How Badly Does Salon Hate President Obama?
Or at the very least, how much does Salon distrust Obama?
Much like the Atlantic publishing a Scientology infomercial last week — and then realizing the full horror of what they had done, sending it off to 404-land later the same day — yesterday Salon published a pro-“Truther” article titled “Give truthers a chance?,” and then pulled it even faster than the Atlantic’s own disappearing act.
The Salon article ran two days after Obama’s second inauguration, but for a moment, cast your mind back to 2008 and early 2009, and his initial presidential campaign and inauguration. On the day before the Fourth of July in 2008, as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama declared that George Bush was “unpatriotic” merely because his administration was spending too much. (Chutzpah, thy name is Barry O.)
Immediately upon taking office, don’t you think Obama would have loved — loved! — to have been able to give a nationally televised speech from the Oval Office and stentoriously explain to the American people in copious detail the full horror of what he had discovered after finally having the chance to go through the White House files? Considering who would have had to have been involved — from Bush and Cheney to Rudy Giuliani down to the team that wired up the WTC with explosives — Obama would have had his dream moment of destroying the Republican brand name forever.
And if not Obama, then why not someone on his staff? As Mark Steyn told Hugh Hewitt in September of 2009 when self-admitted Truther Van Jones crashed and burned:
HH: In Obama’s America, Van Jones has come to great prominence. Today, the latest, he’s President Obama’s green jobs advisor, last night he had to apologize for calling Republicans a**holes.
MS: Right.
HH: And the remark said they do not reflect the view of this administration. Actually, I think they do reflect the views of this administration. But today, it was revealed, he’s a truther. He joined, in 2004, he signed a statement calling for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and others to launch an investigation into evidence that suggest high level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur. How long would a Bush administration official who called Democrats a**holes and was a truther lasted, Mark Steyn?
MS: Exactly. I mean, this is the thing. We’re supposed to be the crazy guys. We’re supposed to be the ones who don’t distance ourselves from the loons. You know, we’re the…Glenn Beck is supposed to be bananas. The birther movement are supposed to be the nuts. And yet, and yet, it is somehow the reality-based community, or whatever these guys call themselves, that has managed to put a 9/11 truther two doors away from President Obama in the Oval Office. And if he really thinks that the federal government pulled off 9/11, then he’s inside the system. Why doesn’t he uncover the truth of it? He’s the green jobs czar. Presumably, in the previous administration, George W. Bush was the steel melting czar. So why doesn’t he just take a look in the filing cabinets, and expose the truth on it? It’s an absolute, it’s not just ludicrous, but it is absolutely outrageous that this fellow has been appointed as one of Obama’s various czars. What I found interesting about the guy is that he’s a communist. Now I assume when people say oh, he used to be a communist, that they were communists in the 60s or 70s, you know, when it was cool, the spirit of 1968 and all that. This guy became a communist in the 90s. He became a communist after the Russians and the Bulgarians and the Romanians and the Czechs and even partly the Chinese, and even the Vietnamese had all given up on it.
So clearly, by 2013 and the time of Barack Obama’s second inauguration, if there was an inside job to bring down the WTC, Obama must know about it himself — and he’s covering it up. He’s in on it! And yet, the same 35 percent or so of Democrats who are Truthers — who all believe in this wheels within wheels Oliver Stone meets the Manchurian Candidate meets Seven Days In May on-steroids vast conspiracy to this day — all voted for a man who must now be part of the conspiracy himself. Otherwise, he has to be the biggest dupe in the history of the White House for not being curious enough to ask his aides to find out what happened now that they have the keys to the kingdom themselves. And this is the story Salon chose to run two days after his inauguration.
In the 9/11 Truthers’ minds, Barack Obama is president, but somehow Dick Cheney is still in power. It gives them the hate they need to greet each new morning.
Of course, if you take that mindset to it’s logical conclusion — that there’s some secret right-wing cabal that’s still really running things and covering up the greatest atrocity in American history — it also means you believe Obama is some sort of graded-on-the-steep-curve affirmative action hire who’s so in over his head that even as president, he’s unable to control his own government or even recognize the shadow cabal pulling the levers, and is too incompetent to the bottom of what really happened on Sept. 11 (or specifically 9/11/01 — the current White House doesn’t seem to really want to know or want anyone to care about what happened on 9/11/12).
So for the Truthers, it’s nothing but
turtlesconspiracy theories all the way down, I guess.Well, around here (the Middle East) a large perecentage of people believe that the Jews – I mean the “Zionists” – are responsible, and THAT conspiracy theory goes back four thousand years (see Peter Shafer, Judeophobia, for the last two to three thousand).
Good article–like most of the ones on the site.
Problem is, like always, the media won’t cover the hypocrisy of it. I used to think that if a tree feel in the foest and nobody was there to hear it, then it STILL fell.
These days I’m starting to think that yeah, it still fell but the low information voter thinks it didn’t because the media, by and large remin mute–or carry the Lefty message that it didn’t “really” fall or that it fell but ONLY because the SOB rightwingers CHOPPED it down.
No, it fell because some right-winger questioned evolution or global warming, kind of like what happens when a child stops believing in fairies. (PS – I have no idea if either theory is true.)
I guess it is easier to believe that it was an inside job than to accept that there are people out there who really want us dead, for no other reason than we are who we are.
Exactly.
Precisely. It gives political cover to the lunkheads who want to sing kumbaya with jihadists while they seek out and kill western and anti-sharia targets. It also allows the blame America first crowd to engage in the sophistry of “…they’re only reacting to Western hegemony.”
It would be downright silly and laughable weren’t so many of these folks in positions of power.
I’m conservative and lefties make me angry and I think they are misguided and sometimes their policies are damaging but I don’t HATE them. 9/11 truthers trigger a real hatred in me. At Christmas usually you have to deal with liberal friends and relatives and maybe you get in arguments…but with truthers, I just want to jump over the table and slap the crap out of them. The other day Alex Jnes was on Piers Morgan talking about gun control and he was described in an article as a conservative. That infuriated me. I don’t want to share any sort of label with a 9/11 truther EVER. Trutherism requires stupidity and pig headed-ness in so many ways- I just have zero respect, zero, none Am I alone in this?
Yes, trutherism is soooo different from progressive utopianism. After all, utopianism will work if we just give it a little more time and lots more money. Stalin proved that, didn’t he?
Not that it matters now, but what ever was wrong with asking who Obama actually is, where he came from, and why so much of his history is sealed.
The lefties are not misguided. At the friends and relatives level they may be, but at the the national level they know exactly what they doing.
No, you are not alone. The conspiracy cranks are despicable — and zillions of them come from The Left. (Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Obama team is so enthralled with, are conspiracy cranks par excellance.) The anti-American tv channels in Canada on every 9/11 anniversary air 9/11 conspiracy shows.
In our PC world, it’s easier to attack ourselves than say the words, “Wahhabi,” “oil,” and “Saudis.”
You don’t need Bush to drive your car. You do need Wahhabi Saudi oil. At least you did in 2001.
Actually blaming the men who flew planes into buildings just opens up a whole can of worms. After all, Saudi Arabian Wahhabi fundamentalism is the root of virtually every radical Islamic group outside ones that are Shite or in the West Bank.
From the ones who called for the attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in the name of the blind sheik, to the Taliban, and to Pakistan, generic Salafis take their direction and inspiration from the Wahhabism invented in Saudi Arabia, and once considered a heretical cult by the Sunni Ottomans.
“Another question: do the layers and layers of fact checkers and editors at a publication like Salon ever ponder any of these notions?”
Having read Salon for several years (to keep up on the enemy) I can tell you with confidence they do not have layers and layers of fact checkers and editors. Every article on the site contains typos and errors of fact. Every one.
I never imagined I would think of Kathy Shaidle as sheltered, but does she know what leaders have done throughout histor?. I mean, I am the last one to believe in conspicracy theories, and I don’t even accept most of the accusations of affairs, let alone murders, by Presidents – but I know Jewish history and the horrific things people like “Saint” Louis, Ferdinand (“Adolph and Eva”) and Isabella, Maria Theresa, et. al. have done to my people – I mean, where could I live? Could I continue to live in Israel knowing the things Jews did to each other before the State? Or how about the blood of countless VietNamese that lies on the head of the Watergate (Democratic) Congress?
I’m sure it was a temporary lapse.
Just to clarify: Trutherism is still idiotic, Kennedy was killed by a lone Communist, and if anyone claims any President except Clinton and Kennedy was fooling around, I’ll want more proof.
at President Harding. Here’s a quote from wikipedia
“President Harding’s sudden death led to theories that he had been poisoned[244] or committed suicide. Suicide appears unlikely, since Harding was planning for reelection in 1924. Rumors of poisoning were fueled, in part, by a book called The Strange Death of President Harding, in which the author (convicted criminal, former Ohio Gang member, and detective Gaston Means, hired by Mrs. Harding to investigate Warren Harding and his mistress) suggested that Mrs. Harding had poisoned her husband. Mrs. Harding’s refusal to allow an autopsy on President Harding only added to the speculation. According to the physicians attending Harding, however, the symptoms prior to his death all pointed to congestive heart failure. Harding’s biographer, Samuel H. Adams, concluded that “Warren G. Harding died a natural death which, in any case, could not have been long postponed”.[252]”
at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_G._Harding#Speculation_on_cause_of_death
I made a post 2 hours ago and it still hasn’t shown up. Why?
haha, very funny. My post asking why shows up immediately and the post I’m asking about shows up afterwards.
Insane, as per/usual.
Proof 9/11 wasn’t a conspiracy:
The prior largest building ever taken down by demolition was the Hudson Department Store in, I believe, Detroit. It was 49 stories tall and had a footprint larger than a city block. It took months of multiple crews working to remove interiors, weaken structural members, place charges. One figure I remember was 14,400 feet of Det Cord.
But two structures, each twice that size, were “prepared,” and no one noticed.
As to Building 7: not only was it struck by debris from the collapsing WTC 1 and 2, consider the seismic shock it experienced, not once but twice, from having the towers impact mere thousands of feet away. These were so strong, they were recorded by seismometers around the US.
Truthers don’t even rise to the level of “Conspiracy Theory,” they’re simply nuts.
Jesse Ventura was recently on Piers Morgan, and made a lot of sense with respect to the fallacy of gun control arguments. However, he is a 9/11 truther and I have listened to him being interviewed on some radio shows about this issue. If he is confronted about it, he replies, “I was a navy seal and an expert in demolition. This was controlled demolition. You have no expertise in this field to argue with me.”
I believe, however, that there is a grain of truth in the government involvement in 9/11: it is NOT that they actively destroyed those buildings, but they allowed 9/11 to occur! If you look at the history leading up to the attacks of 9/11, you can see that the government failed to heed any warnings, failed to respond in any way to prior terror attacks (WTC ’93, African embassies, USS Cole), and failed to follow through on any leads (Able Danger, the 20th hijacker). Instead, the government built a wall to prevent sharing of information that might have averted these terror attacks! After the attacks, did anyone from the Clinton or Bush administrations lose their jobs or get prosecuted? I believe that 9/11 had the effect of promoting Islamism in America, and the elites are all for this. Consider: after 9/11, Bush told us “Islam is a religion of peace,” offense to Islam and Islamophobia have become crimes against humanity, moreso than Muslim terror, we expended our blood and treasure to build nations where Sharia is enshrined in the constitution and Christians are persecuted and murdered, Muslims cannot be portrayed in a negative light in TV or movies (unless accompnied by a pro-Islam public service announcement) and our leaders want to temper the 1st amendment with shariah-compliant blasphemy laws. Indeed, the creator of the youtube video that offended Islam is in jail for a year, and we have a president that tells us “the future does not belong to those who insult Islam.” Can you imagine any of this happening before 9/11?
There is an element inside the Leftist camp which is truly bizarre. They are capable of believing multiple, self-refuting contradictions. Logic doesn’t seem to be their strong suit.
(I recall CNN reporting back in 2010, that ten percent of Democrats were convinced that Obama was not born in the United States. But, for them, this was a *good* thing.)
“Do the Truthers ever ponder any of this? Or is it simply a case, as with JFK’s assassination, of wanting to imagine that the scope of the events leading up to a world-changing catastrophe are equal to the horror caused by the moment itself?”
They’re brain damaged. Van Jones got the green jobs czar gig because Valerie Jarrett (also brain damaged) was hot for his bod.
Obama probably wanted to keep Van but, like the Reverend Jeremiah, had to throw him under the bus even though he didn’t want to. Sometimes stuff is so bad even the Left can’t find a way to spin it.
These days, Van is often seen speechifying to audiences of mild to severely brain damaged people. He dresses very nattily and lives well, seems to enjoy the high life, all the while bashing “capitalism”.
Lots of gold star hypocrites are on the Left’s list of favorites.
The reason why many of the conspiracy theories abound is because people do nto trust their own government. It is not like they have any reason to doubt our lovely government officials.
One caveat — it is possible to go to another bizarre extreme (I’ve seen it here in Canada). And that is to see everything as a potential “conspiracy” and denounce it in the strongest of terms. Hence, the Tea Party activists are not really about lower taxes and a less intrusive, limited government — in reality they are 1950′s style, racist xenophobes out to destroy America, and they are a far, far worse threat than 9/11 Truthers. A terminally ill cancer patient who takes a supplement is, in reality, a conspiracist opposed to “big Pharma”, and is an anti-science Neanderthal. A person championing the Second Amendment is a gun-happy, wanna-be terrorist. I could continue in this vein, but I hope most people get the point.
In Paris in 1790, Deductive reasoning escaped from spiritual matters in the Church, its natural fit, and went out to be taken up by secular religions of the left. The left reasons with Deductive reasoning and they are not even aware of it. Deductive reasoning in the wrong field of action is extremely hazardous.