The Phony Campaign

2012-05-20 Update

[phony baloney]

President Obama threatens to pull away from Mitt, phonywise:

Query String Hit Count Change Since
2012-05-15
"Barack Obama" phony 22,600,000 +700,000
"Mitt Romney" phony 1,040,000 +20,000
"Gary Johnson" phony 313,000 +7,000

  • Right-wing troglodytes unearthed a biographical sketch of President Obama published by his literary agency which claims Obama was "born in Kenya". This claim appeared in print and on the web from 1991 until 2007.

    For geographically-challenged readers: Kenya is not a suburb of Honolulu.

    The literary agent now claims this to be a "fact checking error".

    Problem: a "fact checking error" requires a "fact" to check. Where that "fact" came from in this case is unclear; the agent claims that Obama wasn't the source, but is otherwise silent. Might have been the literary agent's cat walking on the keyboard.

    Two things are obvious: (1) Somebody lied at some point. (2) The MSM is just way too busy chasing down allegations of high-school bullying by Mitt Romney to check it out.

  • Does Obama have the phony campaign wrapped up? As Peter Suderman reminds us, Mitt Romney still has untapped potential. After quoting a Romney speech that excoriates the Obama Administration's stimulus as "the biggest, most careless one-time expenditure by the federal government in history", Suderman observes:
    How bad does Mitt Romney think Obama's stimulus was for America? So bad that Romney would have done...well, pretty much the same thing, but with a somewhat different mix of taxes and spending.
    Suderman makes his case via the dreadfully unfair tactic of quoting a book Romney wrote back in 2010. Ancient history!

  • The real phony news continued to be downticket, as the contributions of "Elizabeth Warren -- Cherokee" to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook (which her campaign had offered as evidence of her Native American heritage) turn out to have been plagiarized from various sources. For example, Prof Warren's "Cold Omelets with Crab Meat" was apparently lifted near-verbatim from a column by New York Times writer and French chef Pierre Franey. Franey wrote that the omelets were "a great favorite of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Cole Porter."

    Commented Mark Steyn:

    Actually, that last line [about the "great favorite"] briefly made me wonder if writing about American liberalism isn't a threat to one's sanity. Some societies are racist, some societies work hard to be non-racist, but only in America does the nation's most prestigious law school hire a 100 per cent white female as its first "woman of color" on the basis that she once mailed in the Duke of Windsor's favorite crab dish to a tribal cookbook.

    Before he ascended to the throne, the Duke inspired a hit song of reflected celebrity: "I Danced With A Man Who Danced With A Girl Who Danced With The Prince Of Wales". That seems to be how Harvard Law's identity-group quota-filling works. I'm confident Elizabeth Warren will eventually be able to prove she danced with a man who danced with a girl who danced with someone who once changed planes at a municipal airport accidentally built on a Cherokee burial ground.

    Theory: Elizabeth Warren is a conservative mole who long ago vowed to illuminate the corruption, hypocrisy, and dishonesty at the core of identity politics in higher education. She's doing a great job!


Last Modified 2014-12-01 2:55 PM EDT