New York--President Obama may have released his birth certificate on Wednesday, but Donald Trump and other wingnuts have already moved on to a new conspiracy: how the president got into the Ivy League. Michelle Goldberg traces the far-right history of the claim.
The birther bit must have been getting old. Now Donald Trump has opened up a new line of attack on President Obama, accusing him of being a “terrible student” who shouldn’t have gotten into Columbia University or Harvard Law School. “How does a bad student go to Columbia and then to Harvard?” he asked the Associated Press. “I’m thinking about it, I’m certainly looking into it. Let him show his records.” He continued darkly, “There are a lot of questions that are unanswered about our president.”
That is just sad. Desperate. Pathetic.
Not content there, apparently he's also possibly looking into the ultra-right-wing website WorldNetDaily, which ran a 2009 piece asking, “Did radical Muslims help send Obama to Harvard?”
I love the way Ms. Goldberg so correctly puts this: Not only does it position the president as a Muslim Manchurian candidate with longtime ties to agents of the caliphate, but it also assures resentful whites that this seemingly brilliant black man isn’t so smart after all. In that sense, it’s of a piece with the right-wing obsession with Obama’s use of a teleprompter, and with the widespread suspicion that he didn’t really write the eloquent Dreams From My Father, a claim Trump recently made at a Tea Party rally. Obama, in this view, is both sinister and stupid, canny enough to perpetrate one of the biggest frauds in American history but still the ultimate affirmative-action baby.
So, anyone call the people who raise this racist?
First, they'd get a "Who, me?!"
And then they'll be chided, harshly, for playing the "race card."
This is no way to screen people for the highest office in the land.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment