Topic: Horowitz
Good news: A major right-wing site is denouncing the Obama birth certificate conspiracy theory. Bad news: It's substituting an even more stupid one.
Following up on David Horowitz's March 30 attempt to get his fellow right-wingers to back away from Obama Derangement Syndrome (because it worked so well with them the last time he tried it), an April 1 FrontPageMag article by Andrew Walden attempts to put a stake through the heart of the birth certificate conspiracy:
For Obama to have been born in Kenya, Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr. would have had to fly from Honolulu to Mombasa, give birth in a substandard third world hospital, fly back and then somehow arrange for a fraudulent birth certificate to be entered by the State of Hawai'i on August 8, 1961 (at the time governed by Republican William Quinn). They would have also somehow planted the phony birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser (at the time edited by Republican Thurston Twigg-Smith) and the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. Hawai'i’s current Republican Governor Linda Lingle would also have to be complicit in the cover-up as would all of the leftist 1960s University of Hawaii friends of Ann Dunham and Barack Obama Sr—among them US Rep Neil Abercrombie.
Walden even calls out WorldNetDaily -- one of the main promoters of the conspiracy -- for getting stuff wrong:
Since Hawai'i law forbids the release of birth certificates to anybody not authorized by Barack Obama or his family, Obama further feeds the paranoia by choosing not to grant such permissions. A World Net Daily story claiming Hawai'i’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle ‘sealed’ the birth certificate is totally false. The governor’s office has asked for a retraction.
It's rather curious, not to mention yet another breach of journalistic ethics, that WND has not reported the governor's denial or otherwise responded publicly to it -- indeed, the Oct. 26, 2008, WND article by Jerome Corsi making this apparently false claim remains live. Erik Rush even repeated the false claim in a December 2008 Newsmax column.
Then, Walden blows it by claiming that right-wing obsession over the birth certificate is exactly what Obama wants them to do:
By refusing media requests for a look at the actual paper birth certificate, Obama’s campaign gave sly backhanded assistance to the forgery hype. The internet release of the birth certificate via hyper-partisan website Daily Kos on June 12 before posting it on a campaign website was likely calculated to fuel the frenzy. This is Obama’s Gramscian strategy designed to redirect the opposition down a blind alley.
[...]
Obama benefits from creating an opposition which seems to be standing by the side of the road impotently pointing to a piece of paper as if it could stop 63 million voters from anointing their ‘chosen one’. Birth certificate lawsuit plaintiff Phil Berg is a Democrat and whether he understands it or not, he has done great work on behalf of his party.
It is time for folks to stop being played by the Obama campaign and drop this counter productive ‘phony birth certificate’ nonsense.
As the Huffington Post's Jason Linkins put it, Walden is "substituting an utterly insane conspiracy theory with a thunderously obtuse one."
Walden might not be a fan of the birth certificate conspiracy, but he has been a promoter of other Obama conspracies: As we've noted, Accuracy in Media has reprinted Walden's purported exposure of "the Frank Marshall Davis netweork in Hawaii,"and AIM's Cliff Kincaid has approvingly cited Walden's work of examining "Davis’s Sex Rebel book."
Ultimately, Walden's complaint seems to boil down to that the birth certificate conspiracy is drawing attention away from his own conspiracy.
