Joseph Farah's Year of Lies About Obama

The WorldNetDaily editor spent 2014 spreading falsehoods about him -- and lying about previous lies he has spread.

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/14/2015

Joseph Farah

These go beyond the previous fits of Obama derangement that dominate his writing. Not did he spread lies about Obama, he lied about what he and WND have written about Obama in order to pretend he and WND are not as Obama-obsessed as they are.

Let's review the year in Farah's lies, shall we?

Perpetuating birther lies

Throughout the year, Farah reminded us what a dedicated birther he remains, all facts to the contrary. In a Jan. 29 column aimed at the critics of his selective birther obsession -- it applies to Obama, not Ted Cruz -- Farah wrote:

Now I have seen dozens of blog postings and “news stories” about my commentary, and they all pretty much say the same thing – suggesting or outright stating that I peddled a theory that Obama was born abroad. This is patently untrue.

In the hundreds of thousands of words I have written and spoken on this subject, I have never theorized Obama was born abroad.

Farah is telling a baldfaced lie, which he's trying to parse by saying he "never theorized" that Obama was born abroad. Farah has repeatedly touted the discredited claim that Obama's grandmother was born in Kenya, and the website he operates published a "Kenyan birth certificate" for Obama he couldn't be bothered to authenticate before publication (it was a fake, of course). Farah may very narrowly portray such claims as something other than "theorizing," but it's utterly dishonest for him to claim he never promoted the idea.

Farah's bamboozlement continued:

So what was my beef?

One problem has always been, and remains today, that we don’t know where he was born because he has never released an unchallenged birth certificate.

A second problem remains that even if the birth certificate is accurate and authentic, it still leaves open the question of his “natural born citizen” status because it states his father was a Kenyan citizen, unable to confer “natural born citizen” status on his son.

A third problem is that his listed mother was unable to confer that status on her son because she was a minor – too young. She hadn’t lived as a citizen in the country long enough. She later left for Indonesia and took her son with her to Indonesia where he was adopted by an Indonesian citizen.

First: Obama's birth certificate has been "challenged" only by people like Farah who will never accept any documentation for Obama as sufficiently legitimate.

Second: Farah has apparently forgotten that WND published an article admitting that the Constitution does not define "natural born citizen," and the Supreme Court has never weighed in. Thus, he cannot claim that Obama is ineligible because his father was not an American citizen.

Third: The idea that Obama's mother was "too young" to confer citizenship upon Obama is a clause that applies only to a child born abroad -- which Farah has never been able to prove he was.

But having spent years propagating a sleazy, partisan, and completely false campaign of personal destruction for the sole purpose of making the birth certificate Obama's Vince Foster, Farah suddenly wants to wash his hands of it, declaring, "I really don’t want to talk about Obama’s eligibility any more."

Sorry, dude, that's not how it works. Until WND publishes the truth about the dishonesty of its birther crusade and apologizes for making years of false attacks -- which it has studiously avoided doing thus far -- Farah does not get to walk away from the wreckage he created.

The only reason Farah is giving up the ghost now is because he has so ruined WND with perpetuating birther falsehoods that nobody believes what's published there anymore. But, again, Farah is an unrepentant liar, so the odds of that happening are pretty dismal -- even if the continued dishonesty forces WND out of business.

In his April 16 column, Farah raged at Obama for daring to tell a birther joke:

I don’t think he has stopped thinking about how he conned the American public into giving him the presidency without genuine, fraud-free documentation. He only produced something a few days after Corsi and WND Books released the No. 1 best-selling book in the nation, “Where’s the Birth Certificate?” – with the intent of halting the sales of a book that proves beyond a reasonable doubt Obama is as phony as his birth certificate.

Watch the video for yourself. Obama’s laughs went on self-consciously long.

“Ha, ha. I think it’s still up on a website somewhere,” he said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

Then he took a long pause.

“You remember that? That was crazy,” he said. “That was some crazy stuff. Ha, ha, ha.

“I hadn’t thought about that in a while,” he said, shaking his head. “Ha, ha, ha. Ha, ha.”

Har har hardy ha har.

Are you laughing about this?

Were you part of the media establishment chorus that laughed off the eligibility question?

This is where that laughter leads.

Are you still laughing?

Now that he has hoodwinked the American people into allowing him to be president for five years without proper identification, the story is that he wants anyone to VOTE without it, too!

[...]

I’m glad he brought up his birth certificate again. Maybe it’s time for Americans to give that phony document the examination it should have received when he released it.

If Obama thinks the birth certificate non-troversy is a joke, it's because people like Farah that have made it that way. It's obvious that no documentation Obama could produce would ever satisfy the likes of Farah, Jerome Corsi and the other birthers.

If Farah actually cared about the birth certificate, WND would have reported the evidence debunking the birthers' claims. But, again, it hasn't -- which tells us that Farah doesn't care whether it's real or not, only that he can use the issue as a cudgel against a political enemy.

And Farah can't even do his birther rant without telling a lie. Obama released his long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011 -- three weeks before Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate was released, not "a few days after" the book came out as Farah claimed.

Farah's impotent rage at Obama for making fun of him demonstrates that he's still sore about squandering what little credibility WND had for a five-year birther crusade that backfired because of his own arrogance and desire for vengeance. Nobody believes him or WND anymore, and he only has himself to blame.

The only chance Farah has to salvage his reputation is to admit the obvious -- that the birther crusade was a sham all along. But that would require him to show some humility and have an attitude of repentance, and we know that ain't gonna happen.

Farah pretends WND didn't embrace Sinclair

In his Sept. 4 column, Farah took offense -- as he is prone to do whenever anyone criticizes him -- at author John Avlon's profile of WND in his book "Wingnuts." Among the many lies he tells to defend himself is this attempt to downplay how WND embraced a dubious Obama "scandal":

You claim WND has repeatedly published a thoroughly discredited drifter’s claim that “he took cocaine in 1999 with the then Illinois legislator [Obama] and participated in homosexual acts” with him. Yes we did report that claim – once – under the headline labeling it a “sleaze charge” and only after Larry Sinclair filed a high-profile civil rights lawsuit against Barack Obama’s inner circle. (I guess your standards of journalism would not permit the reporting of such a lawsuit.)

As ConWebWatch documented, WND published three articles -- not one, as Farah claimed -- highlighting Sinclair's lawsuit at the time it was filed, and Farah wrote a column defending publication of Sinclair's claims, even boasting that Sinclair's claims "has been reported in only one news venue – WND." None of these articles gave any indication that WND bothered to investigate the veracity of Sinclair's charges.

By contrast, WND published nothing whatsoever about the press conference in which Sinclair proved himself beyond a doubt to be the "thoroughly discredited drifter" that Farah apparently now concedes he is. Instead, Jerome Corsi took up Sinclair's cause, publishing numerous WND articles uncritically rehashing Sinclair's claims. Farah did not apparently require Corsi to note that Sinclair is a discredited drifter.

Lies about Obama, Assad and ISIS

In his Sept. 21 column, Farah asserted that "Obama exaggerated the offenses of the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad, led a fight to bomb it, sent arms and funding to Sunni Muslim rebels and then watched as those arms fell into the hands of ISIS – literally launching these demons into a regional threat," adding that "a bulwark against radical Sunni domination in the Middle East and a surprisingly good protector of minority religious groups like Christians and Druze." Farah also claimed that "we need to recognize Syria and Assad are on the front lines of fighting ISIS."

Actually, the opposite is true -- Assad is not only not fighting ISIS, he effectively created the group.

Newsweek reported that the Assad regime released many terrorists from its prisons in 2011 at the start of the Syrian civil war, presumably to create a pretense to crack down on dissent. NBC agreed, adding that Assad had released terrorists from his prisons during the Iraq War as a bulwark to prevent U.S. troops in Iraq from advancing into Syria.

The Christian Science Monitor notes: "ISIS has largely refrained from fighting the Syrian regime to focus on building an Islamic state in northern Syria and ousting more moderate rebel rivals. In return, the regime has left ISIS alone, allowing the Syrian military to concentrate on fighting the moderate rebel groups. At the same time, Assad also points to the brutal exploits of ISIS and other jihadist groups in the conflict to justify its argument to the international community that it is fighting Islamic 'terrorists.'"

Lying about Obama and Ebola

At a time when there were no active cases of Ebola in the U.S., Farah devoted his Nov. 23 column to "trying to figure out why Barack Obama appears to be doing everything in his power to spread the Ebola virus." It's all about the Cloward-Piven strategy, apparently:

The Cloward-Piven Strategy is mainstream leftist ideology. It’s the Rosetta stone for understanding what progressives do and why they do it. It seems to make no sense on the surface to non-leftist ideologues. It seems like irrationality, stupidity or even insanity. But it’s not. It’s pure evil from the pit of hell.

It’s the kind of thinking that led to the gas chambers. It’s the kind of thinking that led to the gulags. It’s the kind of thinking that led to the guillotines.

Let’s recall that Obama first set out to kill the flawed but greatest health-care system the world had ever known. He lied repeatedly about what he was doing. He misrepresented his intentions and his goals. Once he got what he wanted and people could see it didn’t work the way they thought it would work, he told them they just didn’t understand. He told them it was their imaginations that they were losing their health-care insurance, paying more for medical services and being denied treatment.

You see, if you follow the Cloward-Piven Strategy, your goal was never to provide better and more affordable health care. It was to destroy the system and replace it with complete government control.

[...]

Here, for instance, is what Obama said about his Ebola strategy. Just read between the lines: “But let’s keep in mind that as we speak, there are children on the streets dying of this disease, thousands of them. And so obviously my first job is to make sure that we’re taking care of the American people, but we have a larger role than that. We also have an obligation to make sure that those (African) children and their families are safe as well because ultimately the best thing we can do for our public health is also to extend the kind of empathy, compassion and effort so that folks in those countries as well can be rid of this disease” (emphasis added).

Do you understand what’s going on here now?

Does this help?

Are things beginning to make more sense to you now?

Given that, again, there were no active cases of Ebola in the U.S. and there have been none since Farah's column, it makes quite a bit of sense that Farah will say anything to smear Obama out of pure hatred, no matter how untrue.

Farah's Dec. 26 column invoked the racially charged image of lazy black men by asking, "Imagine how bad off America would be if Barack Obama had a work ethic," Farah manufactures offense that Obama watches ESPN once in a while instead of obsessing about politics all day:

Think about that statement.

No. 1, we already know Obama takes more vacations than any 50 families in America combined, right? And those outlandishly expensive vacations are paid for by you and me.

No. 2, we know he plays more golf than most pros. Do you think he pays for his golf outings? Of course not.

Now we know he spends most of his mornings watching ESPN!

Farah is simply lying out of spite. While Obama had taken 125 full or partial days on vacation as of August, George W. Bush had taken 407 vacation days at the same point in his presidency. We don't recall Farah getting too worked up about Bush taking "more vacations than any 50 families in America combined" -- even though the number would have to be increase to "any 200 families in America combined" to be truly accurate.

Farah's claim that Obama "plays more golf than most pros" is also a blatant lie. One anti-Obama website claims that, as of this writing, Obama has played 208 rounds of golf. That equates to less than one round a week during his presidency. By contrast, your typical golf pro plays four rounds a week during a tournament, plus numerous additional rounds of practice time. Further, Obama's total is only one-fourth the amount reportedly played by President Dwight Eisenhower.

Farah lies about his own words

The extent to which Farah lies so shamelessly was demonstrated yet again in his March 18 column:

Who says Barack Obama isn’t doing all he can to help his country?

There are some cynics out there who don’t believe it. Some even suggest he’s doing his best to wreck it.

The facts suggest otherwise.

If the gospels of Matthew and Luke are correct, and one’s heart is where one’s treasure is, then Obama truly loves his country.

What am I talking about?

For several years now, WND has been tracking the administration’s investment in what Michelle Obama calls her husband’s “home country in Kenya.” I don’t call it that, mind you – never have. That’s what Obama’s wife calls it.

You gotta love how Farah makes a false statement -- that for Obama, Kenya is "his country" -- and then five paragraphs later denies he has done such a thing and blames it instead on Obama's wife.

Anyway, the point of the article is to sum up WND's selective reporting on "projects and spending Obama has directed to Kenya." No context is provided, of course; Farah can't be bothered to tell us any actual funding figures for previous years or funding for other countries in Africa. He's just cherry-picked these numbers and wants you to think that they mean something even though they're utterly devoid of context.

Farah lies about Clinton, too

Farah didn't limit his lie-telling in 2014 to current Democratic presidents. He wrote in his April 18 column:

No doubt those behind the 1993 Clinton administration plan to disarm personnel on U.S. military bases thought nobody in their right mind would attack one. Since that decision, hundreds of soldiers and civilian workers on domestic U.S. military bases have been killed or wounded. Prior to that decision, there were no recorded mass shootings.

In fact, the Department of Defense directive establishing the rules limiting firearms on military bases was issued in 1992, when George H.W. Bush was president and Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense.