OK, WaPo’s jumped the shark. Despite the clever and dry chuckle I get from a guy named “Bacon” writing about people attacking Obama for being ZOMG SECRET MUSLIM!!11one!, I can’t help but ask myself who the hell still believes in the liberal media myth after this.
Despite his denials, rumors and e-mails circulating on the Internet continue to allege that Obama (D-Ill.) is a Muslim, a “Muslim plant” in a conspiracy against America, and that, if elected president, he would take the oath of office using a Koran, rather than a Bible, as did Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the only Muslim in Congress, when he was sworn in earlier this year.
In campaign appearances, Obama regularly mentions his time living and attending school in Indonesia, and the fact that his paternal grandfather, a Kenyan farmer, was a Muslim. Obama invokes these facts as part of his case that he is prepared to handle foreign policy, despite having been in the Senate for only three years, and that he would literally bring a new face to parts of the world where the United States is not popular.
The son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya, Obama was born and spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, and he talks more about his multicultural background than he does about the possibility of being the first African American president, in marked contrast to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), who mentions in most of her stump speeches the prospect of her becoming the first woman to serve as president.
“A lot of my knowledge about foreign affairs is not what I just studied in school. It’s actually having the knowledge of how ordinary people in these other countries live,” he said earlier this month in Clarion, Iowa.
“The day I’m inaugurated, I think this country looks at itself differently, but the world also looks at America differently,” he told another Iowa crowd. “Because I’ve got a grandmother who lives in a little village in Africa without running water or electricity; because I grew up for part of my formative years in Southeast Asia in the largest Muslim country on Earth.”
While considerable attention during the campaign has focused on the anti-Mormon feelings aroused by former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney (R), polls have also shown rising hostility toward Muslims in politics. It is not clear whether that negative sentiment will affect someone who has lived in a Muslim country but does not practice Islam.
Really, ol Perry Bacon Jr. here coulda saved column inches by simply writing “Despite denials, some people say Obama is going to kill all of us in our sleep and replace us with Islamonazihomodhimmiaboriofacist android clones with turbans.”
So, what’s the source, Baconator?
An early rumor about Obama’s faith came from Insight, a conservative online magazine. The Insight article said Obama had “spent at least four years in a so-called madrassa, or Muslim seminary, in Indonesia.” It attributed this detail to background information the Clinton campaign had been collecting.
After Obama denied the rumor, Jeffrey Kuhner, Insight’s editor, said Obama’s “concealment and deception was to be the issue, not so much his Muslim heritage,” and he suggested that the source of the madrassa rumor was the Clinton campaign. The Clinton campaign denied the charge.
Human Events, another conservative magazine, published on its Web site a package of articles called “Barack Obama Exposed.” One of them was titled “The First Muslim President?”
Robert Spencer, a conservative activist, wrote in Human Events that “given Obama’s politics, it will not be hard to present him internationally as someone who understands Islam and Muslims, and thus will be able to smooth over the hostility between the Islamic world and the West — our first Muslim President.”
Conservative talk-show hosts have occasionally repeated the rumor, with Michael Savage noting Obama’s “background” in a “Muslim madrassa in Indonesia” in June, and Rush Limbaugh saying in September that he occasionally got “confused” between Obama and Osama bin Laden. Others repeatedly use the senator’s middle name, Hussein.
The rumors about Obama have been echoed on Internet message boards and chain e-mails.
Bryan Keelin of Charleston, S.C., who works with an organization of churches there, posted on an Internet board his suspicion that Obama is a Muslim. “I assume his father instructed him on the ways of being a Muslim,” said Keelin, who described himself in an interview as a conservative Republican who will vote for former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.
“The Muslims have said they plan on destroying the U.S. from the inside out,” says one of the e-mails that was posted recently on a blog at BarackObama.com, the campaign’s Web site, by an Obama supporter who warned of an attempt to “Swift Boat” the candidate. “What better way to start than at the highest level, through the President of the United States, one of their own!”
Another e-mail, on a site called Snopes.com that tracks Internet rumors, starts, “Be careful, be very careful.” It notes that “Obama takes great care to conceal the fact that he is a Muslim,” and that “since it is politically expedient to be a Christian when you are seeking political office in the United States, Obama joined the United Church of Christ to help purge any notion that he is still a Muslim.”
So…you’re basically writing a news article whose only purpose is that it’s all wingnut rumors just to point out…what? That the rumors aren’t true?
Except you don’t mention that the rumors are complete batshit nutbar wank fantasies about Barack Obama. You say that he denies them. And then you make it sound like there’s a huge army of brave patriots just waiting to expose him as ZOMG SECRET MUSLIM!!11one! and save America from dhimmitude, instead of just, you know, a bunch of purely evil rumors being regurgitated about the Mysterious Mulatto Gentleman For Your Titillating Consumption.
Assholes. All the way around. Throwing in Romney’s Mormonism as a dodge is a particularly nice touch.
No seriously. Assholes. This column has no place anywhere near the Washington Post. Even FOX would call this a hatchet job and walk away from it. But this is what passes for news in the Village…on page A01.
The “fact” that “there are rumors about Obama being a Muslim” and that “it would negatively impact his campaign if he WAS a Muslim” is FRONT FUCKING PAGE NEWS.
I do have a problem with Obama on some policy issues, key word being “policy”. I do like his stance on other policy issues. I think he would be a preferable candidate to Hillary because of his anti-war stance, I think Edwards would be a slightly better candidate on other economic and health care POLICY ISSUES. But why would I expect the WaPo to talk about policy issues when it’s much more fun to make shit up about candidates?
