Ever since a commenter mentioned that the mustache on Joseph Farah was reminiscent of a 1970’s porn star, I have been thinking about the relation between pornography and anti-Obama smears under a concept I call “information pornography.”
Joseph Farah
Pornography is at its essence the objectivization of sex, sex removed from the context of affection or procreation and packaged to create arousal. Information pornography is the objectivization of language, removing it from the context of truth and information, and packaging it to create the arousal of false belief and anger.
This brings us to one the top purveyors of information pornography on the Internet, Joseph Farah, specializing in material for the anti-Obama/birther fetish market. After years of playing with the issue he has finally started talking like he has two of those things that appear in sexually pornographic images and come out with the statement in his September 13th WorldNetDaily column titled: Enough’s enough: Obama has conceded ineligibility that Barack Obama is not eligible to be president.
The article starts out with a joke:
For more than two years now, I have given Barack Obama the benefit of the doubt.
I wouldn’t call Farah’s doubt campaign a “benefit” and he’s gotten commentators to do the heavy duty lying (like the fake travel ban to Pakistan story) for him on the web site he publishes.
Farah’s article continues with smears designed to titillate the birthers and make any intellectually honest person puke.
One particularly salacious paragraph reads:
He [President Obama] has failed to answer the charge. He has failed to enter a plea. He has failed to show up for a hearing. Therefore, I no longer afford him the presumption of innocence.
Of course no charges have been filed, and no hearing has been held where the President was asked to appear. But information pornography is by definition detached from context.
WND published their catalog of birther porn last week.
Farrah has Pat Boone and Chuck Norris as contributors, if you are intersted in wingnut viewpoints. That should indicate the level of compitence at WND. (slightly above post & fail, by a hair)
WND is talented at pointing out who wears white, pointy hoods.
Man, now I got the image of Farrah doing porn in my head, Damn you!
Pornography has at least some “redeeming social value.”
By that definition what Farah publishes is not pornography, but obscenity.
Another coincidence for you Doc-
in the comment thread for “The passport hypothesis” I used the term “birther porn” before you made this post.
I assume that you had started to write this article before reading my comment.
Must be something in the air…
It looks like I am wrong about the timing judging by the time stamp on the first comments to this article- I posted my comment at 11:06 PM. It took a bit to write, but not 3 hours. Oh well, you’ll have to take my word about it. 🙂
Good point. What Farah and his ilk “publish,” is utterly without redeeming social value.
Yes but what is his porn name? According to the porn name generator: Humpy Muffmuncher
http://gangstaname.com/en/names/generate
Orly Taitz – Fine Ol’ Crack Smoka
Mario Apuzzo – White Mofo Daddy
Phil Berg – Green Egg Jimmy Jamma
I couldn’t help the ’70’s porn star ‘tache comment, it’s just so fake AND stereotypical.
I see him a in a classic nay epic plumber/pizza delivery guy masterpiece
I will now abase and reform myself by going and poking at the IQ lowering, painful idiocy over at Gretawire
“birther fetish market” … a very nice term, very likable. WND hasn’t gone that Farah to milk the birther conspiracy theory of all it worth. All pretending the time pretending to be objective. The only people that WND has been fooling was birthers.
WND is now headlining the story about Taitz getting invited to the DSCC/DCCC reception.
Apparently WND also hasn’t figured out that Taitz donated $1,000 to the DSCC in 2006, which undoubtedly explains why she was invited.
No apparently the easier solution is that Obama took time out in his busy day to phone the local DSCC chapter, ask to speak to whomever is in charge of the mailing list, and inquire if they had room for one more name on the list while trying his best not to snicker too loudly.
Nonsense! It makes for great comdey.
Why is it that the social value of comedy is so often underappreciated?
From TPM…
“In fact, I couldn’t find a single tea partier to talk to yesterday who didn’t have doubts about Obama’s citizenship status or his faith. Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone at yesterday’s 912 rally felt that way — just the ones I talked to. A year after 9/12/09 tea partiers were roundly criticized for images and rhetoric questioning Obama’s faith and past at their big DC rally, it seems the movement has not strayed from the idea that Obama is not just a bad president but some kind of other or “usurper” (as one banner calling for his overthrow on display put it) illegally occupying the nation’s highest office.
“People here know he’s not an American,” a tea partier from DC who would identify himself only as “Randy” told me. He launched into a refrain I would hear more than once during the day — Obama has not displayed enough paperwork proving his U.S. birth to get a driver’s license, not to mention a job that requires a security clearance.
The facts, clearly, do not matter to some. Obama was born in Hawaii, case closed. The case is so closed, in fact, that Hawaii’s Republican governor, Lisa Lingle, recently signed a law allowing state officials to ignore repeated requests for the president’s birth certificate from misguided birthers.
Nevertheless, the president’s citizenship is an open question to the tea partiers I spoke with at the rally yesterday. “I have my doubts,” Jack Smith, a tea partier from Georgia, told me. “He needs to show us the documents.”
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/09/tea-partiers-at-912-rally-obama-is-not-an-american.php
Some good article regarding the Forbes “birther” article….
Forbes Embraces Birtherism Lite.
Sometimes it’s best to think of racism as intellectual laziness. That is, it reflects a failure to evaluate people for who they actually are, because it’s easier to slip them into a familiar, predetermined category that doesn’t upset other related conclusions a person might have come to as a result. For whatever reason, elements of the right have chosen not to evaluate Barack Obama based on his actions or his policies but through the kind of postmodern literary interpretation that wouldn’t make it through the vetting process of a freshman bong circle at Wesleyan. In these retellings of Obama’s personal history, the president’s life is an epic, Marxist, sinister version of a Joseph Campbell-style heroic journey, with its hero ultimately falling, like Anakin Skywalker, to the dark side of the force.
Emerging from his sinecure as president of a small religious college in New York, Dinesh D’Souza, who has been laundering the racism of the right through an “intellectual” filter since his days at Dartmouth, gets back to where his career began. In an essay for Forbes, he concludes that the animating philosophy of the president is “Kenyan anti-colonialism.” The purpose of the essay is to synthesize the most idiotic conservative criticisms of Obama into one handy term:
…………………
“This is birtherism with big words. This is the witchdoctor sign without Photoshop, WorldNetDaily without the exclamation points. D’Souza doesn’t need to stare at Obama’s birth certificate for hours to come to the same conclusion as the birthers, which is that the president is a foreigner. But neither is “Kenyan anti-colonialism” a superficial term. At once, it engages all the racialized elements of the conservative critique of Obama — not just that having an African father means he isn’t really an American but that his inner life consists of a deep anger toward white people, and the office of the presidency is merely the means to secure a collective payback. It also manages to nod in the direction of another conservative racist meme, that having a black president makes the United States somehow analogous to African Third World countries run by bloodthirsty despots. Newt Gingrich took a break from his clownish Islamophobia this weekend to embrace this idiocy and drew a much harsher reaction, in part because we’re still so silly about race in this country that we’re still disarmed when a person of color makes a blatantly racist argument.”
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_serwer_archive?month=09&year=2010&base_name=forbes_embraces_birtherism
And this article…
“So it’s come to this: Forbes cover story on “How Obama Thinks” is a gross piece of innuendo—a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia. This is the worst kind of smear journalism—a singularly disgusting work.
Forbes for some reason gives Dinesh D’Souza the cover and lots of space to froth about the notion popular in the right-wing fever swamps that Obama is an “other”; that he doesn’t think like “an American,” that his actions benefit foreigners rather than Amurricans. It’s too kind to call this innuendo. It’s far too overt for that. …
……
“But D’Souza has some real nerve here: Obama is a native-born American and D’Souza is not. When he says “Here is a man who spent his formative years—the first 17 years of his life—off the American mainland,” he could be referring to himself. According to Wikipedia, anyway, he was born in India in 1961 and never came to the States until 1978. That adds up to about “the first 17 years of his life—off the American mainland.” Somehow the first-seventeen years thing raises questions about Obama’s Americanness but not about D’Souza’s qualifications to question somebody’s degree of native-born Americanness.”
http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/forbes_shameful_obama_dinesh_dsouza.php?page=all&print=true
Black Lion:
The allegations against D’Sousa in those blogs are just as ridiculous as D’Sousa’s article.
Did you borther to read D’Sousa’s piece? His argument is that Obama is unAmerican not because of his birthplace, but because of foriegn ideological influences.
D’Sousa claims that Obama is a doctrinare anti-colonialist ideologue, and that he picked up that ideology during his formative years.
Now I will agree with you that his thesis is tenuous, at best. He provides no direct evidence of it. At best he shows that some Obama policies are consistent with anti-colonialist ideology.
Nevertheless, failure to prove his thesis doesn’t make D’Sousa a birther or a birther lite.
As I said, people accusing D’Sousa of birtherism are just a ridiculous as D’Sousa when he accuses Obama of being a doctrinare anti-colonialist.
Adam, I did read the article. Remember a main part of his theme was that Obama is following in the footsteps of his father and from his father is where is gets his idelogy. Which is interesting since he barely knew his father and the assumptions and conclusions he draws stretches credulity. Also Obama lived overseas for at best 4 years in Indonesia returing when he was 10. Still too young to formulate an ideology about anything. DSouza had a conclusion in mind, that Obama is somehow channeling his father and Africans in general with his actions. Even though there are no facts to support his conclusion, he uses half truths and his opinion to support is conclusion. He showed at best confirmation bias, similar to the birther mind.
Part of the arguments of birtherism is suggest that Obama can’t have been born in America because he is anti-American. Obama was estranged from his father (when he was around three and from what I understand might have meet him once much later in his life).
The use of the term “anti-colonialist” ignores America’s history.
D’Sousa article isn’t tenuous but false.
So, unfortunately there is no comparison to D’Sousa’s proxy to birtherism and his thesis.
Funny thing that stick in my throat about D’Sousa is that he was born in India, A former British colony. It’s amazing that he didn’t see the duplicity of his article.
What sticks in my throat about D’Sousa’s article is that he insinuates that Hawaii isn’t really America. “Here is a man who spent his formative years—the first 17 years of his life—off the American mainland,” Like Hawaii is a foreign country, or something. It’s no more foreign than, say, Alaska.
Or that exotic sovereign nation called New Mexico. During the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, a customer from New Mexico was informed that they didn’t sell tickets to people in foreign countries. Sigh.
I’d take this post much more seriously if the author hadn’t consistently misspelled Dinesh D’SOUZA’S name.
Martin Luther King was influenced deeply by Ghandi. George W Bush claimed to be deeply influenced by Jesus. Jefferson was greatly influenced by the thinkers of the French and Scottish Enlightenment. Were they un-American? Is it D’Souza’s belief that all of human wisdom is contained within the boundaries of the US (excluding Alaska and Hawaii) and no one should ever look for any ideas elsewhere? Perhaps he feels the US should give up nuclear weapons since they arose from the foreign ideas of Einstein, Fermi and other Europeans?
When did our melting pot congeal?
My article was published on: Sep 14, 2010 @ 19:57 but I have been planning it for at least a week.
I can almost guarantee you it’s not as bad as the image I have in my head.
Interesting article regarding Orly over at NBC’s site….
http://nativeborncitizen.wordpress.com/2010/09/16/orly-throws-a-hissy-fit/
“Orly is not impressed that people contacted her new friend and asked him some questions about his support’ or Orly, especially since the friend’ was the Chair of the Constitutional Law Department of a reputable school. Rotunda was quick to point out that Orly’s claims about President Obama being ineligible were based on a flawed understanding of law: Natural Born basically means born on US soil or territory. Orly did not respond too well…”
and
“As Professor Rotunda explained
She asked me to recommend an election lawyer and I did. I think she is wrong in her claim that Obama is not eligible to serve. I learned this morning from another email that she is mentioning my name on her page. I asked her to remove the reference. Hopefully she has done so or soon will. She has the right of free speech to make whatever claim she wants but I don’t agree with her.”
About Taitz and Rotunda, at her blog a mean obot comments:
and Taitz retorts
It struck me that Judge Carter was excruciatingly clear what he thought of Taitz’s case, but the following part of his order dismissing the case is particularly relevant to this tiff:
From today’s humorous Post and Fail….
“Maintaining his corrupt policy of “say one thing to the American people and then do the opposite,” Dictator-in-Chief Obama remains true to his primary mission–collapse and destroy the USA and her people. Applying the directives of Saul Alinsky, the Cloward-Piven Strategy and–of course–Karl Marx, Obama and his merry band of demolishers are working feverishly to destroy the USA before a potentially new and more conservative-run House of Representatives takes the majority.”
…….
“The above are only a few of what I believe to be the most egregious of the Obama programs. Each and every day, The Obama is working to collapse more of this country’s Republic, while saying he is “saving” it. Does this remind anyone of Taqiyya–the Islamic practice of routinely lying to “infidels?” Note: He may not be a Muslim, but he seems to use some of their methods quite well.”
http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/09/15/obama-co-speeding-its-implementation-of-collapsing-america/
And in the comments….
Pixel Patriot says:
Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 5:24 AM
http://www.sonorannews.com/archives/2010/100915/frontpage_Obama.html
Also, an urgent plea from Chalice of Patriots Heart Network. Please help her if you can:
On Monday morning I must file the legal brief and Response to the ‘US Citizenship and Eligibility’ battle I am involved with the Illinois State Board of Elections. (ISBE) As far as I know, this case is the only uncontested case of “Standing” on the eligibility issue. What I discovered was that no where in
Illinois do they check the eligibility of any candidates running for
office.
While Meroni V ISBE addresses all candidates on my ballot, I have uncovered information that will allow a linkage to the 2008 election in Illinois.
This link has the video and the information about the court filings.
The video with my testimony before the Illinois State Board of Elections explains some of the pleadings. The Attorney General replied yesterday and I must reply and get the answer to the court by Monday, September 20th. There is no chance for delays, by law this is an expedited proceeding.
The trial is on Thursday, Sept 23rd at 2pm. The Judge will decide within days.
This is a very serious case with a strong Conservative Judge. I must drive 500 miles (round trip) to go to court in Springfield, Illinois. Last week the judge ruled against the State and in my favor; based on my legal pleadings that the State had to provide me free of charge all the transcripts from the hearings before the Illinois State Board of Elections in August. A small but important victory because the ISBE lawyer wrote the review of the case law that allowed me the transcripts. That they then tried to deny me that right was evident to the Judge so he ruled for them to get the transcripts to me immediately.
I have uncovered some CRITICAL information that will set a similar pace to this case. I will discuss some of this once the filings are completed next week and all of it after the trial on Thursday night. We will have a special show Thursday night, September 23rd.
I must raise $800 to get this filed on Monday. I can not fight this next step without funds and frankly I won’t make the deadlines if I don’t get help. Besides other costs, I will have to pay for a local service to get the case to the Clerk of the Court on Monday.
Please help us with your donations.
Your prayers of support are also appreciated.
Thank you,
Chalice
(aka Sharon Meroni)
I heard that barnyard animals become skittish when Joseph Farah is near. I’m not accusing him, I’m just asking a question whose time has come.
Farah has failed to answer the charge. He has failed to enter a plea. He has failed to show up for a hearing. Therefore, I no longer afford him the presumption of innocence.
Just like Glenn Beck has never denied raping and murdering a girl in 1990. Is it true Glenn Beck’s car was in the same state at that time in 1990? I don’t know for sure.
What strikes me is these folks who seem to care so much about pursuing their claims seem to always need their rubes, er-“followers” to foot the bill.
So, are we to believe that Meroni can’t even find a way to come up with $800 on her own? Does she really manage her own finances that poorly that she couldn’t even get a quick loan of such a fairly minimal amount? What if her car broke down and she had to deal with $800 of repairs…are you telling me she couldn’t find a way to pay for that? She seems to be capable of finding the cash to travel out to see Manning & other gatherings of the nut cases…yet she needs her followers to foot these legal causes she holds so dear… *sheesh*
It is a ploy just like Orly Taitz wanting her supporters to help pay her $20,000 fine.
My point exactly.
Jimmy Carter gets it right….
Appearing on the NBC Nightly News, former Pres. Jimmy Carter demonstrated that he still has keen insight into the state of modern media:
Brian Williams: How do you think it came to be that such high numbers of people believe that this American-born Christian President is either foreign born or a Muslim or both?
Pres. Carter: I think the number one factor is Fox News. It’s totally distorting everything possible concerning the facts. And I think their constant hammering away at these false premises about our incumbent President has a major impact on the consciousness of America. A lot of well-meaning people, including many of those in the Tea Party movement, believe what is said in this constant hammering away by Glenn Beck and by others who have no regards for the truth.
http://www.newscorpse.com/ncWP/?p=2758
Falin’ Palin…
“A year ago, Chuck Heath made brief news with his off-the-cuff quip that his daughter Sarah Palin skipped out on her studies after one semester at Hawaii Pacific College because she didn’t feel comfortable around so many Asians. The quip was intriguing not because of its blatant racism, but because Palin didn’t deny she said it. In a backdoor way, she confirmed that not only did she probably say it, but she meant it. She said that she much preferred to go to school in Idaho because it “was more like Alaska.”
Idaho could never be mistaken as the poster state for a multicultural population mix. The state is mostly white, rural, hard-line conservative, and in some places has been a fertile nesting ground for an assorted array of kooky, far-out racist, paramilitary groups.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, Palin took some heat for telling a meeting of Alaska’s black leaders in April 2008 that she didn’t have to hire any blacks. The black leaders had complained to Palin about the invisibility of blacks and minorities on her staff and in state governmental departments. Even more damning, she purportedly told the black leaders that she did not intend to hire any blacks. Palin’s campaign manager and a staff representative hotly denied to this writer that Palin had made the comment. However, they quickly declared that Palin was absolutely color-blind in hiring and did not have to push any special programs to boost minority hiring. But there was a glaring paucity of blacks, Asians, Hispanics on her staff and relatively few in top state jobs. Also during the campaign, Palin was mute on the series of racist emails that some state employees sent out on state of Alaska email accounts.
Palin has lambasted Obama on the campaign trail as “palling around with terrorists,” and “This is not a man who sees America as you see America and as I see America.” This was another page from the GOP’s old reliable playbook of racially tinged code words, phrases, and digs.
This didn’t type Palin as a racial bigot. It did type her as the latest in the line of GOP politicians who have realized they can score big with a subtle play of the race card. During the past decade, a parade of Republican state and local officials, conservative talk show jocks and even some Republican bigwigs have made racist cracks. Their response, when called on the carpet, has always been the same. They make a duck-and dodge denial, claim that they were misquoted, or issue a weak, halfhearted apology. And each time the response from top Republicans is either silence, or, if the firestorm is great enough, to give the offender a much-delayed, mild verbal hand-slap.
Palin need not be troubled with apologies, or having to worry about reprimands from GOP leaders. They are scared stiff of her and the millions that she appeals to. This has been well evident in the blatantly racist signs, posters, and slogans and confederate flags and the separatist Texas lone star flags waved about at the Tea Party and taxpayer protest marches.
Palin gave another wink and nod to the bigots by almost single-handedly reviving the withered-on-the-vine, unabashedly racist tinged, birther campaign. She accomplished that neat trick with her remark to a conservative radio talk show host that it was “fair game” to question the validity of Obama’s birth certificate. Palin again fanned the latent bigotry among her fans with her Going Rogue book tour. She flatly said that she’d avoid the big city liberal media hot beds and tour in mostly small and mid-sized towns in the Heartland states. This was a not so subtle code guarantee that her audience would be overwhelmingly white, working class, and conservative. It was.”
http://newamericamedia.org/2010/09/sarah-palin-plays-race-card-without-mentioning-race.php
What strikes me is these folks who seem to care so much about pursuing their claims seem to always need their rubes, er-“followers” to foot the bill.
So, are we to believe that Meroni can’t even find a way to come up with $800 on her own? Does she really manage her own finances that poorly that she couldn’t even get a quick loan of such a fairly minimal amount? What if her car broke down and she had to deal with $800 of repairs…are you telling me she couldn’t find a way to pay for that? She seems to be capable of finding the cash to travel out to see Manning & other gatherings of the nut cases…yet she needs her followers to foot these legal causes she holds so dear… *sheesh*