new claim that Malcolm X had impregnated Ann Dunham, a white woman.
She posted Schultz’s ludicrous theory. To date, the post has received nearly 10,000Facebook likes and drew a firestorm. The theory took off nationally, and because of that post, she was thrust into the public eye when Olbermann named her Worst Person in the World. Geller’s celebrity and readership jumped again.
“So you kind of indirectly started birtherism even though you weren’t the one peddling it,” I say. “Kind of, right?”
Geller looks at me, smiles coyly, and nods.
It was her most successful jab at the president early on. She hated him, feared him. She’d dedicate the next four years to smearing him at every opportunity. She teamed up with Spencer to write a book, 2010’s The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America, before the president was even inaugurated.
Geller looked at Obama and saw a man who loved America less than her, who had a Muslim name and held meetings with members of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom she saw as savages.
Obsessed, she blogged about the president nearly every day. At one point, she wrote on her blog: “One thing is for sure: Hussein [Obama] is a Muhammadan. He’s not insane … he wants jihad to win. That’s what he is doing. Of course, to the Western mind, the rational mind, the logical mind, the American mind, that is insane.”
It made juicy reading. More people subscribed. Then her popularity got another boost when a massive, right-wing grassroots movement called the Tea Party started making national news.
It started as a modest group of people who wanted to cut the deficit, balance the budget, and lower taxes. But it was sexy, and it exploded. The left reported more on the uglier fringe groups, like the birthers. Later, America would hear about the Southern evangelicals, the voter IDers, the anti-immigrationers. The Tea Party grew into a sort-of big-tent party. Geller was one of the first converts.
“It was just organic. People got up and said: ‘No. No way.’ And it didn’t have a leadership,” Geller says. “I kinda liked that about the Tea Party. Because weak people need a strong leader. Strong people don’t need a strong leader.”
Geller got gigs blogging for other sites. Fox News loved her. Halfway through Obama’s presidency, her blog was fielding 200,000 unique visitors a month. And then plans for theCordoba House, an Islamic community center since renamed Park51, were announced. Geller seized her opportunity.
“I thought it was deeply humiliating, wildly offensive. I didn’t say they couldn’t build it,” she says. “I appealed to them not to build it.”
Top Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and Sarah Palin spoke out against the community center, which also had a mosque. Geller teamed with Spencer and other Southern Poverty Law Center–certified hate groups to denounce the $100 million project. She went as far as to say the “Ground Zero Mega-Mosque”—as she liked to call it—was a “victory mosque.”
It earned Geller her second Worst Person in the World award. Olbermann said Geller’s rhetoric helped stoke a paranoia that resulted in, among other things, a national spike in anti-Muslim hate crimes and a mosque firebombing in Jacksonville.
That November, she traveled to Sherman Oaks, California, to receive the Annie Taylor Award for Courage from the ultra-conservative, anti-Muslim David Horowitz Freedom Center. Spencer himself presented her with the award. “You have to understand that we’re in a war,” Geller said in her acceptance speech. “We are at war now. It’s not coming. It’s not around the corner. We’re at war now. The Ground Zero Mosque is the second wave of the 9/11 attack.
Eight months later, Anders Behring Breivikignited a bomb in Oslo, Norway. He killed eight people. A few hours later, dressed as a police officer, he traveled to a children’s summer camp. He pulled out a gun and slaughtered 69 teenagers.
Breivik wrote a manifesto in which he stated the purpose of the killings: to prevent a Muslim takeover. He quoted from Geller’s Atlas Shrugs. He also cited Spencer, her partner, dozens of times by name.
“O bama won,” Geller’s blog read on November 6. “And America, land of the free, home of the brave, died tonight.”
The president had just won re-election in a landslide. The Tea Party, doomed by the rise of flawed presidential candidates such asHerman Cain, Rick Santorum, and Michele Bachmann, and “Rapey Republican” congressional candidates Todd Akin andRichard Mourdock, was on life support. Park51 was still on schedule to open steps away from Ground Zero.
War is lucrative, and Geller is seeing the dividends. Last year, she published a second book,Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. She gets more than 1 million unique visitors to Atlas Shrugs every month, which attracts more advertising, which generates more revenue. It’s money she’ll use when the fighting reaches our shores.
According to the NY Daily News, Donald Trump‘s three eldest children held a pre-election meeting with the outspoken businessman to request that he tone down his anti-Obama rhetoric lest he ruin the family’s reputation.
A source told the New York paper that Eric, Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump met with their father in mid-October to request that he calm down the presidential bashing.
“The three of them met and went to see their dad in his Fifth Ave. office,” the source said. “They showed a lot of respect, but told him he’s worked too long and too hard to build up the reputation he has. They understand completely he’s always been outspoken and that he likes attention, but this is too much.”
However, Trump’s reps deny the existence of any such meeting, calling any rumors “completely untrue” and that his children love his exercise of “free speech” and would “they would never” try to rein in their father.
Throughout the 2012 election season, Trump became rather infamous for continually bashing the president over a variety of issues — namely whether Obama was legitimately born in the United States. Despite the state of Hawaii presenting an official birth certificate to try and end the whole debacle, Trump persisted on, claiming that there are ways for this document to have been fraudulent.
The News’ source said that the Trump “kids said they know it’s not helping” the business for Trump to be engaged in “birtherism.” “They told him you can’t throw this all away on this nonsense,” the source claimed.
WASHINGTON — The movement to impeach President Barack Obama has been launched, just days after he won a second term in the White House.
The Conservative Majority Fund, a conservative group known primarily for its birther conspiracy spreading, has launched a robocall campaign to gin up support for the president’s impeachment.
The call, emailed to The Huffington Post by Shaun Dakin of StopPoliticalCalls.org, reads in part as follows:
Our only recourse now is to move forward with the full impeachment of President Obama. We suspect that Obama is guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors and that there may be grounds for impeachment as is laid out in the constitution. Further, he may not even be a U.S. citizen because nobody, I mean no one, has seen an actual physical copy of his birth certificate. Impeachment is our only option. And Republicans are already considering Obama investigations. As the nation’s most effective conservative group we are launching the official impeach Obama campaign.Among the “misdemeanors” they cite are the president’s proposals to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay — an idea supported by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) — and to give “full amnesty” to undocumented immigrants. Indeed, a pathway to citizenship has, in recent days, been endorsed by McCain and other Republicans.
![(via Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever | Mother Jones)
Barack Obama’s presidency has been an inspiration to many Americans—especially nutjobs. Ever since the first-black-president-to-be appeared on the national political stage, a cottage industry of conservative conspiracy theorists has churned out bizarro, paranoid, and just plain racist effluvia—some of which has trickled into the political mainstream. Below, we’ve charted some of the Obama-baiters best (i.e. worst) work. (Scroll down for more detailed descriptions of the conspiracy theories in the diagram.)
Obama is a secret Muslim: This one began right after he took the stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, with chain emails alleging his “true” religious affiliation. The rumor soon found its way onto the popular conservative online forum Free Republic, and took on a whole new life in the years to come. Related: Obama secretly speaks Arabic, attended a madrassa as a kid in Indonesia, referred to “my Muslim faith” in an interview, and was sworn in on a Koran.
Obama’s bringing 100 million Muslims to America: Avi Lipkin and his PR outfit Special Guests claimed to have evidence of a scheme to bring roughly 100 million Muslims from the Middle East into the United States, converting the country into an Islamic nation by the end of Obama’s second term and making it easier to obliterate Israel.
Obama once aided the mujahideen: Harlem pastor and professional race-baiter James David Manning contended that in his younger days, Obama went undercover as a CIA agent to facilitate the transfer of cash and weapons to the Afghan mujahideen in the ’80s, thereby aiding what would become the Taliban.
Obama is in the pocket of the Muslim Brotherhood: Billy Graham’s son Franklin wants you to know that Obama is allowing the Muslim Brotherhood totake over the federal government.
Obama redecorated the Oval Office in Middle Eastern style: Driven by his fierce sense of anti-American interior design, Obama got rid of the red, white, and blue decoration scheme in his White House office.
Obama married a Pakistani guy: World Net Daily correspondent and conspiracymonger extraordinaire Jerome Corsi posted a videoin which he claimed to have “strong” evidence that Obama was once married to his college roommate from Pakistan. The smoking gun: Photos of the chums in which the future president is “sitting about on the [Pakistani roommate’s] lap.” Related: For years Obama wore a gold ring on his left hand. Was it his gay-wedding ring?
Obama’s ring has a Koranic verse on it: The very same ring is allegedly emblazoned with a key phrase in the Islamic declaration of faith: “There is no god except Allah.” (It’s not.)
Obama was funded by a Saudi prince: Another fairy tale courtesy of Corsi: In late-’70s Chicago, Obama secured political and academic funding from a variety of sketchy Arab sponsors, including a Saudi prince. Which may explain why President Obama bowed to the Saudi king.
Obama was born in Kenya: In early 2008, fringe theorists began a push to prove Obama was born on foreign soil and was therefore ineligible to live in the White House. The theory gained national attention thanks to the efforts of perennial GOP candidate Alan Keyes, “birther queen” Orly Taitz, and Corsi. Related: Obama’s birth certificate is a fake, he killed his grandmother in Hawaii because she knew the truth, sealed access to his birth certificate and other damning documents, and did pretty much everything horrible you could possibly do for the sake of a phony birth certificate.
Obama lost his US citizenship: According to Corsi, Obama became an citizen of Indonesia while he lived there as a child.
Michelle’s “whitey” tape: During the 2008 campaign, rumors surfaced that a video of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” would be released to sink her husband’s campaign. It’s never materialized. Related: The time Glenn Beck called Barack Obama a racist.
Obama was a Black Panther: Well, only if you’re not very good at spotting photoshopped images.
Obama is the son of Malcolm X: Because, you know, black people. This charmer popped up on Atlas Shrugged, Pamela Geller’s anti-Muslim website. (Geller is also known for obsessing over Shariah turkeys she believes are destroying Thanksgiving.)
Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis: The conspiracy film Dreams From My Real Father espouses the theory that Davis, a leftist activist, was not only Obama’s ideological mentor but his biological father. Related: Obama got a nose job to make his nose look less like Davis’.
Obama’s mom and dad were communists: And you know that communism is an inherited condition.
Obama’s ghostwriter was Bill Ayers: Conservative commentators claimed they uncovered evidence that ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was the true author of Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from my Father. Former Republican congressman Chris Cannon of Utah went as far as to try to commission an Oxford professor to confirm Ayers’ authorship through computer analysis.
Obama trained to overthrow the government: In 2008, leading Obama conspiracy theorist Andy Martin declared on Fox News’ Hannity’s America that the then-presidential candidate had trained for “a radical overthrow of the government” during his time as a community organizer in Chicago.
Obama wouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance: During the ‘08 campaign, Obama was rumored to have refused to say the pledge during a town hall meeting. A photo of the incident was actually taken while the national anthem was being sung.
Obama removed the flag from Air Force One: …and replaced it with his campaign logo.
Obama ordered soldiers to swear allegiance to him: In April 2009, a clearly satirical report detailing how secretary of defense Robert Gates was growing “extremely frustrated” with the White House’s plans to scrub the Constitution from the military oath of loyalty made the rounds on the right-wing blogosphere.
Obama secretly gave away American islands to Russia: Texas House candidate Wes Riddle endorsed this theory and noted the relinquishment as grounds for impeachment. However, the seven Arctic islands were actually given away in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.
Obama caused the recession—in 1995: According to a recent Daily Caller story, Obama’s efforts to force banks to lend to African-Americans in the mid-’90s led to the subprime mortgage crisis that killed the economy in 2008.
Obama’s youth reeducation camps: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) warned that “young people will be put into mandatory service” at politically correct, billion-dollar camps run by the Democrats.
Obama’s coming for your guns: Extreme gun-rights outfits, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), alleged that the Obama administration is supporting the (nonexistent) United Nations Small Arms Treaty, which would lead to nationwide gun confiscation.
Obama’s coming for your gold: This theory was floated by Glenn Beck—and the gold company he shilled for.
Obama is planning FEMA concentration camps: Again with the camps. This theory got a big boost from Glenn Beck (who claims he didn’t mean anything by it). Related: An executive order titled, “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” was issued in the middle of March 2012. Conservative commentators saw it as a martial law power-grab that allowed the president to commandeer farmland, steal everyone’s food, and draft any American into slave labor for a war of aggression against Iran. Also, he has a “secret vault” at Interpol’s headquarters for imprisoning Americans. (Chuck Norris is on the case.)
Obama wants to confiscate your IRA: Townhall.com sent out an message ad claiming that Obama wants to seize your retirement account by force.
Obama caused the BP oil spill: Conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones promoted the theory that the Deepwater Horizon spill was all part of the administration’s plans of oil nationalization and global government.
Obama was behind the Aurora massacre: In July, Gun Owners of America blasted out a press release claiming that the mass murder at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado was suspiciously timed. “Someone in Washington” was probably behind it, paving the way for Obama-led firearm confiscation and “government genocide.”
Obama personally caused Hurricane Sandy: It wasn’t global warming that made Sandy so intense; it was Barack. Alex Jones’ site reported the president engineered the storm using a Pentagon weather modification project. The mayhem caused by the hurricane would afford Obama the opportunity to score points by briskly managing disaster relief a week before the election.
Obama had Andrew Breitbart killed: In March 2012, conservative media impresario Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure. Less than a month prior to his death, he had announced that he had uncovered footage of Obama’s formative years as a radical. So obviously, Obama had him offed. (The tapes were later revealed to contain things like a young Obama hugging a black college professor.) Related: People—like a Rod Blagojevich fundraiser and an Obama impersonator—died between 2008 and 2012. Obama was in office between 2008 and 2012…coincidence?!?!
Obama spiked the jobs report: ”Jobs truthers” (like former GE CEO Jack Welch and Florida tea party congressman Allen West) accused the Obama administration of cooking the September unemployment numbers to manufacture a rosier picture of the economy and boost the president’s chances of reelection.
Obama faked bin Laden’s death: Since no photographs of Bin Laden’s corpse were produced, the Al Qaeda leader must still be out there. Fox News’Steve Doocy and Andrew Napolitano entertained the idea that Operation Neptune Spear was merely a ploy to revive Obama’s sagging approval ratings. Related: Obama was photoshopped into the iconic killing-OBL White House photo.
Obama’s plan to fake an assassination attempt: A false-flag operation would create urban tumult and give Obama the pretext to declare martial law, thus suspending democracy, postponing the 2012 election, and prolonging his stay in office. The theory was flagged by Tenn. State Rep. Kelly Keisling, among others, after circulating online.
Obama the brainwashing hypnotist: As a master of neuro-linguistic programming, Obama convinced Americans to vote for him via subliminal messages. Relaed: Rush Limbaugh pondered if hypnosis was the reason that so many Jewish voters were in the bag for Obama.
Obama’s teleprompter: Obama’s eloquence is a myth! The 44th president is incapable of speaking in public with his teleprompter.
Obama had a ghostwriter for everything: Jack Cashill over at WND had a hot scoop on how Obama’s love letters to his college girlfriend were ghostwritten.
Obama’s anti-Semitic poetry: However, according to the American Thinker, Obama’s ghostwriters did not write his youthful poem “Underground,” which compares Jews to fig-eating underwater apes and echoes Koranic verse.
Obama’s exiled lover: Obama was supposedly fooling around with an attractive young staffer from his 2004 Senate campaign. Michelle Obama had the temptress packed off to the Caribbean before the ‘08 campaign.
Obama is gay: Which explains why he joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. No, really. (Via Corsi, of course.)
Obama’s crack cocaine/gay sex/murder orgy cover-up: In 2008, a small-time conman named Larry Sinclair and his kilt-wearing lawyer held a press conference to tell the world of the future president’s murderous, drug-and-sodomy-fueled crimes.
Obama’s campaigns were funded by drug money: During an October conference call organized to oppose pot legalization, a writer from Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine asked about “reports [that both Obama’s] 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns have been financed in part by laundered drug money.”
Obama is the Antichrist: Obviously. Related: If you play his 2008 Democratic nomination acceptance speech backwards, you can hear him instruct listeners to do Satan’s bidding.
Obama is a lizard overlord: According to codes hidden in Biblical verse, Obama is a reptilian humanoid. This idea has found its way on to some right-wing radio shows, and two Daily Caller reporters recently published a (satirical?) ebook on the topic titled, The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer.
Obama’s adventures on Mars: As a teen, Obama participated in a CIA initiative to teleport to Mars using a top-secret “jump room.” Self-described time-travelers William Stillings and Andrew Basiago claim to have met the future POTUS at American space bases on the Red Planet. In early 2012, a spokesman for the National Security Council actually acknowledged these claims, and issued a fairly convincing denial.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mcv6oo20RZ1r1vqpco1_500.png)
(via Chart: Almost Every Obama Conspiracy Theory Ever | Mother Jones)
Barack Obama’s presidency has been an inspiration to many Americans—especially nutjobs. Ever since the first-black-president-to-be appeared on the national political stage, a cottage industry of conservative conspiracy theorists has churned out bizarro, paranoid, and just plain racist effluvia—some of which has trickled into the political mainstream. Below, we’ve charted some of the Obama-baiters best (i.e. worst) work. (Scroll down for more detailed descriptions of the conspiracy theories in the diagram.)
Obama is a secret Muslim: This one began right after he took the stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, with chain emails alleging his “true” religious affiliation. The rumor soon found its way onto the popular conservative online forum Free Republic, and took on a whole new life in the years to come. Related: Obama secretly speaks Arabic, attended a madrassa as a kid in Indonesia, referred to “my Muslim faith” in an interview, and was sworn in on a Koran.
Obama’s bringing 100 million Muslims to America: Avi Lipkin and his PR outfit Special Guests claimed to have evidence of a scheme to bring roughly 100 million Muslims from the Middle East into the United States, converting the country into an Islamic nation by the end of Obama’s second term and making it easier to obliterate Israel.
Obama once aided the mujahideen: Harlem pastor and professional race-baiter James David Manning contended that in his younger days, Obama went undercover as a CIA agent to facilitate the transfer of cash and weapons to the Afghan mujahideen in the ’80s, thereby aiding what would become the Taliban.
Obama is in the pocket of the Muslim Brotherhood: Billy Graham’s son Franklin wants you to know that Obama is allowing the Muslim Brotherhood totake over the federal government.
Obama redecorated the Oval Office in Middle Eastern style: Driven by his fierce sense of anti-American interior design, Obama got rid of the red, white, and blue decoration scheme in his White House office.
Obama married a Pakistani guy: World Net Daily correspondent and conspiracymonger extraordinaire Jerome Corsi posted a videoin which he claimed to have “strong” evidence that Obama was once married to his college roommate from Pakistan. The smoking gun: Photos of the chums in which the future president is “sitting about on the [Pakistani roommate’s] lap.” Related: For years Obama wore a gold ring on his left hand. Was it his gay-wedding ring?
Obama’s ring has a Koranic verse on it: The very same ring is allegedly emblazoned with a key phrase in the Islamic declaration of faith: “There is no god except Allah.” (It’s not.)
Obama was funded by a Saudi prince: Another fairy tale courtesy of Corsi: In late-’70s Chicago, Obama secured political and academic funding from a variety of sketchy Arab sponsors, including a Saudi prince. Which may explain why President Obama bowed to the Saudi king.
Obama was born in Kenya: In early 2008, fringe theorists began a push to prove Obama was born on foreign soil and was therefore ineligible to live in the White House. The theory gained national attention thanks to the efforts of perennial GOP candidate Alan Keyes, “birther queen” Orly Taitz, and Corsi. Related: Obama’s birth certificate is a fake, he killed his grandmother in Hawaii because she knew the truth, sealed access to his birth certificate and other damning documents, and did pretty much everything horrible you could possibly do for the sake of a phony birth certificate.
Obama lost his US citizenship: According to Corsi, Obama became an citizen of Indonesia while he lived there as a child.
Michelle’s “whitey” tape: During the 2008 campaign, rumors surfaced that a video of Michelle Obama using the word “whitey” would be released to sink her husband’s campaign. It’s never materialized. Related: The time Glenn Beck called Barack Obama a racist.
Obama was a Black Panther: Well, only if you’re not very good at spotting photoshopped images.
Obama is the son of Malcolm X: Because, you know, black people. This charmer popped up on Atlas Shrugged, Pamela Geller’s anti-Muslim website. (Geller is also known for obsessing over Shariah turkeys she believes are destroying Thanksgiving.)
Obama is the son of Frank Marshall Davis: The conspiracy film Dreams From My Real Father espouses the theory that Davis, a leftist activist, was not only Obama’s ideological mentor but his biological father. Related: Obama got a nose job to make his nose look less like Davis’.
Obama’s mom and dad were communists: And you know that communism is an inherited condition.
Obama’s ghostwriter was Bill Ayers: Conservative commentators claimed they uncovered evidence that ex-Weatherman Bill Ayers was the true author of Obama’s 1995 memoir Dreams from my Father. Former Republican congressman Chris Cannon of Utah went as far as to try to commission an Oxford professor to confirm Ayers’ authorship through computer analysis.
Obama trained to overthrow the government: In 2008, leading Obama conspiracy theorist Andy Martin declared on Fox News’ Hannity’s America that the then-presidential candidate had trained for “a radical overthrow of the government” during his time as a community organizer in Chicago.
Obama wouldn’t say the pledge of allegiance: During the ‘08 campaign, Obama was rumored to have refused to say the pledge during a town hall meeting. A photo of the incident was actually taken while the national anthem was being sung.
Obama removed the flag from Air Force One: …and replaced it with his campaign logo.
Obama ordered soldiers to swear allegiance to him: In April 2009, a clearly satirical report detailing how secretary of defense Robert Gates was growing “extremely frustrated” with the White House’s plans to scrub the Constitution from the military oath of loyalty made the rounds on the right-wing blogosphere.
Obama secretly gave away American islands to Russia: Texas House candidate Wes Riddle endorsed this theory and noted the relinquishment as grounds for impeachment. However, the seven Arctic islands were actually given away in 1991 by President George H.W. Bush.
Obama caused the recession—in 1995: According to a recent Daily Caller story, Obama’s efforts to force banks to lend to African-Americans in the mid-’90s led to the subprime mortgage crisis that killed the economy in 2008.
Obama’s youth reeducation camps: Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) warned that “young people will be put into mandatory service” at politically correct, billion-dollar camps run by the Democrats.
Obama’s coming for your guns: Extreme gun-rights outfits, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), alleged that the Obama administration is supporting the (nonexistent) United Nations Small Arms Treaty, which would lead to nationwide gun confiscation.
Obama’s coming for your gold: This theory was floated by Glenn Beck—and the gold company he shilled for.
Obama is planning FEMA concentration camps: Again with the camps. This theory got a big boost from Glenn Beck (who claims he didn’t mean anything by it). Related: An executive order titled, “National Defense Resources Preparedness,” was issued in the middle of March 2012. Conservative commentators saw it as a martial law power-grab that allowed the president to commandeer farmland, steal everyone’s food, and draft any American into slave labor for a war of aggression against Iran. Also, he has a “secret vault” at Interpol’s headquarters for imprisoning Americans. (Chuck Norris is on the case.)
Obama wants to confiscate your IRA: Townhall.com sent out an message ad claiming that Obama wants to seize your retirement account by force.
Obama caused the BP oil spill: Conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones promoted the theory that the Deepwater Horizon spill was all part of the administration’s plans of oil nationalization and global government.
Obama was behind the Aurora massacre: In July, Gun Owners of America blasted out a press release claiming that the mass murder at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado was suspiciously timed. “Someone in Washington” was probably behind it, paving the way for Obama-led firearm confiscation and “government genocide.”
Obama personally caused Hurricane Sandy: It wasn’t global warming that made Sandy so intense; it was Barack. Alex Jones’ site reported the president engineered the storm using a Pentagon weather modification project. The mayhem caused by the hurricane would afford Obama the opportunity to score points by briskly managing disaster relief a week before the election.
Obama had Andrew Breitbart killed: In March 2012, conservative media impresario Andrew Breitbart died of heart failure. Less than a month prior to his death, he had announced that he had uncovered footage of Obama’s formative years as a radical. So obviously, Obama had him offed. (The tapes were later revealed to contain things like a young Obama hugging a black college professor.) Related: People—like a Rod Blagojevich fundraiser and an Obama impersonator—died between 2008 and 2012. Obama was in office between 2008 and 2012…coincidence?!?!
Obama spiked the jobs report: ”Jobs truthers” (like former GE CEO Jack Welch and Florida tea party congressman Allen West) accused the Obama administration of cooking the September unemployment numbers to manufacture a rosier picture of the economy and boost the president’s chances of reelection.
Obama faked bin Laden’s death: Since no photographs of Bin Laden’s corpse were produced, the Al Qaeda leader must still be out there. Fox News’Steve Doocy and Andrew Napolitano entertained the idea that Operation Neptune Spear was merely a ploy to revive Obama’s sagging approval ratings. Related: Obama was photoshopped into the iconic killing-OBL White House photo.
Obama’s plan to fake an assassination attempt: A false-flag operation would create urban tumult and give Obama the pretext to declare martial law, thus suspending democracy, postponing the 2012 election, and prolonging his stay in office. The theory was flagged by Tenn. State Rep. Kelly Keisling, among others, after circulating online.
Obama the brainwashing hypnotist: As a master of neuro-linguistic programming, Obama convinced Americans to vote for him via subliminal messages. Relaed: Rush Limbaugh pondered if hypnosis was the reason that so many Jewish voters were in the bag for Obama.
Obama’s teleprompter: Obama’s eloquence is a myth! The 44th president is incapable of speaking in public with his teleprompter.
Obama had a ghostwriter for everything: Jack Cashill over at WND had a hot scoop on how Obama’s love letters to his college girlfriend were ghostwritten.
Obama’s anti-Semitic poetry: However, according to the American Thinker, Obama’s ghostwriters did not write his youthful poem “Underground,” which compares Jews to fig-eating underwater apes and echoes Koranic verse.
Obama’s exiled lover: Obama was supposedly fooling around with an attractive young staffer from his 2004 Senate campaign. Michelle Obama had the temptress packed off to the Caribbean before the ‘08 campaign.
Obama is gay: Which explains why he joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. No, really. (Via Corsi, of course.)
Obama’s crack cocaine/gay sex/murder orgy cover-up: In 2008, a small-time conman named Larry Sinclair and his kilt-wearing lawyer held a press conference to tell the world of the future president’s murderous, drug-and-sodomy-fueled crimes.
Obama’s campaigns were funded by drug money: During an October conference call organized to oppose pot legalization, a writer from Lyndon LaRouche’s magazine asked about “reports [that both Obama’s] 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns have been financed in part by laundered drug money.”
Obama is the Antichrist: Obviously. Related: If you play his 2008 Democratic nomination acceptance speech backwards, you can hear him instruct listeners to do Satan’s bidding.
Obama is a lizard overlord: According to codes hidden in Biblical verse, Obama is a reptilian humanoid. This idea has found its way on to some right-wing radio shows, and two Daily Caller reporters recently published a (satirical?) ebook on the topic titled, The Lizard King: The Shocking Inside Account of Obama’s True Intergalactic Ambitions by an Anonymous White House Staffer.
Obama’s adventures on Mars: As a teen, Obama participated in a CIA initiative to teleport to Mars using a top-secret “jump room.” Self-described time-travelers William Stillings and Andrew Basiago claim to have met the future POTUS at American space bases on the Red Planet. In early 2012, a spokesman for the National Security Council actually acknowledged these claims, and issued a fairly convincing denial.
Carmen Robles has a beef with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. A 15-year-old sophomore at Tempe High School just outside of Phoenix, Robles is a straight-A student and, thanks to C.S.I., an aspiring forensics analyst who chats happily about her trip last year to see a cadaver at Grand Canyon University. She’s also an undocumented immigrant, from Tempe by way of Nogales, Mexico, who came to the United States with her mom eight years ago on a tourist visa and never left. Over the last three years, as Arpaio’s stepped up his crusade against undocumented immigrants, they’ve started to feel the squeeze: “She’s giving taxes to the government and they’re still trying to take her away,” Robles says.
So Robles has decided to get even. A few months ago, she joined Adiós Arpaio, a union-backed effort aimed at registering Latino voters in Maricopa. Hanging out at shopping malls and low-rider car expos, Robles and her 300 fellow volunteers—almost all Latino high school students—have registered more than 34,000 voters. Now Robles spends most school nights in navy blue nurse scrubs and Chuck Taylors, going door to door in Tempe housing developments to make sure people send in their ballots.
Since winning office two decades ago on an anti-corruption platform, Arpaio has never been reelected by fewer than 12 points. But thanks to a handful of wrongful death lawsuits, allegations of massive civil rights violations, a quixotic birther investigation, and $100 million in misspent funds, Democrats and activists in Maricopa County believe they finally have the votes to throw out America’s most controversial lawman. As Daria Ovide, Adiós Arpaio’s communications director, puts it, the difference between this election and the last one is “we’ve had four more years of the sheriff making an ass out of himself.”
With five days to go until the election, the race is slated to go down as one of the most expensive sheriff’s races in American history, largely on the basis of Arpaio’s $8 million war chest. But against any other candidate, Democratic challenger Paul Penzone’s $530,000 would have been a state record. And anti-Arpaio groups have built a ground game from scratch with help from national groups like the AFL-CIO and UNITE Here ($500,000 in seed money), and found a candidate with compelling credentials who can appeal to Latinos and white suburbanites alike.
Penzone, a 45-year-old veteran of the Phoenix Police Department, is in many ways a natural foil for Arpaio. Trim and young-looking with close cropped black hair, he draws a natural contrast with Arpaio, a 80-year-old with an expanding paunch and a comb-over that looks glued-on. The policy differences are just as stark.
While Arpaio’s office was publicly shamed for mishandling 400 sexual abuse cases—many involving women in predominantly Latino neighborhoods—and forming a Cold Case Posse to investigate President Obama’s birth certificate, Penzone earned his stripes tracking down child molesters and reopening actual cold cases as part of the region’s Silent Witness program. Like Arpaio, Penzone has a fondness for television cameras, regularly appearing as a law enforcement analyst on cable news programs.
“I’ve never had a problem with him personally, but professionally I just felt that his practices were more about sensationalism than law enforcement,” Penzone says during an interview at Leisure World, a sprawling Mesa retirement community where he was campaigning. “It’s gotten to the point where he misrepresents what law enforcement stands for and does a disservice to all those people that put their lives on the line to protect others.”
Penzone says that Arpaio’s budget mismanagement would leave him no choice but to keep the county’s infamous Tent City jail open, but he’d overhaul its operations to crack down on abuse (according to a federal lawsuit, Arpaio’s guards use terms like “Mexican bitches” to refer to Latino inmates). He says he’d put less of an emphasis on immigration raids and pay more attention to violent crimes, like human trafficking. “We used less force to catch drug dealers who had weapons, money, and drugs, than the sheriff does when he goes to a restaurant or a maid service to arrest a few workers who are undocumented,” Penzone says.
In a stunning appeal to Islamaphobia, a group linked to former Swiftboater and birther conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has launched a smear attack ad on a Muslim-American Congressional candidate. The spot warns that Dr. Syed Taj, the Democratic nominee in Michigan’s 11th Congressional district, wants to “advance Muslim power in America.”
Freedom’s Defense Fund, a right-wing PAC that has spent at least $150,000 on ads in support of Missouri Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R) despite his comments that victims of “legitimate rape” are unlikely to become pregnant, reported spending at least $30,000 on ads against Taj and for his opponent Republican Kerry Bentivolio, a Tea Party activist and Santa Clause impersonator.
So far in the 2012 election cycle, the PAC has spent over $3 million to promote its far-right beliefs. Corsi, who has been tied to the Fund, has promoted a multitude of Islamophobic conspiracy theories, including that President Obama wears an Islamic inscription on the interior of his wedding ring. Despite his fringe beliefs, Corsi was recently permitted to ride on the Romney campaign plane with the press corps.
This spot, titled “What do we really know about Syed Taj?” warns:
ANNOUNCER: We know Syed Taj wants to advance Muslim power in America. Syed Taj: too extreme for Michigan. Too extreme for America.
Monica Crowley defends birther film Dreams From My Real Father:
A new “documentary” alleging that President Obama’s real father is actually communist writer Frank Marshall Davis was enthusiastically promoted by Fox News contributor and O’Reilly Factor guest host Monica Crowley on her radio show last month.
Dreams from My Real Father, which was written, directed, and produced by conservative filmmaker Joel Gilbert, largely bases its premise that Obama is a “red diaper baby” born to the communist Davis on Gilbert’s contention that the two men closely resemble one another (the authors of this story disagree). In an interview with Media Matters, the documentarian castigated both the mainstream and the conservative media for not following up on his work, which he compared to the Academy Award-winning Watergate thriller All The President’s Men.
Though it has not been picked up for theatrical release, the film recently made headlines due to a campaign to mail millions of copies of the DVD to voters in swing states. On October 23, The New York Times described the effort as “the latest example of how secretive forces outside the presidential campaigns can sweep into battleground states days before the election.”
Since its release in April, coverage of Dreams by conservative outlets has been relegated mostly to fringe websites like WorldNetDaily, where Jerome Corsi has written several articles promoting the film (when he hasn’t been busy alleging that Obama is also secretly gay and secretly Muslim). Gilbert told Media Matters that without conservative talk radio, “it would be very hard to get information out” on the film, and indeed his promotional tour has featured numerous appearances on lower-tier conservative radio shows and a handful of interviews with larger shows like that of Michael Savage, as well as conspiracy-friendly broadcasts like The Alex Jones Show.
But alongside outlets that promoted the film like birther website WorldNetDaily and radio hosts like “conspiracy king” Alex Jones stands Fox News’ Monica Crowley.
Last month, Crowley invited Gilbert onto her radio show for an extended interview. Previewing the segment, Crowley claimed that Obama “has been president for almost four years and we still don’t know who he is.” Blaming the “left-wing press” for their supposed lack of interest in vetting Obama, Crowley claimed that Gilbert has done “the actual investigative work into Obama and his background.”
Crowley made it clear that she had already seen the film before hosting Gilbert and over the course of the interview repeatedly plugged the film’s website, ObamasRealFather.com. Crowley labeled the film “just dynamite” and “very well done” and encouraged her listeners to “judge the story for themselves.”
According to Crowley, Gilbert laid out “some very powerful evidence” in the film.
But the “powerful evidence” used by Gilbert in the film consists almost entirely of wild speculation and almost unfathomable leaps of logic.
sked about this lack of concrete evidence during his lengthy talk with Media Matters last week, Gilbert explained, ”when you put all those things together, Frank’s history, the nude photography, the teeth, the look, we have a lot of evidence and extremely high likelihood that is Ann. And there was a potential, and again we don’t have the security cam footage, but potential for an intimate relationship.”
Gilbert is not the first to claim that Davis was Obama’s father; litigious anti-Semite Andy Martin offered a similar allegation in October 2008, based on what CNN described as “unnamed sources” and “without offering any proof.” Right-wing media figures have also postulated that Malcolm X, an unnamed “American black,” and an Indonesian man are Obama’s “real” father.
At one point in the film, Gilbert supports his claim that the elder Barack Obama is not the president’s father on the basis that the president’s “real” birth certificate lists his father as “unknown.” Gilbert fails to produce a copy of this alleged birth certificate or any evidence that it exists. When asked by Media Matters about the claim, Gilbert said a friend of Davis’ father told him about the document.
“Even Obama says in his book, he says things that allude to the fact that the Kenyan is not his father. He says when the Kenyan died I had no proof to show who my father really was to make a claim on the estate. He talks about his parents marriage, he says there was no record of a marriage license. There’s no wedding, there’s no cake. Over and over he’s dropping breadcrumbs and hints.”
Obama’s “book is sketchy, there’s no fact about most things, whereas this film is probably 90 percent fact,” Gilbert concluded, “and the 10 percent that is not proven makes sense, because it’s a result of the facts that exist.”
Gilbert complained to Media Matters that major news outlets are ignoring his work because it is too explosive. “What I’ve found is nobody wants the scoop. In other words, they don’t want to be the first one to show something new, for fear of being under attack,” Gilbert claimed.
The documentarian also expressed frustration that conservative media have been reluctant to cover the film.
“Even conservative outlets like Newsmax.com, you’d think that they’d want to show something of an investigatory nature about Obama, I’ve worked with them for years,” Gilbert said, later adding, “I was shocked in the land of the First Amendment, in the information age that the media was able to either be afraid and compromised or intentionally ignore something of great relevance to the American people.”
Asked whether he thought the unwillingness of Fox News and other conservative outlets to cover the film might be a comment on the validity of its claims, Gilbert instead blamed Media Matters.
“I’ve been told that they’re afraid of people like you,” he told us. “They’re afraid of Media Matters, they’re afraid of MSNBC attacking and ridiculing them for covering something negative about Obama. That seems to be the dynamic that’s been around for years.”
He simply sends them a copy of the president’s birth certificate.
Birther queen Orly Taitz remains isolated in her quest to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and is ineligible to be president. In an interview with Vic Eliason on VCY America, Taitz alleges that Barack Obama’s Social Security number is invalid, insists that “we are getting very close to a dictatorship” in the United States today, and expresses disappointment that she has not received support from fellow birthers Donald Trump and Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona.
Taitz claimed that Obama’s Social Security number is a “Connecticut number which was issued to another individual,” and states that the number he is using is “not a valid number.” She was stunned that her “persuasive” evidence was rejected by courts in Georgia. Taitz concludes that judges continue to shoot down her allegations against the president not because they are wrong, but because the conspiracy goes all the way to the top. Eliason affirms this belief, asserting that judges are merely “intimidated” by “dealing with a case that is so volatile, [that involves] the highest executive in our country.”
Taitz said that her inability to remove Obama from the ballot is further proof that “we are getting very close to a dictatorship” akin to the Soviet Union.
Yet even the greatest supporters of the birther movement have failed to back Taitz. Taitz was “disheartened” that Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a leader of the “Cold Case Posse,” did not show up at her trial to testify. Donald Trump has also been unresponsive to Taitz.
The Kansas State Objections Board is considering removing President Barack Obama from the November ballot because of doubts over his place of birth, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.
The panel of Republicans, which consists of Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, received a complaint from a resident who claimed Obama was not a natural born citizen and therefore ineligible to be president.
Obama has been dogged by questions about his eligibility to serve as President of the United States since 2008. Some of the so-called “birthers” believe Obama is not a natural born citizen because his father was a British subject.
Kansas GOP officials consider removing Obama from November ballot (via Raw Story )
The Kansas State Objections Board is considering removing President Barack Obama from the November ballot because of doubts over his place of birth, according to the Topeka Capital-Journal. The panel of Republicans, which consists of Secretary of State Kris Kobach, Attorney General Derek Schmidt and…
The Obama campaign swiftly and harshly condemned a joke made by Mitt Romney about the president’s birth certificate on the campaign trail in Michigan Friday, saying Romney made the “decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement.”
“I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised, where but the both of us were born,” Romney said after introducing his wife, fellow Michigan native Ann Romney. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place where we were born and raised.”
“Throughout this campaign, Governor Romney has embraced the most strident voices in his party instead of standing up to them. It’s one thing to give the stage in Tampa to Donald Trump, Sheriff [Joe] Arpaio, and Kris Kobach,” Obama spokesperson Ben LaBolt said in a statement. “But Governor Romney’s decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement should give pause to any rational voter across America.”
The Romney campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TPM. A Washington Post reporter tweeted soon after the joke that a Romney adviser told him, “The governor has always said, and has repeatedly said, he believes the president was born here in the United States.”
