What was Barry Obama’s thesis about?
Simon Maloy at Media Matters sneers at length (with UPDATE!s) at the recent kerfluffle among conservatives about somebody saying Obama dissed the Founding Fathers in it. The screed reminds me strongly of some of the pieces that have appeared on conservative sites debunking the crap that’s been spewed about George Bush, Republicans, and conservatives in general over the last few years, with one important difference.
We still don’t have Obama’s thesis to look at, so its content is still subject to assumption and rumor. Maloy provides no evidence whatever in his “debunking”, merely assertion plus quotes from some of the more strident conservative comments on the subject. Conservatives generally had evidence, however thin, that the Leftoid accusations were false. Maloy’s got nothing but the bare word of people who haven’t seen the theisis, either!
By the Mapes/Rather standard of “evidence” Maloy’s essay counts as confirmation that Obama really did call the Founders a bunch of uncaring, slaving capitalists too stupid and vicious to invent Socialism. Somebody with more leisure than I have should search the archives of Kos, et. al., for the pieces expressing that sentiment regarding “Bush AWOL”, “Cheney Profiting from the War”, or the Lancet “statistics”, and paraphrase them in response. It’d probably take Moulitsas and Hamsher a week to catch on.
Don’t give me “nobody keeps old papers”. A college thesis is supposed to be a contribution to scholarship which later writers can cite in support of their own contributions. As such, it’s supposed to be kept around for the convenience of those later scholars. If it wasn’t, it confirms that young Barry was being given a free ride — he produced enough verbiage for them to give him the degree without regard to content, then they tossed it in the Dumpster® to avoid later embarrassment.
In the meantime, Rush and others used the story to get attention, therefore viewers, listeners, and readers, and therefore to attract advertisers who paid them money. Other media outlets take note. Mr. Emmanuel had a true insight that doesn’t apply only to direct politics.
“Dumpster” is a registered trade mark of the Dempsey Corporation. Used under the “Fair Use” provisions of the Copyright Act.
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24 October 2009 at 3:00 pm
geoffb
All I know about this is that the apparent site that it first appeared at,
http://jumpinginpools.blogspot.com/2009/08/obama-college-thesis-constitution-is.html ,
on August 25th 2009 at 2:12 pm did at some point place a satire tag on it. The first time I looked at it I saw no tags at all but there had been some problems with Blogspot earlier.
In the comments at jumpinginpools you can see Sarah W, trying to get some source or confirmation about the piece. Media Matters need not have bothered as the wingnut ‘o sphere tears into things like this and within less than a day found that there was no hard source to be had.
The interesting question to me is since the original was posted August 25th and only picked up by a couple of small sites at that time and went nowhere, how did this get blown out all over at this time, by who, and why?
The closest analog to me is that “Promise Keepers” march photo that got spread around by one guy on Twitter as a Washington Tea Party photo and then quickly debunked but not before damage was done.
26 October 2009 at 9:18 pm
Spiny Norman
IIRC, Markos Moulitsas “proved” the Dan Rather TANG memos were “genuine” (because a cumbersome and expensive IBM typesetting machine existed at the time that might possibly been able to produce them, and there was no evidence that the Texas ANG base DIDN’T have one…) or, just in case people didn’t buy that explanantion, they were “accurate reproductions” that “expressed Col. Killian’s true thoughts” or some such garbage.
That a 4th-year undergraduate Barack Obama would refer to Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, et al as “the so-called Founders” wouldn’t surprise me at all. That attitude was certainly common among the “progressive thinkers” he was taught by at the time, and still is. I doubt we’ll ever see anything Obama produced as a university student. If Barack wants to continue his charade as a “moderate”, he’ll certainly keep it that way.