Are the Élite Apologists for the O Too Clever by Half?

Are Obama’s élite sup­port­ers in the media and pol­i­tics over­do­ing their Amer­i­cans Are Morons meme?  James Taranto raises an inter­est­ing point in a mus­ing for his Best of the Web fea­ture for the Wall Street Jour­nal.

Richard Nixon was not a crook, Michael Dukakis was not unpa­tri­otic, and Barack Obama is not a Mus­lim. Unlike Nixon and Dukakis, Obama didn’t actu­ally issue an explicit defen­sive denial; instead, as we noted yes­ter­day, the pres­i­dent said through a spokesman that he is obvi­ously a Chris­t­ian. He prays every day.

But News​Busters​.org reports that CNN recast it as a Nixon­ian denial: W.H.: PRES. OBAMA ISN’T MUSLIM, read a chy­ron (cap­tion at the bot­tom of the screen) yes­ter­day on The Sit­u­a­tion Room, as Wolf Blitzer led his pro­gram with a dis­cus­sion of a recent poll in which 18% of par­tic­i­pants thought Obama was Muslim.

One of Blitzer’s guests, James Carville, offered this expla­na­tion for the finding:

I don’t [know] other than the fact peo­ple are just will­ing to believe any­thing or there are a lot of stu­pid peo­ple out there,” Carville said. “I really don’t have an expla­na­tion, just like I don’t have an expla­na­tion for the fact that you see some of these polls that a quar­ter of the peo­ple believe he was born out­side the coun­try. I’m just as flum­moxed as the next per­son.

News­busters’ Jeff Poor makes an excel­lent point:

Every time the ques­tion about Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s faith is brought up, the wiz­ards of smart in the main­stream media get up in arms about “right-​​wingers” or “tea partiers” per­pet­u­at­ing those alle­ga­tions. But is it pos­si­ble that by devot­ing so much atten­tion to these issues of Obama’s faith and his cit­i­zen­ship, the media are cre­at­ing the very feed­ing frenzy they’re appalled by?

This sounds exactly right to us. The agenda behind these polls, and the lib­eral media’s report­ing on them, is to por­tray crit­ics of Pres­i­dent Obama as kooks and idiots. (and, if you’re John Avlon, to ped­dle books, as we noted in March).

This strat­egy is back­fir­ing, and in two ways. First, as Poor sug­gests, by main­stream­ing these sup­pos­edly fringe notions. If the idea that Obama is Mus­lim mer­its the atten­tion of the august Pew Research Cen­ter for the Peo­ple and the Press and the most respected name in news, who’s to say it’s crazy, or even wrong?

Sec­ond, it puts the ugly atti­tudes of the lib­eral élite on dis­play, à la Lone­some Rhodes’s open-​​mic inci­dent in “A Face in the Crowd.” Now we know that James Carville thinks “there are a lot of stu­pid peo­ple out there.” At least those who work in the Obama White House are, for the most part, dis­ci­plined enough not to make such insult­ing statements–as Carville him­self was when he worked for Pres­i­dent Clin­ton. Yet when peo­ple hear such con­temp­tu­ous state­ments from the president’s sup­port­ers in the media (as well as from some in pol­i­tics, most notably Speaker Nancy Pelosi), they can draw their own con­clu­sions about what Obama and his inner cir­cle think of them.

Thus, at a time when the vast major­ity of vot­ers oppose the president’s poli­cies for any num­ber of legit­i­mate rea­sons, the media’s self-​​superior dwelling on “stu­pid” or “kooky” Obama crit­ics tends to mar­gin­al­ize Obama, not his oppo­nents. Obama’s pres­i­dency is being con­sumed in a bon­fire of lib­eral vanities.

All the News That’s Fit to Print

The great Greg Sar­gent notes a telling find­ing in the Pew poll: “A solid major­ity” of respon­dents who think Pres­i­dent Obama is Mus­lim “say they ‘learned’ it from the media.” Sarge scratches his head:

I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe some voices on the right have suc­ceeded in cre­at­ing an alter­nate real­ity that really is impen­e­tra­ble. Maybe tra­di­tional news orgs haven’t been force­ful enough in knock­ing the lies down. Or, alter­na­tively, maybe there’s a seg­ment of folks who are so dis­trust­ful of the “MSM” that they believe the oppo­site of what it tells them.

Maybe they read this arti­cle, pub­lished dur­ing the 2008 campaign:

As the son of the Mus­lim father, Sen­a­tor Obama was born a Mus­lim under Mus­lim law as it is uni­ver­sally under­stood. It makes no dif­fer­ence that, as Sen­a­tor Obama has writ­ten, his father said he renounced his reli­gion. Like­wise, under Mus­lim law based on the Koran his mother’s Chris­t­ian back­ground is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Amer­i­cans under­stand it, Sen­a­tor Obama is not a Mus­lim. He chose to become a Chris­t­ian, and indeed has writ­ten con­vinc­ingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how impor­tant his Chris­t­ian faith is to him.

His con­ver­sion, how­ever, was a crime in Mus­lim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usu­ally trans­lated from the Ara­bic as “apos­tasy,” but with con­no­ta­tions of rebel­lion and trea­son. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Mus­lim can com­mit, worse than mur­der (which the victim’s fam­ily may choose to forgive).

What right-​​wing rag pub­lished this? The New York Times, of course.

Is it pos­si­ble that, as these dan­di­fied anuses blow kisses to one another, shar­ing in the mutual glow of being so darn spe­cial and enjoy­ing a good laugh at the rubes, they have for­got­ten a cou­ple of things?

They haven’t got rid of the Elec­toral Col­lege yet.  New York and Los Ange­les, Min­neapo­lis and Austin may get a good healthy snig­ger at the expense of Goofis Amer­i­ca­nis, who in spite of con­stant hec­tor­ing still doesn’t think there is any­thing that much Wrong With Him, but for some rea­son he believes he is qual­i­fied to show up at the polls. And, while he may not get the sort of charge from these antics as the writ­ers at the New York Times or Salon or NPR he is noticing.

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Tags: Barack Obama, Boobs, Muslim, New York Times, Oafs