Birther Congressman Trent Franks: What, me stoke the fires of irrational hatred and fear amongst my countrymen?

With nuts bringing guns to his healthcare town halls and Facebook taking down a poll asking readers if President Barack Obama “should be killed”, Arizona U.S. Congressman Trent Franks–a Birther Legislator!–called Obama an “enemy of humanity” [emphasis added]:

“Obama’s first act as president of any consequence, in the middle of a financial meltdown, was to send taxpayers’ money overseas to pay for the killing of unborn children in other countries. Now I gotta tell you, a president that will do that, here’s almost nothing that you should be surprised at after that. You shouldn’t, we shouldn’t be shocked that he does all these other insane things. A president that has lost his way that badly, that has no ability to see the image of God in these little fellow human beings, if he can’t do that right, then he has no place in any station of government and we need to realize that he is an enemy of humanity.”

You’re doing the country a whole lot of good, Congressman!  Ah, Arizona voters – electing someone who is recklessly speaking to dangerous undertones in our politics today.  It does not speak well about the people in his district.

You may remember that Franks is the only Congressman to have threatened to sue the President over his birth certificate.

Why would anyone want this party back in power as long as they are composed of such shameful extremists (never mind the hypocrisy).  Even out of power the Republican Party is a national embarrassment.

Here’s the video, if you can stomach that people in Arizona actually elect people like Trent Franks to represent them:

Politico had this story in the entire Kanye West-Taylor Swift issue:  off-the-record, Obama called West a jackass.  Perhaps after a summer of strife, this is Obama’s way of uniting us over something we can all agree upon.

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Nothing has been confirmed by the White House, but this is reportedly how it all went down:  CNBC was interviewing Obama.  During the moments that are supposed to be “off the record”–remember Newt Gingrich’s mother and Connie Chung–the Swift-West business came up. Perhaps in a moment of unguarded candor, Obama called West a ‘jackass’.

Is this Obama’s Sister Souljah moment?  Maybe, because Terry Moran at ABC News tweeted it!  This caused an uproar, and ABC had to release this statement:

In the process of reporting on remarks by President Obama that were made during a CNBC interview, ABC News employees prematurely tweeted a portion of those remarks that turned out to be from an off-the-record portion of the interview. This was done before our editorial process had been completed. That was wrong. We apologize to the White House and CNBC and are taking steps to ensure that it will not happen again.

Still unclear:  how did ABC News have access to off-the-record remarks in a CNBC interview?

File this under “calling a spade a spade” – which hurts to say, because I have always loved Kanye; my Wikipedia portrait of him (above) is in my top ten favorites.  His music had a deep impact on me in 2006.

But my stomach turned as I watched Taylor Swift have her moment taken away from her.  It was…just horrible to witness.

Dammit Kanye!  Why do you make it so difficult to love you?

I feel bad for Bob Herbert at the New York Times. His column yesterday has the same tone many of my posts on this blog have had: what in the hell is going on in the United States?

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"Am I now ready to go to the healthcare town hall debate with the President, Dad?"

Right before the election I had dinner with a gay friend of mine who is a nuclear physicist.  He told me that he was voting for McCain.

“Why?!” I asked, not hiding contempt in my tone.  He smiled as if he had been confronted with this exact response dozens of times.  “Well, I vote with my checkbook,” was what he managed through his toothy grin.

Republican politics tend to be one of the ways gay men who don’t feel comfortable with who they are escape themselves.  Some people join the military; others join the priesthood; and others become Republicans.  They think it’s the “Daddy Party”, so they join it to separate themselves from the nancyboy Democrats.

As they grow up a little and realize they are voting against their interests, gay Republicans usually have to come around with the “vote for the checkbook” argument.  I had a response:

“Leaving aside the arguments that you are choosing your checkbook over your civil rights; what, exactly, about the last eight years made your checkbook stronger or was in any way exemplary of fiscal restraint and prudence?” I asked.

He had  no answer, but instead looked embarrassed.  As a former Teenage Republican, from a conservative standpoint the George W. Bush years lost the fiscal issue for the Republicans.  Anyone who still says they vote for them for fiscal reasons is apparently still living in 1988.

Herbert is one of my favorite columnists, and the tone of his writings are imbued with a sense of dumbfoundedness.  Back in January he saw the beginnings of the Republican mode of attack against Obama:

The G.O.P.’s latest campaign is aimed at undermining President Obama’s effort to cope with the national economic emergency by attacking the spending in his stimulus package and repeating ad nauseam the Republican mantra for ever more tax cuts.

[....]

Maybe the Republicans don’t think there is an emergency. After all, it was Phil Gramm, John McCain’s economic guru, who told us last summer that the pain was all in our heads, that this was a “mental recession.”

The truth, of course, is that the country is hemorrhaging jobs and Americans are heading to the poorhouse by the millions. The stock markets and the value of the family home have collapsed, and there is virtual across-the-board agreement that the country is caught up in the worst economic disaster since at least World War II.

The Republican answer to this turmoil?  Tax cuts. [....]

The question that I would like answered is why anyone listens to this crowd anymore. G.O.P. policies have been an absolute backbreaker for the middle class. (Forget the poor. Nobody talks about them anymore, not even the Democrats.) The G.O.P. has successfully engineered a wholesale redistribution of wealth to those already at the top of the income ladder and then, in a remarkable display of chutzpah, dared anyone to talk about class warfare.

Yesterday, Herbert’s column almost nine months later sounds even more exasperated:

The political debate has been poisoned by birthers, deathers and wackos who smile proudly while carrying signs comparing the president to the Nazis. People who don’t even know that Medicare is a government program have been trying to instruct us on the best ways to reform health care. [....]

The wackiness is increasing, not diminishing, and it has a great potential for destruction. There is a real need for people who know better to speak out in a concerted effort to curb the appeal of the apostles of the absurd. [....]

But there is another type of disturbing behavior, coming from our political leaders and the public at large, that is also symptomatic of a society at loose ends. We seem unable to face up to many of the hard truths confronting the U.S. as we approach the end of the first decade of the 21st century.

There is no end to the craziness. The entire Republican Party has decided that it is in favor of absolutely nothing. The president’s stimulus package? No way. Health care reform? Forget about it.

We’ve also been unable or unwilling to face the hard truths about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the terrible toll they are taking on our young fighting men and women. Most of us don’t want to know. Moreover, we’ve put the costs of these wars on a credit card, without so much as a second thought about what that does to our long-term budget deficits or how it undermines much-needed initiatives here at home. [....]

There are many other issues that we remain in deep denial about. It’s not just the bad economy that has thrown state and local budgets into turmoil from coast to coast. It’s our refusal to provide the tax revenues needed to pay for essential public services. Exhibit A is California, which is now a basket case.

The serious wackos, the obsessive-compulsive absurdists, may be beyond therapy. But the rest of us could use some serious adult counseling. We’ve forgotten many of the fundamentals: how to live within our means, the benefits of shared sacrifice, the responsibilities that go with citizenship, the importance of a well-rounded education and tolerance.

The problem is our national discourse, and that the Republicans appear to have crafted Obama and Liberals as enemies, as opposed to reasoned opposition.  It’s a dangerous step, for either side.  Winning political skirmishes to advance your ideology is fulfilling; turning a society against itself in the process is dangerous.

The current political climate is at best creating a country that is unable–and unwilling–to solve its most serious problems.  At worst, it is turning the country against itself, which can have far more violent and disastrous repercussions than the right is willing to admit as they carry guns to public debates.  The moment something big goes wrong with the emotions they are stoking, the current state of Republican politics is going to come back to bury them.

Bob Herbert, you’re not the only one exasperated, confused and concerned.

“Once these stories get out there, they’re hard to stamp out because our media do such a lousy job of speaking truth to stupid.” – Bill Maher, July 31, 2009, L.A. Times

CNN's Dobbsian President Jon Klein: "Yes! We have no standards!"

Ugh.  During the recent Lou Dobbs birther dust-up, CNN President Jon Klein confirmed a suspicion I’ve had that the cable news networks have fundamentally debased American journalism (cue laugh track).

King Birther Dobbs

Lou Dobbs should have stuck to business reporting.  Instead, Dobbs has fashioned himself after someone more of his era, Father Coughlin.  From Coughlin’s Wikipedia article:

He was one of the first political leaders to use radio to reach a mass audience, as more than forty million tuned to his weekly broadcasts during the 1930s. Coughlin used his radio program to promote Franklin D. Roosevelt and his early New Deal proposals, to issue antisemitic commentary, and later to rationalize some of the policies of National Socialist Adolf Hitler and Fascist Benito Mussolini.  The broadcasts have been called “a variation of the Fascist agenda applied to American culture”. His chief topics were political and economic rather than religious, with his slogan being Social Justice, first with, and later against, the New Deal.

Dobbs as a modern-day Coughlin was evident with his alarmist xenophobic advocacy journalism on the subject of immigration. Now he enters the fracas as a light of hope for the “Birthers”, recently tying the two issues together to say Obama might be an illegal immigrant:

I’m starting to think we have a document issue. You suppose he’s un — no, I won’t even use the word undocumented, it wouldn’t be right.

The birthers are primarily composed of southern redneck Republicans (the party’s base, and Dobbs’ demographic):

The conspiracy has a regional flavor. Overall, even including Democrats and independents, only 47 percent of respondents in the South said they believed Obama was born in America, with 23 percent saying he was not and 30 percent saying they were unsure. In the Northeast and Midwest, the percentage of respondents who believe Obama was born in the U.S. was over 90 percent.

Ninety-three percent of Democrats say the president was born in the United States, as do 83 percent of independents.

Virtually nobody except for Lou Dobbs and America’s Backwater Republicans gives any serious consideration to the birthers.  So why is Lou Dobbs on CNN  promoting the tin hat redneck crowd’s most delusional hope to an international audience?  Ratings – the only thing that matters in cable news.

After Dobbs first salvo on behalf of the birthers was aired on CNN, he continued giving fuel to the birthers on his radio show by stating that, “Obama should put his birth certificate out there. I’m still looking for validation.”

Dobbs has no intention of backing down, but at least the birther nonsense seems to have hurt his ratings. Thank God for small favors.

Important lesson via CNN President Jon Klein

The most important lesson to be learned here has nothing to do with the birthers, and everything to do with how cable news is operating.  CNN’s President, Jon Klein, has had to defend Dobbs before, but his recent defense is illuminating:

We have no control over what he says on his radio show. It’s not a CNN radio program so he does what he does on the radio separate from what he does on our air. So we ask you and anyone writing about this, to look at what he says on CNN. It’s the only thing we control.

“It’s the only thing we control” is not correct.  You control giving Dobbs a platform.  You control what kinds of opinions you judge to be worthy of airing.

The defense Klein raises is problematic for the public interest, something that a news agency is supposed to hold supreme after “truth”.  It tells people turning to CNN that the network could care less about the integrity of the people they want you to hear, as long as they do their nasty business off ‘their air’.

Yeah, but…Dobbs did say these things on ‘your air’, Mr. Klein, and continued with them on his radio show.

Lou Dobbs as Father Coughlin is one thing, but the debasement of cable news journalism is more evident at Fox News, where few standards are in place for the pedigrees of their pundits, as I wrote last week:

Whether it be foul-mouthed stalker Rachel Marsden; the scandal-fabricating Aaron Klein; former gay porn star and male escort Matt Sanchez; or the crazy racist Hillary supporter Harriet Christian; the number of bottom-feeders with few journalistic–or personal–ethics who are paraded before us by the mainstream media is startling.  It’s not even a left-or-right issue.

With cable news thinking people like this are worth listening to, and people actually listening, there appears to be absolutely no way to fix this breakdown in our national discourse on cable news.  When there are no standards for opinion-makers, the quality of Americans’ opinions suffers.

Thanks, Jon Klein, for confirming that your network could care less what your pundits do and say when they are not on ‘your air’.  It logically follows that David Duke could have his own show on CNN, as long as he doesn’t talk about white supremacy on ‘your air’.

Or maybe even the white supremacy bit is okay, if you appear on Rachel Maddow.

Confused about Obama’s new regulatory proposals for the financial industry that virtually destroyed the global economy?  One is a Consumer Protection Agency.  John Ydstie, National Public Radio’s economics correspondent, does an excellent job of explaining it all.

This new agency would look at [things like interest-only balloon payment mortgages] and, I guess sort of modeled after the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which says, ‘Hey, you can’t sell a toaster that burns down a house,’ and they would say, ‘Hey, you can’t sell a mortgage that makes someone lose a house.’ – John Ydstie, National Public Radio’s economic correspondent

Listen to the the full explanation at NPR here.

I wonder how Sherri Goforth of Tennessee feels as the picture of modern “Old South” racism?

What you are looking at in this post is a photo the executive assistant to Tennessee Republican state Senator Diane Black sent out from her government office with the subject “Historical Keepsake Photo”.  It shows portraits of the 44 presidents of the United States; however, it’s unlikely that the Obama “spooked eyes” approximation is really our President looking his best.

The haplessly-surnamed Senator Black chairs the Senate Republican Caucus, and a note on the e-mail said it was paid for by the Tennessee Republican Party.  GOP officials denied that it was theirs.

The racist Goforth, who will keep her job for Senator Black, also saw nothing wrong with sending the photo; she just sent it to the “wrong list of people”.  According to Christian Grantham of Nashville is Talking:

I spoke with Sherri Goforth minutes ago to confirm she sent this email. She confirmed she had sent it and also said she had received a letter of reprimand from her superiors but said she will stay on the job.

When I asked her if she understood the controversial nature of the photo, Goforth would only say she felt very bad about accidentally sending it to the wrong list. When I gave her a second chance to address the controversial nature of the email, she again repeated that she only felt bad about sending it to the wrong list of people.

“I went on the wrong email and I inadvertently hit the wrong button,” Goforth told NIT. “I’m very sick about it, and it’s one of those things I can’t change or take back.”

Best response to that came from Wonkette:

Yes, yes, Republicans must be careful not to hit the “wrong button” when sending out the racist bullshit. Sadly, our liberal technology sector has yet to create a button that would only send your racist fuckwad idiocy to fellow mouth-breathing racist cretins who think there is NOTHING as funny as the idea of … people with dark complexions. Even when you’re just sending the Funnies to proper white folk, there is still often a “N.L.” who will complain about old-fashioned Southern comedy.

But Senator Black has protested that she is friends with all kinds of colored folks:

In fact, Black says, she’s “reached out to people all over this world” as a nurse. As evidence of her racist-free heart, she cites her trips to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Guatemala. She went deep into the jungles of Guatemala like a great white bwana to help babies.

“I spent time in Haiti during the time of Aristide working with people with black skin who needed medical help,” she says. And if that’s not enough, her family once hosted a Brazilian exchange student in their home. Wow!

In response to Black’s love of the dark-skinned, a comment by “Jake” to that post wrote this:

So, she has “reached out to people all over the world” (selectively)… What about the people in her own district? Are they too common to deserve her time and attention? The LGBT community certainly did not meet her exotic qualifications.

Jake’s comment was expounded upon at Daily Kos:

For those of you not familiar with her boss, Senator Diane Black, she’s a Republican who was the main Senate sponsor of S.J.R. 127, a trigger amendment passed this year that, if passed in one more legislative vote and by a ballot initiative, will allow abortion to quickly be banned in Tennessee should Roe v. Wade ever be overturned.  She also rudely cancelled a meeting with GLBT activists from her own district (you know, people she was elected to represent) at the last second by saying that they “wouldn’t change her mind” and therefore she didn’t even need to hear from them.  So in other words, a really charming individual who’s doing SO MUCH for the people of her district.

Is now the time to remind readers that former Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Chip Saltsman sent out the “Barack the Magic Negro” song as a “gift” to Republican National Committee members during his bid to head the RNC?

Old habits die hard, ay Tennessee?

As if the right-wing fringe politics of the nationally-organized tea parties are not embarrassing enough, almost nobody showed up for them. 

Staten Island's Republican fringe show up for a party that almost nobody else cared about. Image: Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty

“Tens of thousands of people” across the United States showed up at the tea parties to denounce taxes, Barack Obama, evolution and whatever else they could throw on the plate. 

To give you perspective on the turn-out of ”tens of thousands” across a country of over 300,000,000 people, at Denver, Colorado’s Gay Pride Parade in 2008 there were 250,000 participants in attendance.

An estimated 800,000 people protested the Republican National Convention in 2004. 

Tens of thousands nationwide, even with right-wing media stars hyping these events?  Perhaps nobody showed up because most Americans think that they are paying a fair amount of their taxes.  Robert Schlesinger  at U.S. News & World Report:

According to Gallup, for only the second time in more than half a century, a plurality of Americans (48-46 percent) think that they’re paying the proper amount of taxes. The only other time that that has been true since 1956 was in 2003 when 50 percent of Americans felt they were paying the right amount in taxes. Drilling down a bit deeper, the slim plurality comes entirely from Democrats, who 55-40 think we’re paying the right amount of taxes (up sharply from 2008 when they thought so 47-45). Independents narrowly disagree, with 48 percent saying taxes are too high and 46 percent saying they’re just right–though that figure too has narrowed sharply, as it was 54-40 in 2008. And Republicans are not surprisingly opposite Democrats, with 53 percent saying taxes are too high and 43 percent saying they’re about right. (Really? Forty-three percent of Republicans think taxes are correct? I thought it was an article of GOP faith that taxes are by their nature too high.)

A separate Gallup poll released today showed that for the first time in 15 years a plurality of Americans think lower-income people are being taxed fairly (usually, they are seen as overtaxed), while by a margin of 50-43, they believe that middle-income taxpayers are taxed at the proper rate (this has fluctuated fairly rhythmically over the decade). Nobody likes the wealthy, of course: 60 percent of Americans think them under-taxed, 23 percent think they pay their fair share, and 13 percent feel that they are overburdened. (The “fair share” and “too much” numbers both declined this year, while the “overburdened” number went up.)

If you watch Fox News and listen to the right-wing media machine, you’d think all of those anti-tax tea parties that are to be thrown around the country are some sort of grassroots movement of lower- and middle-income people showing up to throw tea to help protect the incomes of the rich.  But Paul Krugman at the New York Times points out that they are not grassroots events at all, but are actually a fake (AstroTurf) Roots campaigns:

[I]t turns out that the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass roots) events, manufactured by the usual suspects. In particular, a key role is being played by FreedomWorks, an organization run by Richard Armey, the former House majority leader, and supported by the usual group of right-wing billionaires. And the parties are, of course, being promoted heavily by Fox News.

But that’s nothing new, and AstroTurf has worked well for Republicans in the past. The most notable example was the “spontaneous” riot back in 2000 — actually orchestrated by G.O.P. strategists — that shut down the presidential vote recount in Florida’s Miami-Dade County.

Just like when John McCain was staging fake town halls.  Krugman’s column in the Times goes on to point out that the tea parties have actually become hotbeds of fringe Republican party political thinking:

Then there are the claims made at some recent tea-party events that Mr. Obama wasn’t born in America, which follow on earlier claims that he is a secret Muslim. Crazy stuff — but nowhere near as crazy as the claims, during the last Democratic administration, that the Clintons were murderers, claims that were supported by a campaign of innuendo on the part of big-league conservative media outlets and figures, especially Rush Limbaugh.

[....]

Going back to those tea parties, Mr. DeLay, a fierce opponent of the theory of evolution — he famously suggested that the teaching of evolution led to the Columbine school massacre — also foreshadowed the denunciations of evolution that have emerged at some of the parties.

So if you plan to go to one of these tea parties, it seems you’ll also be railing against evolution and the media hiding Obama’s “secret Muslim” status.   And you’ll also be out there to decry Obama in support of the rich [emphasis added]:

Thus, President Obama is being called a “socialist” who seeks to destroy capitalism. Why? Because he wants to raise the tax rate on the highest-income Americans back to, um, about 10 percentage points less than it was for most of the Reagan administration. Bizarre.

I support President Barack Obama and I particularly support his agenda.  So it is with remorse that I have to write what is obvious:  Senator Chris Dodd needs to go.   He is directly responsible or had his hands in some of the most appalling abuses in the financial industry.  Particularly egregious is that he is the one who wrote the legislative loophole that allowed those unethical AIG bonuses that tore the country apart.

"I apologize if we had some confusion." We're not confused any more, Senator Dodd.

Dodd originally denied that he did this (he lied) and then when confronted with evidence, admitted it was his hand who wrote the loophole.  “I apologize if we had some confusion,” said Dodd, who initially said that any notion of his involvement in the bonus loophole was “ridiculous”. 

He tried to shift some of the blame to the Treasury Department, but that doesn’t hold up.  Dodd is not a puppet of the Treasury and his lying and then shifting of blame is enough that he should not be allowed to continue to represent the people of Connecticut.  That AIG employees were lobbied to donate to Dodd, who was the largest beneficiary of AIG money, is the icing on the cake.

 Dodd’s problems are his own.  As Hartford Courant columnist Helen Ubiñas wrote,  ”Could be the one about the funky mortgage deals, the precious Irish cottage, the obscene AIG bonuses or even the latest about his tanking poll numbers.  Reader’s choice, really.”

If Senator Dodd really cared more about representative government than about his own power, then he would step down and allow another Democratic candidate to run in the general election.  With someone as smarmy as Dodd, that seems unlikely.  So it is up to the people to be unforgiving, which they should be.  There should be no room in our democratic government for liars and those who pull the sort of ethically-challenged shenanigans that Dodd has pulled, and lied about.  Yes, it sucks to lose an incumbent Democrat, but that’s not what’s important here.   The fundamentals of our governing principles are.

If the Democratic primary voters don’t do what’s right, then elect an independent challenger.  If there is no viable independent challenger, then vote for the Republican, which pains me to say; however, the last eight years should have taught all of us that politics needs to take a back seat to holding our leaders accountable.   I think it takes liberals to show how to dispose of our own trash, as opposed to lionizing them (see Rush Limbaugh) and embracing them (see Senator David Vitter).

Chris Dodd needs to go.

Wikipedia “scandals” have become a staple in the news; but how about one that was completely made up by WorldNetDaily and reported on by Fox News?

I missed this story last week, but it involves a few of my favorite themes:  Israel, Wikipedia and the joke that is the right wing media.   WorldNetDaily, the “Conservapedia of News,” was recently caught with its pants down after Aaron Klein, one of its partisan hacks, fabricated a Wikipedia scandal.  I will leave it to the reader to decide what is more comical: the “scandal”, or Aaron Klein trying to thump his chest in indignation when he is caught.

Aaron Klein becomes the face of shoddy right wing reporting.

Aaron is chief of WND’s “Jerusalem bureau” and he decided to test a theory.  Aaron’s theory was that the editors of Barack Obama’s Wikipedia article will not allow criticism on the page.  So what does smarty pants Aaron do?  He tries to insert the bizarre fringe theory that Barack Obama is not a U.S. citizen eligible for the Presidency.  Here’s what Aaron wrote:

There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.

This is one of the more pathetic right-wing conspiracy hopes.  Even though Obama provided a certification of live birth in Hawaii, the right wing foamers-at-the-mouth do not feel that is enough.

Obama can do nothing to ever convince people like Aaron Klein and the rest of the deluded right wing (who should be more deluded with the fact that they supported a President like George W. Bush, who trounced every notion of “conservative values”).  If Obama produced whatever document they asked for, they would find some reason to doubt its authenticity.  “There’s no amount of evidence or data that will change somebody’s mind,” says Michael Shermer, who is the publisher of Skeptic magazine and a columnist for Scientific American.   ”The more data you present a person, the more they doubt it … Once you’re committed, especially behaviorally committed or financially committed, the more impossible it becomes to change your mind.”

Alex Koppelman wrote on Salon about how the vast birth certificate conspiracy knows no bounds:

For believers, it works like this: So what if Dr. Chiyome Fukino, the director of Hawaii’s Department of Health, released a statement saying she has verified that the state has the original birth certificate on record? So what if she said separately that the certification looks identical to one she was issued for her own Hawaii birth certificate? Why didn’t her statement specify Obama’s birthplace? So what if a Hawaii Health Department spokeswoman later clarified that Fukino meant that Obama was born in Hawaii? So what if researchers for FactCheck.org actually saw the physical copy of the certification and debunked much of the key “evidence” supposedly proving that the image posted online is a forgery? They’re not really independent. They’re funded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Obama once (with Bill Ayers, no less) ran an entirely unrelated program that happened to be paid for with money donated by Walter Annenberg. And on and on and on.

Aaron Klein has now made himself part of that conspiracy by trying to insert this fringe theory on to Obama’s Wikipedia article, and then acting shocked that it was removed.   When Aaron was called out on this, he tried to deny that he was the one who did it.  Wired magazine demonstrated how people like Aaron often don’t use intelligence when they try to game Wikipedia, which is why they are caught engaging in unethical behavior:

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That’s Aaron Klein’s entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

When Gawker exposed Klein’s fabrication of a scandal, he demanded a retraction:

First, I am not “Jerusalem21,” but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama’s page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing – like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama’s page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

Gawker refused to retract the story, stating, “In other words, Klein masterminded the creation of the supposed scandal he wrote about.”   Klein’s crap defense is the same one he gave Wired, which like Gawker, called him out on his BS:

What’s missing from [Aaron Klein's] treatise on investigative journalism is the reporter’s obligation to disclose when he’s engineered events on which he’s reporting. In a follow-up e-mail, Klein acknowledges that he should have made that disclosure, but suggests he’s guilty of nothing more than an accidental omission in a hastily written story.

“It just slipped my mind,” he writes.

Interesting. Let’s look at some of the original text [DS: the following is text from the WND story]:

Indeed, multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately and were banned from re-posting any material on the website for three days.

In one example, Wikipedia user “Jerusalem21″ added the following to Obama’s page:

“There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.”

As is required on the online encyclopedia, that entry was backed up by third-party media articles, citing the Chicago Tribune and WorldNetDaily.com

The entry was posted on Feb. 24, at 6:16 p.m. EST. Just three minutes later, the entry was removed by a Wikipedia administrator, claiming the posting violated the websites rules against “fringe” material.

[...]

When the user “Jerusalem21″ tried to repost the entry about Obama’s eligibility a second time, another administrator removed the material within two minutes and then banned the Wikipedia user from posting anything on the website for three days.

That’s a lot of mind-slippage. You’d think at some point in the writing, Klein would have a revelation, slap his head and say, “Silly me! Here I am writing about my researcher following my instructions, and I’m making it sound like I don’t even know the guy! Glad I caught that.”

The only other example in Klein’s article of a user being suspended from Wikipedia also traces back to a Jerusalem21 edit — this time about William Ayers. That example found its way into the Fox News report. But, similarly, Klein forgot to mention that it was the same user — his unnamed researcher — and the same ban: i.e., the one that followed two successive edits accusing Obama of falsifying his birth.

After this was reported by Gawker and Wired, WorldNetDaily removed all references to “Jerusalem21″ and instead put in “one Wikipedia user” as the victim of not having this lunatic theory inserted.

Aaron: you’re a partisan hack who clearly knows very little about journalistic integrity, which is why you work for WorldNetDaily and not a mainstream publication.  You’ll say anything and do anything to cover up your shoddy reporting.   That is clear.   So Aaron, when the Israeli Foreign Ministry brings me out to Israel next week to photograph for Wikipedia, I’ll be sure to do a better job of constructing reality than you appear able to do.