Fake Obama Thesis Story Goes Viral, Because of Stupidity

Nov 2nd, 09 / 0 Comments /

Evans Politics, October 24, 2009

an upside down dead elephant symbolizes the GOP

Listen to the Self-Satisfied Moron,
Rush Limbaugh, Gush About This, Below

Fake Obama Thesis Story Goes Viral, Because of Stupidity, © The Huffington Post, October 23, 2009, by Jason Linkins:

“Okay, let’s get you up to speed on the incredibly true story about how a bunch of right-wingers got taken in by some satiric blog post on Barack Obama’s college thesis, written ages ago, and frantically presented it as real.

“Months ago, some blogger crafted a fake news story about how Time Magazine’s Joe Klein had obtained ten pages of a thesis written by Barack Obama, in which he wrote about how the Constitution was ‘inherently flawed.’

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: “I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh.”
In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: “There are many who will defend the ‘free market.’ But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny.”
However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: “… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”

“Now, I don’t see a whole lot in there about the ‘the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,’ which is what he actually wrote about for Columbia, which should have been the first clue that this was a satire. ALSO HELPFUL: the tag on the satiric blog post, which reads, and I quote, “SATIRE.”

Read the full story, here.

Read the SATIRICAL blog post by Brian Lancaster, Obama College Thesis: ‘Constitution is Inherently Flawed’, Jumping In Pools, August 25, 2009.

See Shocker for conservatives: Obama may not hate the Constitution, Salon, October 23, 2009, by Alex Koppelman.

COMMENT by Paul Evans: Now this is really an old, old controversy that came up (and was settled) near the beginning of the Obama Campaign. See Obama’s missing ‘thesis’, MSNBC First Read, July 24, 2008, by Domenico Montanaro:

The hunt for Obama’s senior “thesis” began with a throwaway line in a newspaper article last October. The New York Times story, on Obama’s early New York years, mentioned in passing that the presidential contender had majored in political science at Columbia and had spent his time “writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament.”
Journalists began hounding Columbia University for copies of the musty document. Conservative bloggers began wondering if the young Obama had written a no-nukes screed that he might come to regret. And David Bossie, the former congressional investigator and “right-wing hit man,” as one newspaper described him, took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University’s newspaper and the Chicago Tribune in March searching for the term paper.

…SNIP…

So we turned for answers to the former professor who graded the now-elusive paper. His former professor, Michael Baron, recalled in an interview with NBC News that Obama easily aced the year-long class. Baron described the paper as a “thesis” or “senior thesis” in several interviews, and said that Obama spent a year working on it. Baron recalls that the topic was nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union.
“My recollection is that the paper was an analysis of the evolution of the arms reduction negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States,” Baron said in an e-mail. “At that time, a hot topic in foreign policy circles was finding a way in which each country could safely reduce the large arsenal of nuclear weapons pointed at the other … For U.S. policy makers in both political parties, the aim was not disarmament, but achieving deep reductions in the Soviet nuclear arsenal and keeping a substantial and permanent American advantage. As I remember it, the paper was about those negotiations, their tactics and chances for success. Barack got an A.”
Baron said that, even if he could find a copy of the paper, it would likely disappoint Obama’s critics. “The course was not a polemical course, it was a course in decision making and how decisions got made,” he said. “None of the papers in the class were controversial.”