I really didn’t think I had to go back and do this one, since it’s been so thoroughly debunked, but since someone just brought it up, again, here goes.

Barack Obama never attended a Madrassa. This story was reported on Fox News, and they were in turn reporting something they’d read in Insight Magazine. They reported without actually doing any investigation at all; they just basically said HEY GUESS WHAT WE READ.

So then CNN actually does some reporting for a change and sends an honest-to-god reporter to the school Obama attended in Indonesia and confirmed that it was not, in fact, a Madrassa.

And while we’re on the subject, “Madrassa” translates literally to “school.” It doesn’t mean “radical bomb-making learn-to-kill-the-Christians school,” even though that’s what we think it means, because we are stupid.

The Associated Press ran this story yesterday asking:

The voices are growing louder asking the question: Is Barack Obama all style and little substance? The freshman Illinois senator began his campaign facing the perception that he lacks the experience to be president, especially compared to rivals with decades of work on foreign and domestic policy. So far, he’s done little to challenge it. He’s delivered no policy speeches and provided few details about how he would lead the country.

No policy speeches? What about this one on March 21? Or this one on March 2? Those are both specific foregin policy speeches. There’s this one from January 25, right after he started his exploratory committee, calling for universal health care.

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the Associated Freakin’ Press couldn’t look at his issues page and see the specifics of what he’s proposed thus far.

From a poorly written article in the Washington Post.

In his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” he recounts a watershed moment of his own — a “revelation,” a “violent” awakening, an incident that “permanently altered” his “vision.” Twice he tells how as a 9-year-old he went to the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia (a country where his mother had taken him to live) and came across a Life magazine article about a black man who had tried to whiten his skin through some sort of chemical process. The result was a disaster.

“I felt my face and neck get hot,” Obama wrote. “My stomach knotted; the type began to blur on the page.”

The child had, for the first time, confronted racism and its hideous consequences.

Only there is no such issue of Life magazine. So says the Chicago Tribune, which has gone through the Obama memoir with commendable thoroughness.

The Tribune, and the Post writer, are correct. It was not in Life Magazine. It was not in Ebony Magazine, as the Senator, when told no such Life article existed, himself suggested.

No, it was an article in Time Magazine.

Yes yes. He misremembered the name of a magazine he saw as a child. C’mon, guys. It’s not like he wrote A Million Little Pieces.

Edit: A poster at DailyKos suggests it might have been Look magazine, which had a similar article around the same time. However, without the actual article, I’m sticking with Time Magazine.

Black pundits claim that he’s not black enough, too ingratiated to White pundits are crying that he’s too black; he lives in Chicago’s South Side, attends a “black church,” worked with the poor.

These are racial attacks shrouded to look like judgements of his character.

I’m gonna quote fellow Goon Preppy Bastard, who nailed it:

To some people, being “black” is an identity, sort of like being gay, or being Jewish, or whatever. And merely having African-American descent isn’t good enough. In order to be “black” you have to meet certain criteria that go along with that identity.

It reminds me of that episode of South Park where Stan falls in with the Goths who are “non-comformists” and they explain to him everything he has to do be non-comformist, too. The label of “black” as an identity (I keep putting it in quote marks to differentiate it from just plain black, as a race) has many criteria that some people don’t think Obama meets.

This is ludicrous. Would you say someone isn’t “gay enough” because they don’t like musicals or Madonna? Since when did being something require you to have groupthink? Obama is a role model for young blacks in America, in my opinion. He’s a testimony to what hard work and diligence can get you. That, of course, is what attracts him to MAINSTREAM America. Someone like Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton–they may be “black enough” but they’re not seen as anything BUT “black.” They’re all about race. There’s nothing to their repertoire but bitterness and anger and what appear to be deep-seated issues towards people who AREN’T black (Jackson has made openly anti-Semitic comments, for example.) Thus they can’t get any support (both have run for president in the past) outside the black community. Obama CAN, and obviously that angers those who cherish identity over substance.

While the pundits prattle on, they seem to either willfully or ignorantly ignore the vast number of people who don’t give two shits about Barack Obama’s skin color, and are instead honestly drawn to the man for the content of his character, for the things he says and the ways he says them. That will be the test for the Senator in this election cycle, not whether he’s up on his Ebonics and down with the 50 Cent, yo.

You may have seen this paradoy of Apple’s 1984 Superbowl commercial.

The Obama camp had nothing to do with it. However, a citizen who worked for the company that designed his web site did. Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, created and uploaded the video and, so as not to give a sense of impropriety, he quit his job when he was outed as the creator.

There’s no controversy here, really, except for a man losing his job for being an independant activist on his own damn time.

This is one of those meme’s that, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, refuses to die.

Barack Obama is a Muslim.

No, he’s not. Frankly, I find it rather insulting that because he was not given an Anglo-Saxon name at birth, there’s an assumption that he must be Muslim. Do you know who the only Muslim currently serving in the U.S. Congress is? Keith Ellison.

His father was raised Muslim and his mother was raised Methodist, but by the time they met, they were both agnostics. Obama was not raised with religion; or, rather, he was raised with a plurality of them (From The Audacity of Truth, pages 203 - 204):

For my mother, organized religion too often dressed up closed-mindedness in the garb of piety, cruelty and oppression in the cloak of righteousness.

This isn’t to say that she provided me with no religious instruction. In her mind, a working knowledge of the world’s great religions was a necessary part of any well-rounded education. In our household the Bible, the Koran, and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. On Easter or Christmas Day my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine, and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. bu I was made to understand that such religious samplings required no sustained commitment on my part — no introspective exertion or self-flagellation. Religion was an expression of human culture, she would explain, not its wellspring, just one of the many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.

Recently, the LA Times resurrected this meme, claiming to have talked to former classmates and teachers from Obama’s four years in Indonesia.

His former Roman Catholic and Muslim teachers, along with two people who were identified by Obama’s grade-school teacher as childhood friends, say Obama was registered by his family as a Muslim at both of the schools he attended.

That registration meant that during the third and fourth grades, Obama learned about Islam for two hours each week in religion class.

It’s interesting that while acknowledging that he attended both Muslim and Roman Catholic classes, no one is accusing him of being a Roman Catholic. Futher, as regards this registration, the paper continues:

Bugs have eaten Obama’s file in the school’s archive, said Vice Principal Hardi Priyono.

Regardless, Barack Obama chose to be a Christian. He came to Christianity while working as a community organizer in Chicago, in his twenties, stating in The Audacity of Truth (page 208):

It was because of these newfound understandings - that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved - that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany; the questions I had did not magically disappear. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.

He’s been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ since. His devotion to his chosen religion should not be doubted, and I should think that those who praise President Bush’s born-again Christian status would extend the same respect to Senator Obama’s religion.

Obama Disputes Bill Clinton’s Take on War Views

According to an item in the gossip column Page 6 in today’s New York Post, Mr. Clinton said at a private fund-raiser Tuesday that Mr. Obama was asked in 2004 how he would have voted on the Iraq war resolution of 2002, had he been in the Senate at the time. According to people who attended the fundraiser, Mr. Clinton was said to have quoted Mr. Obama as saying, “I’m not sure,” and then criticized The New York Times for not highlighting that position as ambivalence over the war.

Man, if only there were some sort of photographic evidence to refute this…

Obama’s most serious ethical blunder to date was revealed this week when an in depth report discovered he paid some parking tickets 17 years late.

BOSTON - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama got more than an education when he attended Harvard Law School in the late 1980s. He also got a healthy stack of parking tickets, most of which he never paid.

The Illinois Senator shelled out $375 in January - two weeks before he officially launched his presidential campaign - to finally pay for 15 outstanding parking tickets and their associated late fees.

It’s no under-age congressional page story, but I’m certain that if the news media continues to dig in to the Senator’s past, they’ll find out that under a full moon, he becomes a werewolf.

The spat between David Geffen and Hillary Clinton. This only became an Obama issue because Geffen held a fundraiser for Obama around the time the remarks were published. What remarks, you ask?

In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Geffen said that Clinton is “the easiest to beat” of the Democratic field and skewered her unwillingness to apologize for her 2002 vote to use force in Iraq. “It’s not a very big thing to say ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Geffen said.

Geffen … saved even sharper criticism for former president Bill Clinton, to whom he was close before a falling-out over the pardoning of financier Marc Rich at the end of Clinton’s second term. “I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Geffen said in an oblique reference to questions surrounding the former president’s private life.

Oh snap! Clinton immediately went on the offensive, demanding an apology from Obama.

“A day after Barack Obama goes out and eschews the politics of slash-and-burn, his campaign embraces the politics of trash,” said Phil Singer, Clinton’s deputy communications director, referring to a speech Obama made Tuesday in Las Vegas.

Per Goon Fistgrrl: Calling Hillary “ambitious” and “polarizing” is NOT dirty politics. Dirty politics is “McCain has a black child,” “Kerry’s wasn’t REALLY a war hero” and “Hillary killed Vince Foster.” If she or anyone else calls Obama “inexperienced” or “shallow,” that’s not dirty politics either. Saying he went to a terrorist school is. For fuck’s sake you have to differentiate yourself from your opponent. It’s not going to be all handholding and squaredancing.

Obama’s most awesome answer:

“It’s not clear to me why I would be apologizing for someone else’s remarks. My sense is that Mr. Geffen may have differences with the Clintons, but that doesn’t really have anything to do with our campaign.”

Owned.

Goon TiCK found an anti-Obama facebook page entitled “Anybody that would support Barack Obama for President is a Moronic Liberal.” Just for fun, Goon Digital Disease ran down the list debunking the “claims.”

1. Republicans are Racists:” Are there people who would not vote for an African American because of race? Yes. Those same people would not vote for me because of my politics”-Barack. Hmmm. Would these be the same Republicans who nominated the first African American woman to head the state department, the same ones who stood by Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, Michael Steele, Lynn Swann, and Ken Blackwell?

Nope, they aren’t the same republicans. When most of those people were chosen it was a different party. Now it’s being headed by hard core evangelicals and quite a few of them aren’t what people would call racially friendly.

2. Barack and wife Michelle make in the $500,000s each year. To be true Democrats, they should donate all but 40,000 of it to the poor in order to provide for their living wage.

This is tripe, if all Republicans did as their faith claims, they should be giving a lot more to charity and actually helping the poor.

3. Michelle Obama sits on the board of a company who has Wal Mart as its number one customer. Wal-Mart is supposed to be the biggest capitalist nemisis to libs.

So she serves on the board of TreeHouse Foods. They sell food to LOTS OF COMPANIES. Sorry this is just a stupid arguement. It’s like saying “Because he drives a car that runs on gasoline he must be in the pocket of big oil”.

4. Barack used the money that he got from you schlubs who bought his book to purchase a costly Illinois mansion in a scandalous land deal with a lobbyist.

Already addressed. From the article:

In June 2005, in what Obama now describes as a “boneheaded” mistake, Obama and Rezko’s wife bought adjacent properties on Chicago’s South Side, closing the deals on the same day. Seven months later, wanting a bigger yard for his $1.65 million house, Obama bought a slice of the Rezko property for $104,500.

“There’s no doubt that this was a mistake on my part. ‘Boneheaded’ would be accurate,” Obama said in a telephone interview Friday. “There’s no doubt I should have seen some red flags in terms of me purchasing a piece of property from him.”

5. Barack is a flip-flopp on many issues and stays in the middle on such matters as gay marriage and Iraq.

Provide sources or else it’s more bullshit.

6. Michelle Obama feels as though she does not make enough money.

Does anyone feel they make enough money? Do you know what all her job involves and her exact pay, as well as how much time she has to invest? Do you know what the pay scale is for someone of her position at various other hospitals? If it’s below that rate of pay then yes, she doesn’t make enough money.

7. Barack is half-white. He chose to be black and unfairly taps himself as being African American, something that is a fraud. He chose to be black because that is the half of him that he could exploit for personal and political gain.

What sort of retarded comment is this? He chose to look black?! what the fuck, is he Micheal Jackson with some wierd skin disorder and is putting on makeup to appear more black?

8. Barack’s wife slipped on Oprah by saying something along the lines “now that we have more resources because of the book deal”

Ummm this is true, the book sells, they make extra cash. He doesn’t have nearly the kinds of funds any of the other candidates have. He talks about how little he was able to raise in one of his races being only around $250,000 when they needed at least a million to compete with the guy he was running against who had over $300 million.

9. Barack is an admitted cocaine user.

Former cocaine user. So was Bush, so were a lot of people in the 70’s and 80’s. Before that there were tons of cocaine users back before the FDA was created as well. He made a mistake, he talks about it and is freely open about it.

10. Barack’s voting record and phony image of centrism are contradictory to one another. He voted against John Roberts to be on the Supreme Court, against an “English as the National Language” bill, and against the reauthorization of the Patriot Act.

And there is fault in any of this?! Roberts is a right wing judge appointed to Chief Justice, I’d side with Obama. “English as the National Language” bill is just retarded flag burning strawman crap; we’re a fucking melting pot, get over it. Anyone against the Patriot Act has a 99.9% chance of getting my vote due to the fact that it’s not constitutional.

11. Barack is an undercover cigarette-smoker who seeks to hide his disgusting habit so it won’t tear down his godly-saviour image.

His wife said she outed him to the media to get him to stop. He knows it’s bad, and he’s trying to quit… OMG JUST LIKE A BUNCH OF OTHER AMERICANS!?! OH NOES WHAT WILL WE DO!

12. Barack was educated at a radical muslim school in Indonesia during four years of his early life.

This is such a lie and so full of bullshit. This wasn’t fact checked at all.