Trump's next rented mule

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Donald Trump's New Obama Conspiracy Theory
 Michelle Goldberg – Tue Apr 26, 11:36 pm ET

NEW YORK – [image: Donald Trump's New Obama Conspiracy Theory]*
President Obama may have released his birth
certificate<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=13rqvhjj9/*http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-04-27/obamas-birth-certificate-trump-made-him-do-it?cid=hp:mainpromo1>on
Wednesday, but Donald Trump and other wingnuts have already moved on
to a
new conspiracy: how the president got into the Ivy League. Michelle Goldberg
traces the far-right history of the claim.*

The birther bit must have been getting old. Now Donald
Trump<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=13ausob2n/*http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-03-30/donald-trump-goes-birther-to-win-2012-primary/>has
opened up a new line of attack on President Obama, accusing him of
being
a “terrible student” who shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia University or
Harvard Law School. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to
Harvard?” he asked the Associated
Press<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=12n4525ah/*http://www.thedailybeast.com/cheat-sheet/item/trump-obama-too-dumb-for-ivies/bluster/>.
“I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his
records.” He continued darkly, “There are a lot of questions that are
unanswered about our president.”

Like everything Trump says about Obama lately, his comments got lots of
media play. Less attention has been paid to where they came from. Conspiracy
theories about Obama’s education have been floating around the far right
since his presidential campaign, with some of the same people who’ve doubted
the president’s birth certificate now demanding to see his college
transcripts. Once again, Trump has found a way to raid the fever swamps for
talking points.

Claims about Obama’s educational history date back to September 2008, when The
Wall Street Journal attacked him for not releasing his school
records<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=11pfvqrfg/*http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122108881386721289.html>,
writing in an editorial, “Some think his transcript, if released, would
reveal Mr. Obama as a mediocre student who benefited from racial
preference.” Since then, Orly Taitz, queen of the
birthers<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=12i0h4jeh/*http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-30/queen-of-the-birthers/>,
has developed elaborate theories about Obama’s college years. As Taitz
argues, Obama himself acknowledged that he was directionless when he started
college. How, then, did he get himself accepted into the Ivy League?

Her speculation: He went as a foreign exchange student. “Sometimes students
with poor grades from other countries who have citizenship in other
countries can get into top universities,” she told The Daily Beast. “That
might be one of the reasons why his records are not unsealed. If his records
show he got into Columbia University as a foreign exchange student, then we
have a serious issue with his citizenship.”

Taitz said she also believes that Obama only attended Columbia for nine
months rather than two years. As proof, she offered a document from the
National Student Clearinghouse database, which verifies college degrees. The
record, which confirms Obama’s graduation, lists his dates of attendance as
September 1982 to May 1983. Kathleen Dugan, a marketing manager at the
National Student Clearinghouse, said Taitz’s document is incorrect, the
result of the way she conducted her search.

Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate
one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate
affirmative action baby.

“There were duplicate requests to our site from requestor Orly Taitz which,
because of the way the queries were input, yielded both correct and
incorrect information on past attendance dates for President Barack Obama,”
said Dugan.

Taitz, naturally, said she believes there’s something more ominous at work.
She noted that Obama has talked about visiting a friend in Pakistan between
his sophomore and junior years of college. “The only reasonable conclusion
is that he was there not a month or two, but a year and a half,” she said.

And how did this half-educated mediocrity get into Harvard Law School, and
then become editor of the Harvard Law Review? Why, Saudi Prince Al-Waleed
bin Talal, of course! According to right-wing lore, a militant Black Muslim
named Khalid Al-Mansour<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=11bgld0l7/*http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=73649>introduced
his protégé to the prince, who presumably saw a chance to advance
his Muslim world-domination agenda by grooming the young man for politics.
The prince thus pulled strings on Obama’s behalf and even paid his way.

Taitz has forwarded all her information about Obama’s college years to Trump
and said she is gratified to hear him raising the issue. “He might have also
gotten it from other sources, too, but he definitely got it from me,” she
said. Perhaps he’s also been reading the ultra-right-wing website
WorldNetDaily, which ran a 2009 piece asking, “Did radical Muslims help send
Obama to Harvard?<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=113t0aksr/*http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=104684>
”

It’s easy enough to see why this particular narrative has endured. Not only
does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with
longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful
whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In
that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use
of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really
write the eloquent *Dreams From My
Father*<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=1335i0kbv/*http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-01-27/the-making-of-the-book-that-made-obama/>,
a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is
both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest
frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.

Trump is clearly not as intelligent as Obama, but he’s not an idiot, either.
When he blows this particular dog whistle, he knows exactly what the
Republican base is hearing.

*Michelle Goldberg is a journalist based in New York. She is the author of
The New York Times bestseller *Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian
Nationalism<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=10vos4iin/*http://www.kingdomcoming.com/>
* and *The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the
World<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=13kfbsvpi/*http://www.amazon.com/Means-Reproduction-Power-Future-World/dp/B0043RT9DU/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1291951253&sr=8-2>
*, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress
Award<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=11nkr6ibq/*http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/newsitem.aspx?id=100001>
and
the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in
Glamour<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=123coe30a/*http://www.glamour.com/women-of-the-year/2007/11/empowering-hands>,
Rolling
Stone, The Nation<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=11suhirpc/*http://www.thenation.com/article/palin-and-christian-right>,
New
York magazine, The
Guardian,<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=11k1cimjc/*http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/michellegoldberg>and
The
New Republic<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/dailybeast/ts_dailybeast/storytext/13720_donaldtrumptakesupbirthersobamacollegeconspiracytheory/41231827/SIG=10locbhoc/*http://www.tnr.com/>.
Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga
evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.*


Johne Cook
| http://raygunrevival.com | http://authorculture.blogspot.com |*
*

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