The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Junk My Dad Says About BHO

Posted on | May 20, 2012 | 8 Comments

by Smitty

I usually call my dad on my drive home from work and commiserate. Dad had an interesting take on the whole literary agency ‘born in Keyna‘ business. He worried that the Obama camp is deliberately leaking the information that Breitbart is uncovering a means of rubbing the faces of patriotic Americans in the fact that we all got rooked, rooked, rooked in 2008.

I countered that, sure, we got rooked, probably more than we’ll ever know. I did come back at dad with the massive level of blowback Barack is facing across the spectrum is completely unheard of. The Obama campaign seems to be getting sacked of barely making it back to the line of scrimmage with every campaign play they try. Intrade still holds BHO with a 58.2% chance of re-election, for whatever that’s worth.

Short of Zombie Osama rising from the Potomac, and BHO vanquishing him with a Hong Kong Phooey Chop, I don’t see Barack turning this around, with this level of sustained pressure.

Update: Althouse evolves the theory more in dad’s direction. Ultimately, whichever direction the White House wants to spin matters stands a good likelihood of not being the useful one.

Category: Barack Obama

Comments

8 Responses to “Junk My Dad Says About BHO”

  1. A.Men
    May 20th, 2012 @ 7:53 am

    Intrade is wrong!  Sure obama, the first gay Preezy is rubbing our faces in his success at destroying America because they know he will lose even with stealing and buying votes!!

  2. DaveO
    May 20th, 2012 @ 8:44 am

    More likely, this was leaked to bring up birtherism again. The only way to get any facts about Obama’s past will be to send Sandy Berger back to the National Archives.

    I do like that Breitbart’s elves are playing this as Obama-the-Morph.

  3. Dai Alanye
    May 20th, 2012 @ 9:15 am

    The exotic background was a plus in the book business, and Obama’s narcissism is such that playing a more colorful part is gratifying to him.

  4. Saul
    May 20th, 2012 @ 9:30 am

    Junk indeed. Your dad is apparently even more of a conspiracy monger than Breitbart News, which included this disclaimer in its breathless exclusive: “We [believe] that President Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, on August 4, 1961.”

    BN is also positing a conspiracy, but theirs is a little less audacious than the one your dad imagines. BN is hammering on the fact that Acton & Dystel didn’t correct the Kenyan-birth mistake on any of the repeated occasions that they updated Obama’s blurb to reflect his latest publishing activity. BN sees a conspiracy there. That’s either inexperience…or dishonesty. 

    I read and research a lot of history and current events, and so I’m very familiar with the fact that people routinely reprint previously-published information without questioning it, and so mistaken information gets re-published repeatedly. That fact of human nature means that factual errors about every imaginable subject have been repeated countless times in exactly the fashion BN portrays as breaking news.

    Just this last week, I happened to check the world’s most authoritative online resource in a field in which I do research. I found that the entry for a particular topic had been revised to embrace a completely mistaken set of conclusions presented in a paper written years ago by someone else. I happen to know the information is completely mistaken because I’ve published better research that specifically debunked the older paper. But now that the mistake is in the definitive source, the errors will be repeated without question by everyone who reads them.

    As I said, it happens every day that people take what they read at face value. Nobody vets every assertion of fact they encounter. That would be impossible, and in most cases, a waste of time. If what Acton & Dystel did was a conspiracy, then we’re all conspirators.

    As for your dad…well, he’s a walking advertisement for the wisdom of Ockham’s razor (the admonition that the explanation which makes the fewest assumptions is likely to be the most accurate).

  5. JeffS
    May 20th, 2012 @ 10:25 am

    Seems to me that this “Bio-gate” is not being expressed in its simplest form, to wit:

    Either Obama lied about his birthplace back in 1991, or he’s lying about his birthplace now.  In either case, Obama is lying. 

    Which is hardly news, as President Zero’s lips move constantly.  But it’s gratifying to see the SCOAMF trip on his own forked tongue.  

  6. Saul
    May 20th, 2012 @ 11:49 am

    this was leaked to bring up birtherism again

    I don’t think Breitbart News editors are the stooges you think they are. 

  7. Anamika
    May 20th, 2012 @ 1:15 pm

    Thanks for sharing all this. I have now  caught up on reading this material and more. It looks like none of the parties has or is presenting the whole picture.  (Like I do, ha ha!)

  8. RichFader
    May 20th, 2012 @ 3:48 pm

    I’m surprised we haven’t heard about Indonesian papers doing interviews with Barry, wherein Teh Awesome assures the intrepid reporter in pitch-perfect Bahasa, “oh, yeah, Jakarta born and raised.”  If Mars had electoral votes, he’d tell the on-planet press that he frolicked in the shadow of Mons Olympus in his youth. (As opposed to Bill Clinton, who has spent the best years of his life in an all-out assault on Mons Veneris.)