Re: Trump's next rented mule

This is the result of a way overfawning, in the tank for Obama, network and 
print media.  If his 'brilliance" had not been decreed by fiat by all his 
adoring fans I don't think this would play.

Mike F.  





________________________________
From: Johne Cook <[email protected]>
To: DADL (off topic) <[email protected]>
Sent: Wed, April 27, 2011 2:36:42 PM
Subject: [DADL-OT] Trump's next rented mule

http://goo.gl/Lrq7E

Donald Trump's New Obama Conspiracy Theory
Michelle Goldberg  –     Tue Apr 26, 11:36 pm ET
NEW YORK – 
President Obama may have released his birth certificate 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 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.  “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,  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,  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 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?”
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,  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 Nationalismand 
The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 
2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard 
Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The 
Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian, and The New Republic.  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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