The Obama Haters: Behind the Right-Wing Campaign of Lies, Innuendo & Racism

2 Falsehoods About Obama Echo Endlessly, Even After Debunking

9 falsehoods about obama echo endlessly, even after debunking 2 Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it. —Joseph Goebbels nearly everyone in public life has been smeared. Celebrities and average people have been cast into the limelight—perhaps thrown to the wolves—for their fleeting fifteen minutes of fame. Just ask Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, better known as Joe the Plumber, who obsequiously thrust himself before the klieg lights when Obama was campaigning in Ohio. Within days the whole world knew that Joe was not really named Joe and that most of the things he said about himself were fables. Without the opportunistic media attention, nobody would have heard about this man, who nonetheless used his undeserved fame to get a book deal and recording contract. Those who seek the spotlight are often singed or even destroyed by it. Ordinary people are turned into monsters. Lawsuits for defamation are rarely successful and draw even more attention to outlandish accusations. Anyone who seeks to be rich and famous should remember the dark side of celebrity: the cottage industry to destroy luminaries for fun, for profit, or maybe just for envy and spite. Anyone can jump in at any point and take potshots . Fire away. Nobody is exempt, not even Mother Teresa, who tirelessly devoted her energies to the sick and dying, the untouchables of India’s fetid slums. She 10 — — — — — — tHe oBama HateRs remained single-mindedly devoted to her life’s mission until she died at age eighty-seven without ever resting on her abundant laurels. None of this stopped Christopher Hitchens from attacking her in The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice, published in 1995. If even Mother Teresa is not immune from calumny, who among us mere mortals—with presumably many more faults, foibles, and weaknesses than Mother Teresa—can escape the wrath of someone with a fat mouth and computer keyboard, let alone well-financed, mean-spirited people with an agenda to crucify anyone they choose? How would Jesus fare in today’s tabloid-driven Internet world? The best-organized hate machine in American political history aimed all its ammunition incessantly at Bill and Hillary Clinton. The slime started flying when he was governor of Arkansas and never stopped: he smuggled drugs, ordered the murder of a White House aide, committed rape, swindled people in the Whitewater land deal, and had extramarital sex with women. Hillary was alternatively described as a lesbian, frigid, having a screw loose, or drugaddled . Of course, we know now that only the womanizer accusation against Bill Clinton was true, but it was nearly enough to topple a president. By the time Clinton was impeached for libidinal lying, millions of people believed he was guilty of real crimes but had somehow hidden the evidence despite the unblinking, searing spotlight on every corner of his life. One might hope that after Election Day, the hatred against Obama would cease. After all, the McCain campaign had rolled up the carpet, turned out the lights, and gone home, its staff scattering to the winds. But for some determined individuals and groups unwilling to accept Obama’s election, the party was just beginning. PLedge of aLLegIanCe Obama haters e-mail a photograph snapped during a September 16, 2007, political forum in Indianola, Iowa, that shows Obama’s hands limply at his waist while Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton, and Ruth Harkin placed their hands over their hearts. The e-mails are accompanied by these remarks: “He refused to not only put his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance, but refused to say the pledge . . . how in the hell can a man like this expect to be our next commander in chief?” It looks damning until you learn that this was the National Anthem being sung at that moment, not a recitation of the Pledge. A video of this event FalsehOOds abOuT Obama echO endlessly — — — — — — 11 shows Obama singing the anthem while the others stood mutely with their hands over their hearts. “My grandfather taught me how to say the Pledge of Allegiance when I was two. . . . During the Pledge of Allegiance you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem you sing,” Obama explained in a November 7, 2007, interview with the Associated Press. Other pictures were taken before and after this same event that show Obama with hand on heart during...