I have to wholeheartedly disagree with Quin Hillyer's endorsement
of Andy McCarthy's
paranoid National Review rant on President Obama. It
does not seperate fact from fiction, but rather substitutes
speculation and conjecture for actual reporting, and its sourcing
is atrocious.
For instance, McCarthy's source for claiming that Obama's
description of his early employment "is bunk" is the Sweetness & Light
blog. If you link to the
post he cites, Sweetness & Light offers an expired link
to another blog, Analyze This, written by somebody claiming to be
one of Obama's former coworkers. Sweetness & Light also cites
a commenter to the Analyze This blog. Now, it's entirely possible
that everything written on Analyze This, including its comments
section, is completely accurate. But if McCarthy wants to see
Obama's original birth certificate (because the official
"certification of live birth" does not provide enough information
for him), you'd think he'd want to do more legwork to corroborate
his own claims, instead of just lazily linking to another blog
and writing without skepticism,
"As the website Sweetness & Light
details, this is bunk."
At another point, McCarthy writes:
There’s
speculation out there from the former
CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no
right-winger and is convinced the president was born in
Hawaii — that the full state records
would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim
Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.”
Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons:
issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s
been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the
Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other
than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of
remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither
do you.
It's stunning enough that McCarthy, a former prosecutor, would
engage in such amateur speculation without backing it up with
actual facts. But his favorable citation of Larry Johnson is even
more alarming. As Dave Weigel reminds us, Johnson is not a
reliable source, but a "now-discredited blogger who
blew his credibility last year after insisting, for weeks,
that he knew 'sources' who were holding onto a tape of
'Michelle Obama railing against ‘whitey’ at Jeremiah
Wright’s church.'" In addition, Johnson
erroneously reported that Karl Rove was indicted during the
Valerie Plame affair, in a post titled, "Rove Indicted -- Frog
March the Bastard." Johnson also has the distinction of having
authored a New York Times op-ed titled "The
Declining Terrorist Threat" -- which was published just two
months prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. It is simply irresponsible
journalism by McCarthy to cite the authority of this man.
Right now, Obama's approval ratings are sinking. And it isn't
because people like McCarthy are raising questions about his
biography. It's because his economic policies aren't working as
promised, and Americans are not buying the health care proposals
he's trying to sell them. By writing this dreck, all
McCarthy is doing is providing fodder to liberals who seek to
distract attention from Obama's fading popularity and his
disasterous health care plan by arguing that conservative
opposition to Obama is rooted in an effort to portray him as
somehow illegitimate.
