To follow up on my Post:
https://ikejakson.wordpress.com/2010/08/21/are-almost-half-of-american/
Courtesy of my email Friend Nimrod. He has his own Blog; it’s very special. There is no other Blogger like Nimrod and I shall introduce him to you soon.
He has his own unique way with words; as in the headline of the email that I received from him:
Too Cool by Half?
The rest is all verbatim; you will have to wait until the end for my answer to my own headline. I now hand you over to Nimrod.
By JAMES TARANTO
Richard Nixon was not a crook, Michael Dukakis was not unpatriotic, and Barack Obama is not a Muslim. Unlike Nixon and Dukakis, Obama didn’t actually issue an explicit defensive denial; instead, as we noted yesterday, the president said through a spokesman that he “is obviously a Christian. He prays every day.”
But NewsBusters.org reports that CNN recast it as a Nixonian denial: “W.H.: PRES. OBAMA ISN’T MUSLIM,” read a chyron (caption at the bottom of the screen) yesterday on “The Situation Room,” as Wolf Blitzer led his program with a discussion of a recent poll in which 18% of participants thought Obama was Muslim.
One of Blitzer’s guests, James Carville, offered this explanation for the finding:
“I don’t [know] other than the fact people are just willing to believe anything or there are a lot of stupid people out there,” Carville said. “I really don’t have an explanation, just like I don’t have an explanation for the fact that you see some of these polls that a quarter of the people believe he was born outside the country. I’m just as flummoxed as the next person.”
Newsbusters’ Jeff Poor makes an excellent point:
Every time the question about President Barack Obama’s faith is brought up, the wizards of smart in the mainstream media get up in arms about “right-wingers” or “tea partiers” perpetuating those allegations. But is it possible that by devoting so much attention to these issues of Obama’s faith and his citizenship, the media are creating the very feeding frenzy they’re appalled by?
This sounds exactly right to us. The agenda behind these polls, and the liberal media’s reporting on them, is to portray critics of President Obama as kooks and idiots. (and, if you’re John Avlon, to peddle books, as we noted in March).
This strategy is backfiring, and in two ways. First, as Poor suggests, by mainstreaming these supposedly fringe notions. If the idea that Obama is Muslim merits the attention of the august Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the most respected name in news, who’s to say it’s crazy, or even wrong?
Second, it puts the ugly attitudes of the liberal elite on display, à la Lonesome Rhodes’s open-mic incident in “A Face in the Crowd.” Now we know that James Carville thinks “there are a lot of stupid people out there.” At least those who work in the Obama White House are, for the most part, disciplined enough not to make such insulting statements–as Carville himself was when he worked for President Clinton. Yet when people hear such contemptuous statements from the president’s supporters in the media (as well as from some in politics, most notably Speaker Nancy Pelosi), they can draw their own conclusions about what Obama and his inner circle think of them.
Thus, at a time when the vast majority of voters oppose the president’s policies for any number of legitimate reasons, the media’s self-superior dwelling on “stupid” or “kooky” Obama critics tends to marginalize Obama, not his opponents. Obama’s presidency is being consumed in a bonfire of liberal vanities.
All the News That’s Fit to Print
The great Greg Sargent notes a telling finding in the Pew poll: “A solid majority” of respondents who think President Obama is Muslim “say they ‘learned’ it from the media.”
Sarge scratches his head:
I’m not sure what to make of that. Maybe some voices on the right have succeeded in creating an alternate reality that really is impenetrable. Maybe traditional news orgs haven’t been forceful enough in knocking the lies down. Or, alternatively, maybe there’s a segment of folks who are so distrustful of the “MSM” that they believe the opposite of what it tells them.
Maybe they read this article, published during the 2008 campaign:
As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.
Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.
His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).
What right-wing rag published this? The New York Times, of course.
I posed the question in my headline. My answer is a resounding NO because All American Journolists are ASSES. They of course, in looking down on the masses from their lofty heights, think that half of the people will believe them because Journolists believe that half of the people are asses.
Jaksonian Philosophy 