Topic: WorldNetDaily
A big part of anti-Obama conspiracy-mongering, as practiced by WorldNetDaily, is the ability to move goalposts as inconvenient facts render earlier conspiracies inoperative. For instance, as it became clear that Obama was born in America, Joseph Farah simply lied to people and insisted that neither he nor WND had ever suggested he wasn't.
Now Jack Cashill is exhibiting the same behavior. Back in 2010 (h/t Media Matters), Cashill wrote a column essentially claiming that Obama made up the girlfriend he wrote about in his book "Dreams From My Father" and pushed the theory that the girlfriend in the book was actually the girlfriend of Bill Ayers, which of course dovetails with Cashill's discredited theory that Ayers wrote the book.
A new Vanity Fair piece, however, shoots that theory out of the water. An excerpt from David Maraniss' upcoming book on Obama, it details with the woman Obama wrote about in his book. Obama also said the woman in the book was a "compression" of girlfriends, and the book itself explains that "[f]or the sake of compression, some of the characters that appear are composites of people I've known."
So, having been thoroughly discredited and exposed for the desperate conspiracy-mongerer that he is, how did Cashill react to this news? By throwing a fit, of course.
In a May 3 column, Cashill desperately likens Obama to James Frey, who infamously invented incidents in his memoirs: "Team Obama is as promiscuous with the facts as Frey. Obama and his muse appear to have created most, if not all, of the racial dramas related in 'Dreams.'" Never mind, of course, that Obama admitted in the book that some characters in the book are composites. While Cashill again portrays Ayers as Obama's "muse" for his book, Cashill doesn't address is now-discredited claim that the woman wrote about was actually Ayers' girlfriend.
Cashill moved into shoot-the-messenger mode for his May 9 column, attacking Maraniss for "unforgivably sloppy reporting," even though it's clear Maraniss has done much more footwork on the subject of Obama's life than Cashill, who seems to be content sitting around at his Kansas City home concocting conspiracy theories.
Still, Cashill whines: "I am hoping Maraniss corrects the record, but given his track record, we can take at face value nothing Maraniss says about Obama not even his story of the missing girlfriends."
Cashill follows that up by demonstrating what happens when you sit around your house all day concocting conspiracy theories: they become increasingly detatched from reality.Thus, Cashill's May 14 column posits that Obama didn't write his own love letters. No, really:
As an Obama biographer – his book “Barack Obama: The Story” is due out next month – Maraniss obviously knows that controversy surrounds Obama’s writing skills.
Given that controversy, he owes his reader some proof of the letter’s legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama’s published work of the same period. He does none of the above.[...]
Recall that Obama, in the words of friendly biographer David Remnick, was an “unspectacular” student. A Northwestern University prof who wrote a letter of reference for Obama reinforces the point, telling Remnick, “I don’t think [Obama] did too well in college.”
And yet writing longhand, presumably from memory, Obama has the wherewithal to put an umlaut over the “u” in Münzer. In college, I was an Honors English student and a Classics minor, not a political science major like Obama. I had not even heard of Münzer before reading this letter.
That Obama could embark upon a sophisticated, spontaneous discussion of T.S. Eliot – he claimed not to have read “The Waste Land” for a year and never bothered “to check all the footnotes” – should have alerted Maraniss.
Nowhere in “Dreams” is there any mention of T.S. Eliot, Münzer or Yeats, or any of the themes in this letter that so excited Adam Hirsch. As Obama tells it, he and his pals “discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy.” This I can believe.[...]
In the Harvard of 1990, with his name fully emblazoned upon his work, Obama was not hesitant to share syntactically challenged clunkers like this one: “No editors on the Review will ever know whether any given editor was selected on the basis of grades, writing competition, or affirmative action, and no editors who were selected with affirmative action in mind.” Huh?
The letter Maraniss reproduces, by contrast, is exquisitely punctuated and free of all such errors. The author of the letter even uses his or her participles correctly.
Uh, yeah.
This is what happens when you can't admit your own errors and choose to live a life of delusion -- you descend further and further down the rabbit hole.
But crazy as it is, it's still primo Obama-hate, so WND will continue to publish Cashill's lunacy.
