Topic: WorldNetDaily
It appears that WorldNetDaily is not quite ready to tell its readers the full truth about its new birther hero, Tim Adams.
Adams is a former temp in a Hawaii elections office who claims that Obama was not born in the U.S. and that no original birth certificate for him exists -- a claim WND has eagerly embraced despite a complete lack of corroboration. As we detailed, Adams first made his claim to a self-described "pro-white" radio host of a show called "The Political Cesspool" during a conference of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a decendent of the openly racist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s and 1960s that the Anti-Defamation League describes as having a "white supremacy, white separatism" ideology.
A June 20 WND article by Joe Kovacs touts Adams' appearance on a local TV show in Kentucky.Buried in the 19th paragraph of Kovacs' article is his attempt to tepidly address criticism of Adams:
Since WND's original report, Adams has come under fire from some critics online who suggested Adams may hold an anti-black philosophy and that his assertions were possibly racially motivated.
At no point does Kovacs go into detail about the specific criticisms of Adams -- namely, his attendance at a racist-linked conference and his interview with a "pro-white" radio host. Kovacs certainly knows about all of this -- after all, he did his own share of whitewashing in that original article, writing that "People started to pay attention this week after he was briefly interviewed by James Edwards, host of a weekly radio show on WLRM Radio in Memphis, Tenn." Kovacs doesn't mention Edwards' name in his June 20 article.
But here's where it gets really weird. Kovac then not only portrays Adams as not racist -- even though at no point does Adams directly address the issue during the interview -- he quotes Adams suggesting that others pursuing the eligibility question are racist:
Adams, though, said it's people still asking Obama to prove his eligibility who tend to have race-based sentiments against the commander in chief.
"Some people are basically racist," Adams said. "It's a question of race. They don't like having someone who's not white, or they don't like someone who's from such a different heritage as President Obama, because his family has ties to Africa. His family also has ties to middle America, so to me it's also a non-issue. The other thing is, is he is a liberal, he's a Democrat. There's a lot of political rancor in the country in the last decade, starting with President Bush, and then we had 9/11. We've had the wars overseas. And this entire fight between the Left and the Right has become so Balkanized that anything someone finds, they say, 'Oh look, he lied about being born inside the United States. There must be something terrible there!' But they're extrapolating something that's not true."
WND, of course, is the leading promoter of birtherism. Which means Adams is, in effect, calling WND racist.
Despite that revealing quote, Kovacs dishonestly frames the issue. At no point during the Kentucky interview was he asked about his white supremacist ties; the above quoted answer was in response to the question, "So why do you think there is still this hubbub among some factions of the U.S. regarding his citizenship?"
If that's surprising, other statements by Adams that Kovacs didn't quote expose the real WND agenda even further. For instance, Kovacs cut off the above quote before Adams said:
This is the kind of thing you run into often. People nowadays constantly refer to the government as an enemy of the people, but the role of the government is to serve the people.
That's certainly a message WND doesn't want to get out. Later, Adams said this:
The other day we had the U.S. senator, I believe it was, who was stopped by the two young men who were asking questions on the street, and they almost had an altercation on the street. Our politicians have been so vilified, I think, that they are almost unable to interact with their constituents. Congress' approval ratings remain low, and the rhetoric is just so violent, and there's so much opposition that we seem to forget that we're all supposed to working toward the same goal. My comment was, the other day talking to several people, was I don't understand how anyone who is a politician in the country today manages to speak publicly, because no matter what you say, it rarely gets out to the public in the form you say it.
[...]
I think we need to notch down the rancor. We need to remember we are all one nation of people. Usually, when you say we are a diverse people, this is an oxymoron, but America is unique in that we are from our heritage a diverse people -- people from many different backgrounds and ethnicities. And we do have a dominant national story in America because we've had one group of people who were numerically superior to everyone else. There was a dominant social group, and that's been changing over the last 20 or 30 years. We have people -- more people from more diverse ethnicities coming in from other countries, coming in -- immigrating to the United States. The makeup of our country and the demographic is changing, and I think that causes a lot of agitation. A lot of people are afraid, and they latch on to people who tell them what they want to hear. And these people do not have their best interests at heart -- they're, you know, poverty pimps. And a lot of these are very nice people, but people can use fear to rile up a group of people who have been isolated or feel like they have been marginalized. And then you can't talk to anyone without very kind of outbursts we've seen over my rather -- I though rather boring comments a couple weeks ago.
"Poverty pimp" remark aside, Adams' comments about people falling prey to those who appeal to their fears describes WND to a T. WND branded itself as Obama Hate Central almost from day one, and it tells lies about him and his administration on a regular basis. Further, WND is so anti-immigrant that it has Tom Tancredo as a columnist.
WND is exploiting its readers' fear of Obama -- a fear that is possibly racially motivated -- and it clearly does not have the best interests of its readers in mind. If it did, it would act like a real news organization instead of the for-profit activist group it is.
If WND ever decides to abandon Adams, it won't be because of his white supremacist connections -- after all, it has no problem with Pat Buchanan's Jew-counting or Jerome Corsi's own associations with the same radio "pro-white" host that talked to Adams. It will be because he knows the truth about WND.
