Rush wasn’t punked, he wasn’t pwned. He was just doing what he does.

Heard this one?  Real knee-slapper.  Report appears on the web back in August.  Blogger posts that Time Magazine’s Joe Klein had dug up Barack Obama’s senior thesis from his Columbia U days in which young Barry the radical and secret Muslim extremist argued that the United States Constitution is inherently flawed.

Via MediaMatters:

A political science major, Obama was seen as a top student, according to his classmates. Professors even asked the young student to lecture several times. Obama was required to write a 'senior seminar' paper in order to graduate from Columbia. The subject of this paper, which totaled 44 pages, was American government. Entitled Aristocracy Reborn, this paper chronicled the long struggle of the working class against, as Obama put it, "plutocratic thugs with one hand on the money and the other on the government."

In the paper, in which only the first ten pages were given to the general media, Obama decries the plight of the poor: "I see poverty in every place I walk. In Los Angeles and New York, the poor reach to me with bleary eyes and all I can do is sigh."

In part, the future President blames this on the current economic system: "There are many who will defend the 'free market.' But who will defend the single mother of four working three jobs. When a system is allowed to be free at the expense of its citizens, then it is tyranny."

However, the President also singled out the American Constitution: "... the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy."

There it is.  Obama hates America and always has.

The post has a tag that identifies it as satire.  But it’s a Right Wing Blog and the Right Wing’s definition of humor has been set by Ann Coulter--- joke. 1. noun. an outrageous lie you got caught telling.  2. alt. a vile insult or an expression of a vicious belief or desire that offends most of the rest of polite society and therefore puts your career and future invitations to appear on Sunday morning talk shows at risk. e.g. It was just a joke! What’s the matter with you?  You don’t have a sense of humor?

In short, the blogger may have thought he was being funny, but he wasn’t being funny by satirizing his fellow Right Wingers’ fear and loathing of the President or their paranoid willingness to believe he’s out to destroy their America.  He was just trying to find a more clever way of expressing that fear and loathing and paranoia and give himself cover in case he was ever called on it.

Which means I believe he’s probably tickled by what’s happened.

The post was picked up on by other Right Wing bloggers who, true to form, didn’t get the joke.  They treated it as fact because it was the only kind of fact they can get their minds around---“facts” are things that confirm everything they already know and don’t really need in order to continue knowing it.  In a way, their facts are like their jokes, linguistic Swiss Army Knives with a tool for every purpose when telling lies and spewing prejudices.

Took a little time, but as these things have a way of doing, the “news” percolated upwards from the blogs to the attention of the mainstream Right Wing noise-makers.

Michael Ledeen “reported” on it.  Rush Limbaugh did his usual riffing.  Lou Dobbs ran with it.

Whoopsie!

Joke’s on them, right?

Um, sort of.

Ledeen has admitted he was fooled and apologized.  I haven’t heard if Dobbs' has said anything.  I don’t care what any of the Right Wing bloggers have said because they won’t learn a lesson from this.  They won’t even see that there’s a lesson to learn.  They’ll fall for something like it again, soon, and when that happens they won’t be embarrassed and they won’t acknowledge that there was any again about it.  Those who will admit that that they’d been fooled before will simply compare their mistake to detectives following the wrong lead for a little bit on their way to discovering the final clue that proves their case and traps the criminal they’ve known to be guilty from the start.  The rest won’t even remember having been ever been wrong before, because all that’s real to them is their hatreds and fears and what they’ll remember is the feeling of having had those hatreds and fears confirmed.

This has become so routine that it’s tempting not to bother to notice, and I probably wouldn’t have bothered except that I got slapped in the face by this post on Yahoo’s Buzz Log when I scrolled over it on my way to checking my mail this morning.

Ok, it’s Buzz Log.  As a platform for keeping track of what’s going on in the world, it’s the antithesis of profound, deep, thoughtful, insightful, pertinent, informative, and, well, intelligent.  But I would bet that far more people get their sense of what’s happening that matters than those who follow the news through even the top political blogs.  So, in case any of that majority of web browsers stumbles this way, please be advised.

Rush Limbaugh did not get punked.

That blogger wasn’t trying to punk anybody---and by the way, Buzz is wrong.  That’s not a humor blog.  It’s a run of the mill outlet for the Right Wing Noise Machine. (Wow, Barack Obama is more unpopular than George W. Bush?  I wouldn’t have guessed.  Thanks for speaking truth to power, guy.)  And like I said, I’m pretty sure the intention was to tell a lie without having to take responsibility for lying.

But Limbaugh didn’t get punked, no matter what.  To have been punked you have to feel like a punk afterward.  You have to care that you fell for the joke.  You have to care that you were wrong.

Limbaugh doesn’t care.

He didn’t care.

It didn’t matter to him whether or not the story about the President’s thesis was true.  That sort of truth doesn’t matter to him.  The only truth he cares about is what his listeners accept as the truth, which is that they are right to hate what they hate and fear what they fear and get angry at whatever they’re angry about---and that’s usually what Rush himself has told them they should hate and fear and get angry about it.

When it turned out he’d passed along yet another lie to his listeners, Limbaugh didn’t apologize.  He shrugged it off.

As the writer for Buzz herself reports, Limbaugh “defended himself by saying basically the thesis felt true.”

That feeling is key.  That feeling matters more to Limbaugh and his dittoheads than any truth.  For them, that feeling is the only truth.

The reason the blogger thought he could get away with that post, the reason those other bloggers swallowed it whole without thinking, and the reason it made it to Ledeen’s and Limbaugh’s and Dobbs’ desk, which is the same reason that another variation of the same “joke” will follow the same path soon and another one will follow right after that.

There are a lot of people in the United States that believe that the President is their enemy.

They hate him and they are afraid of him.

And that hatred and fear is dangerous.

The truth is that Barack Obama is less popular ten months into his Presidency than George W. Bush was ten months into his, but it’s because Democrats and Liberals were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt, they wished him well and they wanted him to succeed for the sake of the country.

That spirit---that patriotism---is absent from a large number of people on the Right at the moment.

They are convinced that the President is trying to destroy America and they don’t just want him to fail at that, they believe that he must be stopped.

At any and all cost.

The Buzz writer says, “Let's hope someone kept their sense of humor in all this.”

Hard to see what’s funny about the fact that the Secret Service is overwhelmed investigating death threats against the President.

___________________

Related Mannion re-run:  In which Al Franken teaches Ann Coulter how to tell a joke.

Update.  Roy Edroso has more, and it’s just what you’d expect.  Fake But Accurate: Obama “Thesis” Proves His Treason Even After It’s Been Debunked.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

"For them, that feeling is the only truth."

If you haven't yet read Charlie Pierce's book Idiot America, you should. Everybody should. It expands on your single sentence and cites examples like the Dover evolution trial, the Terry Schiavo case, and the Pennsylvania memorial to the passengers on the 9/11 plane which crashed there.

[Mike Schilling]

Yet Limbaugh is incensed by the inaccurate "quotes" that were circulated during his recent attempt to buy an NFL team. Not sure why, when they felt so true.

[Dutch]

Mmmm. Yeah.

This so reeks of "birth certificate fever."

If the dude had spent $15 for a copy of his birth certificate and made it public instead of spending $60,000 to keep it locked in a vault, there would be no contraversy.

And by the same token (Freudian pratfall!) if he and his wife hadn't redacted and squelched all of their college papers before the campaign, there would be no ... joke? (Are we really calling this a joke? Do you really think PBO's actual college papers are so different? These are all his words from speeches mashed into a mock term paper. Give the prankster some props for leaving out PBO's racist use of the term "Typical White Folks.")

The reason we should have known this screed was NOT the college thesis of PBO is because it's grammatically solid. The samples we DO have of Mr. Editor of the Harvard Law Review's college writing are pretty abysmal. He didn't have Billy Ayres ghost writing his term papers back then.

[actor212]

I wondered how "Chief Korir" was going to extend his stranglehold over the gullibility of right-wing Americans.

Last year, it was the Whitey tape in which Michelle Obama was supposedly heard talking about White Americans. This year, the "senior thesis".

Hand it to "Korir". He has these idiots by the short hairs.

Errrrrrrrr, Dutch? The state of Hawaii released his CoB.

[MBunge]

"If the dude had spent $15 for a copy of his birth certificate and made it public instead of spending $60,000 to keep it locked in a vault, there would be no contraversy."

One of the basic things that's crippling conservative "messaging" is that they're producing narratives that are so insular and disconnected from perceived reality that no one outside their particular clan knows what the hell they're talking about. Does anyone have the slightest idea where that $60,000 figure came from?

Mike

[Falstaff]

I don't, Mike, but I do think you're right. I think we've reached a point -- I think our host has possibly opined this more than once -- where there simply isn't anything Obama can do to appease these people. It seems like Dutch and his like have just decided that Obama Is Evil And Illegitimate, and that's all there is to it.

I mean, for crying out loud, the birth certificate was released, but that wasn't good enough. As we see above. It has to be fake and phony, because to the really hardcore types, Obama himself is fake and phony.

I'm not saying anything new here, I know, but that still just boggles me. It has to be shady, because Obama's evil? I mean, that's not even a straw man, that's just naked hate.

[actor212]

Falstaff, this is a crowd that falsely claimed the kerning on a valid military document was impossible, despite IBM's own admission that not only was that typeface available when Bush served in the TANG, it was a common typeface and usually included in the purchase of Selectric typewriters.

It goes beyond naked hatred of Obama to puerile "fingers in ears, lalalala, I'm not listening" stupidity.

[Falstaff]

Excellent point, really.