If you think this is awful, you should read the comments.*

>> Sunday, February 07, 2010

A number of you have emailed me a link to the latest Jack Cashill article, and although I understand why, I'm not any better equipped to deal with his unsubtle descent into pure lunacy than you folks are. What can you do with an article that argues:

  1. No one would ever want to go to Kenya, so
  2. Obama's resemblance to his maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham, is suspicious; therefore
  3. Stanley Dunham is his real father, but because Obama must have one black parent,
  4. That means his father must have been Stanley Dunham's friend, the black communist Frank Marshall Davis;
  5. Or, because these friends drank at a black bar near a red-light district, Obama must be the child of Dunham and a black prostitute, because
  6. White women with black children were socially acceptable, whereas white men with black children were not, and
  7. Barack Obama Sr. was enlisted because "African" is a more respected cultural identity than "Negro," and because, as everyone knows,
  8. No one named "Darnell Johnson" would ever be elected President; moreover,
  9. Stanley Dunham sung the Obama Sr.'s praises Obama, which would have been odd in "the racially charged 1960s," especially when you consider
  10. That a 69-year-old woman said a momentous something happened in 1961, when in fact it had to have been in 1962 that
  11. This 69-year-old woman saw Ann Dunham nursing baby Obama, which she could not have been, because
  12. Obama must have been born to Dunham in February or March of 1961, on account of the fact that pregnant women can't attend college,
  13. But if they could, they would have learned that scientists use the phrase "inference to the best explanation," which leads Cashill to infer that
  14. "Obama was likely born in Hawaii but that Ann Dunham did not give birth to Barack Obama Sr.'s child on August 4, 1961," and what proves the legitimacy of this inference is that
  15. A celebrity biographer got confused when 69-year-old women mistook something that happened 49 years ago for something that happened 50, meaning
  16. The mainstream media ought to be paying attention to this, but because it is not, Cashill has no choice but to label himself a "birther."
Putting aside for a second that the majority of these alternative parentage theories would utterly invalidate the birther's central claim that Obama is ineligible to serve (white Washingtonians and black Hawaiian prostitutes being natural born citizens and all); and putting aside all the racist assumptions (white women love black men, but no white man would ever want to have sex with a black woman, the history of slavery in American notwithstanding); and putting aside the blatant contradictions (Dunham named his child "Barack Obama" so no one would think he's black); and putting aside all the other nonsense in this article, you are left with nothing.

Because once you put aside everything that sensible, rational people rightly put aside, there's nothing there. Every time he posts something, I wonder what whether this new bit of lunacy will be what's required for those conservatives (for example) who took Cashill seriously to distance themselves from him. (Then again, everyone says I have too much faith in people who warrant none.)

*But instead of cluttering up the front page with them, I'll stick the choice ones in our comments below.

0 comments:

Post a Comment

About This Blog

  © Blogger template Simple n' Sweet by Ourblogtemplates.com 2009

Back to TOP