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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Donald Trump's New Obama Conspiracy Theory
by Michelle Goldberg Info
Michelle Goldberg is a journalist based in New York. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.
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- + Single Page print TwitterEmailShare President Obama may have released his birth certificate on Wednesday, but Donald Trump and other wingnuts have already moved on to a new conspiracy: how the president got into the Ivy League. Michelle Goldberg traces the far-right history of the claim.
The birther bit must have been getting old. Now Donald Trump has opened up a new line of attack on President Obama, accusing him of being a “terrible student” who shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia University or Harvard Law School. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he asked the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.” He continued darkly, “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
Like everything Trump says about Obama lately, his comments got lots of media play. Less attention has been paid to where they came from. Conspiracy theories about Obama’s education have been floating around the far right since his presidential campaign, with some of the same people who’ve doubted the president’s birth certificate now demanding to see his college transcripts. Once again, Trump has found a way to raid the fever swamps for talking points.
Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school records, writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the birthers, has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?
Her speculation: He went as a foreign exchange student. “Sometimes students with poor grades from other countries who have citizenship in other countries can get into top universities,” she told The Daily Beast. “That might be one of the reasons why his records are not unsealed. If his records show he got into Columbia University as a foreign exchange student, then we have a serious issue with his citizenship.”
Taitz said she also believes that Obama only attended Columbia for nine months rather than two years. As proof, she offered a document from the National Student Clearinghouse database, which verifies college degrees. The record, which confirms Obama’s graduation, lists his dates of attendance as September 1982 to May 1983. Kathleen Dugan, a marketing manager at the National Student Clearinghouse, said Taitz’s document is incorrect, the result of the way she conducted her search.
Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative action baby.
“There were duplicate requests to our site from requestor Orly Taitz which, because of the way the queries were input, yielded both correct and incorrect information on past attendance dates for President Barack Obama,” said Dugan.
Taitz, naturally, said she believes there’s something more ominous at work. She noted that Obama has talked about visiting a friend in Pakistan between his sophomore and junior years of college. “The only reasonable conclusion is that he was there not a month or two, but a year and a half,” she said.
And how did this half-educated mediocrity get into Harvard Law School, and then become editor of the Harvard Law Review? Why, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, of course! According to right-wing lore, a militant Black Muslim named Khalid Al-Mansour introduced his protégé to the prince, who presumably saw a chance to advance his Muslim world-domination agenda by grooming the young man for politics. The prince thus pulled strings on Obama’s behalf and even paid his way.
Taitz has forwarded all her information about Obama’s college years to Trump and said she is gratified to hear him raising the issue. “He might have also gotten it from other sources, too, but he definitely got it from me,” she said. Perhaps he’s also been reading the ultra-right-wing website WorldNetDaily, which ran a 2009 piece asking, “Did radical Muslims help send Obama to Harvard?”
It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.
Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either. When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the Republican base is hearing.
Michelle Goldberg is a journalist based in New York. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012. |
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Wed Apr 27, 2011 9:48 pm |
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twotap
F L I N T O I D
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| So lets see them if obama has nothing to hide and is the smartest man to ever occupy the whitehouse as some claim whats the problem? |
_________________
"If you like your current healthcare you can keep it, Period"!!
Barack Hussein Obama--- multiple times. |
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 7:51 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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No Trump
on April 20, 2011 11:21:26 | 701 times read
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No Trump
By Cal Thomas
Tribune Media Services
In bridge, a trump card is held in reserve for winning a trick. In politics, Donald Trump is anything but reserved and appears to think he might trick enough voters to win the next presidential election.
There’s plenty of material from which to draw when critiquing a possible Trump candidacy. His multiple marriages (three) and affairs would provide more fodder for the media and contrast poorly with President Obama’s “family values” image as husband of one wife and father of young daughters, whom he clearly loves.
In recent weeks, Trump has been trying to gain a toehold in the evangelical community, which is especially influential in Iowa, where caucuses begin the process of nominating a presidential candidate.
In an interview with David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network, Trump described Christianity as “a wonderful religion.” In answer to a question about his faith, Trump said, “I believe in God. I am Christian. I think the Bible is certainly, it is ‘the’ book. It is the thing.”
To evangelical ears, that lacks substance. While a candidate’s faith should matter only if it affects policy, if someone wishes to use his or her faith to win votes, then voters ought to be able to judge the depth of that faith as a means of determining their credibility on earthly issues.
What should we make of Trump telling Brody that people send him Bibles all the time and that he stores them “in a very nice place”? “There is no way I would ever throw anything, to do anything negative to a Bible. I would have a fear of doing something other than very positive so actually I store them and keep them and sometimes give them away to other people.”
Does he read the Bible and believe what it says? How about the parts concerning marriage, divorce and fornication? Would that be something Trump should take to heart? Brody didn’t ask and Trump didn’t volunteer. He did say he goes to church “as much as I can. Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there’s a major occasion.” Christians know a lot of people who attend worship services only on Christmas and Easter and perhaps for weddings and funerals. They are usually not serious about their faith. Not to judge, but if Trump intends to use faith as a means of winning votes from people of faith, then those people have a right to determine by his actions whether he is sincere or simply trying to manipulate them into voting for him.
Trump also appears shifty when it comes to judging our “worst” president. In 2007, Trump said President George W. Bush was “the worst president ever.” In 2008, he said Bush should be impeached and that he was “impressed” by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. But this year he says President Obama is “the worst president ever.” He is also on record as saying Jimmy Carter was the worst president.
Trump has donated to many liberal Democrats, arguing that since he lives in liberal New York City he had no other choice. Really?
Conservative talk show host Mark Levin isn’t buying it. On a recent broadcast of “The Mark Levin Show,” he asked, “Where was (Trump) during the tea party’s rise and throughout the battles it was having? Why was he donating to Senator (Chuck) Schumer, Congressman Anthony Weiner and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns when the tea party was beginning to rise?” Levin also notes that Trump wants universal health care and asked, “How is that conservative?” Trump also has flipped from pro-choice on abortion to pro-life because, he told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, two married friends who wanted to abort their child, decided not to and now are happy they didn’t. Pro-lifers won’t be impressed because Trump didn’t mention the baby’s right to life.
Donald Trump is no conservative. If he runs for president, he could harm the eventual Republican nominee. Maybe that’s why so many in the liberal media are promoting him while President Obama’s approval ratings continue to fall.
(Direct all MAIL for Cal Thomas to: Tribune Media Services, 2225 Kenmore Ave., Suite 114, Buffalo, N.Y. 14207. Readers may also e-mail Cal Thomas at tmseditors@tribune.com.
(C) 2011 TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 9:49 am |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Mike Thompson: Obama's birth certificate
2:12 AM, Apr. 28, 2011 | 51Comments
Blog: Mike Thompson
Donald Trump had been playing the birther card so successfully that even Sarah Palin had tried neutralize the birther issue and Trump’s birther-driven jump in the polls by claiming she took “ Obama at his word" when he stated that he was born in this country. Right, just ignore all the evidence available before the release of the president’s long -form birth certificate; Obama’s “word” was the only proof of his citizenship. That’s all we had to go on, just Obama’s “word.” Which is a clever way of pretending to take the high road while continuing to sow seeds of doubt.
All of which goes to show that it really doesn’t matter what Obama says or does, conservatives like Trump and Palin will find some way to twist his words and actions. Of course, this tactic is as common to politics as baby kissing, but what separates run of the mill political distortions from the birther movement is the element of race. It’s an ugly tactic and it needs to stop.
Become a fan of Mike Thompson on Facebook and follow his updates on Twitter. |
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 10:22 am |
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twotap
F L I N T O I D
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the element of race
ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ tired worn out and of course predictable.  |
_________________
"If you like your current healthcare you can keep it, Period"!!
Barack Hussein Obama--- multiple times. |
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 4:58 pm |
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Crowfeeder
F L I N T O I D
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| Good,that's over.Now we can concentrate on the important question...Sunni or Shia ? |
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 5:40 pm |
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