Ever since Glenn Beck announced that Barack Obama has “a deep-seated hatred of white people,” the conservative media has searched for conclusive proof that would unambiguously affirm that the President has a long standing racial bias against his own mother and her familial heritage.
Having failed to uncover any credible evidence, the race-obsessed right-wingers have proffered wildly delusional theories to advance their contention that Obama is fundamentally prejudiced against whites. The latest attempt at this characterization is the effort to smear his Harvard law professor, Derrick Bell, as a some sort of black supremacist merely because he advocated a more diverse faculty at Harvard Law School where he was the first black professor to receive tenure.
Continuing with this venture into the college history of the President, these rightist investigators have now expanded their inquiries into the past of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, who also attended Harvard. What they found is sure to blow the roof off of the White House. Apparently there is video documentation of someone that may or may not be Ms. Obama participating in a demonstration at the office of the law school’s Dean.
The video comes from the archives of WGBH, who covered the demonstration in May of 1988. It shows some students engaging in a peaceful protest to get the school to hire more minority teachers.
The discovery of this video is attributed to J. Christian Adams, a notorious race-baiter who has accused Obama of promoting a racially divisive America. Adams published his findings back on May 7, in his column at Pajamas Media where he wrote…
“A treasure trove of information is coming out regarding Barack Obama’s time in college. Over at the Breitbart sites, we are learning how Obama inserted himself into a fight to implement hiring on the basis of race at Harvard Law School. The Obama tapes also seem to show the other Obama – Michelle. […] In May 1988, Harvard Law students, borrowing from Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, and foreshadowing the Occupy movement of 2011, occupied the Harvard Law School’s dean’s office.”
Isn’t it interesting that Adams employs buzzwords like “Alinsky” and “Occupy” to describe what everyone else would recognize as garden variety protests? Adams goes on to state that one of the students in the video “appears to be Michelle Obama.” That’s right, he has no confirmation that the woman seen briefly from a distance in a 22 year old video is actually the future First Lady. Yet that doesn’t prevent him from publishing an article that not only alleges her participation, but infers that it has some meaning beyond the sort of standard campus activism that is a part of college life and a cherished freedom granted by the Constitution.
The Adams article was later picked up by the ultra-conservative DailyCaller, where they repeated the assertion that the “footage shows a young woman who appears to be Michelle Obama.” This is how the Right-Wing Noise Machine operates as they attempt to spread their derisive propaganda out to the racist audience they have so carefully cultivated. The next step should be an appearance on Fox News to discuss this bombshell.
The fact that these pseudo-journalists have no shame in disseminating false stories with nakedly prejudiced inferences should not surprise anybody. Recently the Breitbrats published an allegation that Derrick Bell had visited the White House twice in 2010 without first checking to ascertain whether it was the Harvard law professor (it wasn’t). And the right has been asserting for years that there is a mystery video of Ms. Obama using the term “whitey,” but it has never materialized.
And therein lies the harm. The object of these rightist rags is not to be accurate or honest. It is to plant seeds of hatred that they know will take root even after they have been exposed as false. There are people who currently believe that the “whitey” tapes have already been released. And as much as 30% of the Republican electorate thinks that the President is a Muslim. These distortions of reality exist because they were deliberately planned out with the knowledge that any subsequent fact-checking would not hinder their infestation into the right-wing community that is already predisposed to believe these racist lies.
Clearly there is a measure of desperation setting in amongst the right. These slanderous assertions are almost comical in their ineptness. They harken back to the Sarah Palin pronouncements that Obama was “pallin around with terrorists.” Those wild allegations came near the end of a campaign that they likely knew they were about to lose. And these new allegations are popping up now for the same reason: The right is increasingly fearful that their incompetent and unpopular candidates are headed for defeat. They also realize that their policy platform, consisting mostly of propping up oil companies and pushing down women, is alienating the electorate in a big way.
The sad thing is that we are still seven months from the election and these sort of nauseating and divisive attacks are probably going to get worse. Our only hope is for the public to express themselves and to make sure that there is a price to pay for spreading hate and lies. November cannot come soon enough.
If there is a more pathetic representative of the cartoon-brained right than video con artist James O’Keefe, I cannot think of who it might be. Despite the fact that he is a convicted criminal who is best known for producing deliberately falsified videos and a sleazy attempt to seduce a CNN reporter on his “Love Boat,” O’Keefe continues to make himself the subject of news reports that exacerbate his already tawdry reputation.
