October 24, 2009
About the Obama Thesis Hoax
When you were younger, your parents probably told you that "if it looks too good to be true, it probably is."
That bit of homespun wisdom should have been applied to a blog post that claimed tertiary knowledge of a Barack Obama college thesis lambasting both the free market system and the Constitution.
The authors claim a defense of satire now that the blog entry was disclosed as such, though that warning came far too late for those that managed to push the story to multiple web sites and even talk radio.
If people had carefully read the entry before promoting it, however, this paragraph offered a big red flag:
In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: &qout;I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.&qout;
When the blog entry claimed that the first ten pages of the President's thesis was given to the general media and not one soul wrote or talked about it that should have sent up huge warning flares that something was wrong with this story.
That no one bothered to contact Joe Klein to see if the document reportedly released to him been, is an example of shoddy fact-checking.
Sadly, this gives the left wing blog Media Matters more than enough excuse to run a headline that begins "So desperate they'll believe anything—" and have some justification for doing so. Michael Ledeen was quick to post a column noting that he'd been duped by the thesis hoax, which was a responsible way to handle such a situation.
Now, if we can only get the same Media Matters partisans that gloated over this incident to develop or even borrow the integrity to admit they were duped by a lying ACORN Philadelphia employee, we can call it a good day.
Obama said most of what is written in the bogus thesis.
I cannot get any links to take on this blog.
If I could get anything to take I could link to a radio recording of a debate where Obama said most of the Constition issues in the bogus thesis.
I leave it for others to find and post the details.
Posted by: davod at October 24, 2009 10:17 AMBased on his own experience, Rush got it right:
RUSH: I'm also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama's thesis is a satire blog. So it's one of these sites like ScrappleFace or The Onion or some such thing. So I shout from the mountaintops: "It was satire!" But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He's mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That's how it works in the media today.Posted by: FakeButAkrit at October 24, 2009 10:35 AM
It's remarkable that the Obama thesis remains confidental to this day.
Perhaps we can hire the people at Columbia responsible for keeping BO's papers under wraps and put them in charge of security at State and Defense.
Of course they are helped along by the fact that the MSM emphatically does not want to know anything about Barry's past.
I'm afraid I was the primary cause of the problem. Ledeen made his post, taking the satire seriously. but no one seemed to have picked it up for two days. Until I did, on Friday. I didn't go to his source site until well after I posted comments about it at The American Thinker blog. That's where Rush picked it up. Not long after I made the post I began to have doubts about the story's veracity and was saying so in comments at AT, but by that time the damage was done. However, the climb downs and corrections made by Ledeen, Limbaugh and myself were relatively fast as compared to similar situations on the left and we needed no prompting much less pressure to do so. The full story of the mess I had a large part in making:
http://keohane.blogspot.com/2009/10/obama-thesis-mess-involving-michael.html
Posted by: Denis Keohane at October 25, 2009 01:19 AMPS - Hours ago I posted a few comments to the Media Matters story, addressing some of their claims and providing some details - but the posts don't seem to have made it past review. Maybe I violated some ground rules...
http://mediamatters.org/research/200910230037
I did acknowledge right up front that I was indeed the vaunted right wing smear machine.
Posted by: Denis Keohane at October 25, 2009 01:39 AM"... this gives the left wing blog Media Matters more than enough excuse to run a headline that begins "So desperate they'll believe anything."
The right isn't the only group "desperate" enough to believe fabricated stories, not that the left will ever admit their own culpability. Love the irony that Rush got bamboozled by a lie after being the victim of one.
Posted by: DoorHold at October 25, 2009 12:09 PM
