Posted on 10/24/2009 10:23:45 PM PDT by Steelfish
Rush Was Punked: “Obama Thesis” Hoax
by Claudine Zap
It must have seemed so perfect. An obscure blogger unearths some pages of President Obama's college thesis. The report supposedly comes from big-time journalist Joe Klein of Time magazine. And the thesis has some real gems: like Obama's disdain for the Constitution.
The whole thing was nothing more than a satirical post on a humor blog. But Rush Limbaugh, who quoted from the supposed thesis on his radio show, sure wasn't laughing. Here's how it went down.
An unknown blogger picked up on a made-up post meant as a joke, which claimed that Joe Klein had gotten his hands on 10 pages of student Obama's college thesis. Rush Limbaugh jumped on it, which immediately sparked Web searches on "obama thesis."
Supposedly titled "Aristocracy Revisited," the excerpt revealed the president had "doubts" about the "so-called founders." Juicy. Except not true. Limbaugh discovered halfway through his show that he'd been had, but defended himself by saying basically the thesis felt true. Listen in to Rush's mea sorta culpa.
Joe Klein finally jumped in, and called the report "nonsense" on his Swampland blog, and the blogger who thought the hoax was real also apologized.
(Excerpt) Read more at buzz.yahoo.com ...
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Ain’t the way I heard it>
Yes, he was punked; but notice she doesn’t ask the appropriate question - why doesn’t America have access to the President’s thesis or any of his other records?
Isn’t the college records of a President usually released after the few months of office? The fact that Obama has not released his is VERY revealing. If he is such a genius as some have claimed, how come he hasn’t released his school records from Columbia or his thesis..I bet there are a lot of interesting goodies in there
Rush said from the start the story was unconfirmed. He played a tape of Obama saying the Supreme Court has not dealt with wealth redistribution. Not too much of a leap to believe he thinks the Constitution doesn’t share the wealth either. Rush did a nice riff on Rather’s “fake but accurate” stand on W’s national guard experience.
Rush found about the hoax before his show was over. FReepers were right on to the fact it was fake, I recall the mods pulled it quickly and Kristinn posted a thread about it being fake very quickly. So, frankly, no one was punked except the blog who started it thinking they could get away with it.
This is a good lesson, Jumping In Pools is a FRAUD blog who plants hoaxes (isn’t the first time). Don’t give them traffic and for God’s sake, don’t post from them.
There is no Obama thesis; affirmative action students don’t have to write one to graduate.
Rush didn’t say it was real, he even said it might not be. He said it did “fit” with what knew of Obama though. Oh and before the show was over, beginning of the third hour I think, he said it was satire. This article is written to give a totally different impression.
There is a temptation in these tough times to run with stories before they are verified. Woe betide us if we become as bad as the left with “fake but accurate”.
The facts are on our side. We need to make sure we HAVE those facts.
Huh...wonder why she didn’t link to the big story she wrote about Rush being smeared by, um, fake quotes? She did write one, right? Right?
Yeah, I heard this show. Rush was pretty quick to say that the “source” for the Klein stuff could not be verified. And indeed, the passages Rush quoted “felt” true, as Rush compared the quotes to genuine audio recordings of Ubama saying the exact same things.
This author is going to pains to paint Rush as embarrassed, or “punked”, but that’s a real stretch.
I strongly suspect that the author “Claudia Zap”, is a socialist Democrat scumbag.
Of course, I could be mistaken...
I remember that... In fact, I believe the thread title referred to the thesis as being from when Ubama was at Columbia. The first thing I thought was, "There's no evidence that the lying scumbag Ubama actually attended Columbia, and nobody from his alleged time at that college has any recollection of him. So how could he have done a thesis at a college he never attended?"
You knew something was fishy just from the thread title.
There was a point to the hoax: have Rush read it, say it as truth, and then slap him down, just like he did those who repeated the lies about the alleged racist quotes. They tried to trap him and make him look just like those he is likely suing.
As I recall, Ozero has a well paid team of attorneys to keep all his school writings secret. If you can figure out how to get the facts from his past, let us know. Every traitorous judge has let him off the hook.
1 Certified copy of original birth certificate
2 Columbia University transcripts
3 Columbia thesis paper
4 Campaign donor analysis requested by 7 major watchdog groups
5 Harvard University transcripts
6 Illinois State Senate records
7 Illinois State Senate schedule
8 Law practice client list and billing records/summary
9 Locations and names of all half-siblings and step-mother
10 Medical records (only the one page summary released so far)
11 Occidental College Transcripts
12 Parent’s marriage Certificate
13 Record of baptism
14 Selective Service registration records
15 Schedules for trips outside of the United States before 2007
16 Passport records for all passports
17 Scholarly articles
18 SAT and LSAT test scores
19 Access to his grandmother in Kenya
20 List of all campaign workers that are lobbyists
21 Punahou grade school records
22 Noelani Kindergarten records are oddly missing from the the State of Hawaii Department of Education.
23 Page 11 of Stanley Ann Dunham's divorce decree.
Anyone who cares about their country would be very concerned that a POTUS had hidden every scrap of information of his life that he possibly could.
Bill Ayers wrote it for him.
Here is AP/Yahoo’s author, Christine Zap’s Facebook page:
http://www.facebook.com/claudine.zap
This is from her blog page:
About Me
Name: Claudine Zap
Welcome to DameNation. I take a critical look at the media’s take on women’s issues, and pick them apart, from feminism to bag fetishes. From pregnancy to prom. From abortion to opting out. From single-sex education to being single. From deadly serious to seriously inane.
A far left radical feminist from Smith College living in San Francisco.
Is anyone surprise that AP would allow a Liberal nutcase to write a newsstory for Yahoo! news?
If thats the best they can do... ha!
No he wasn't. He pulled off another brilliant "gotcha" as I was waiting for him to do.
Get with the program.
Until the actual thesis is presented... how would you know it’s a fake?
He didn’t sound like he was pulling a ‘gotcha’ even when he admitted it was a hoax. I think he thought there might be a possibility that this thing was real.
I heard Rush read this. Now I will readily admit that I was multitasking at the time and was not listening as though I would be taking a test.
What I do not get in this so call claim that Rush was Punked is that Rush reads from all manner of MSM internet writings always pointing to the multitude of holes or biases by MSM. I was not hearing Rush present the veracity of this piece but that it read as similarity to the known voice and words spoken already by BamaKennedy.
Personally until it is produced, it is anyone guess BamaKennedy actually wrote a 'thesis'.
Doesn't Kline has a history of writing things for a bit of 'capital' anonymously, say like that book he wrote titled 'Primary Colors' as an insider of the Clintons campaign?
Right now I view anything written by these twisted leftist as trial balloons to gage reaction on producing a sequel.
-PJ
the document was fake, but the story is still true.
This was not a very bright idea. All it did was call attention to the fact that no one has ever seen Obama’s thesis.
This is a throw mud against the wall job with an agenda to discredit the source. Rush played that clip you link to which has been around for a while. As well as several other hosts. I think Ingraham,Hannity,Hewitt, Charlie Sykes local Milwaukee WTMJ, even Savage played that clip so its out there. The problem is when you throw mud on the wall some sticks.
http://www.theusmat.com/
Well ok he didnt say it in his thesis ,he just says it as a Senate Candidate in Radio interviews and as A President
Then he came back later and said it wasnt true, but in his humorous jab at Dan Rather’s style journalists, said he was sticking to the story because he knew it was probably true.
10 times more brilliant than any of these schooled journalists, who dont listen for voice inflexion or context, and believe everything as if they were reading it off of a transcript, which is probably what happened.
Hard to see how this could happen.
Anyone can look at Obama’s college records and see the real thing.
/s
“He didn’t sound like he was pulling a ‘gotcha’ even when he admitted it was a hoax. I think he thought there might be a possibility that this thing was real.” ~ Blogger
Well, I am copying and pasting the whole commentary on the subject (from the 1st and 3rd hour) so that you can see how brilliantly he brought this off on Friday.
A masterpiece of “gotcha”. Rush was not punked - THEY were punked BY Rush. bttt
I’ve provided the link of you want to see what he played showing B.O. IN HIS OWN WORDS proving that the “fake quotes” from the satire piece, do reflect “what he really thinks” as opposed to the fake quotes supposedly made by Rush for which they could provide no “real” quotes that would prove their claim that, “well, we know this is the way he really thinks, anyhow”.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html
Obama’s Disdain for Constitution: We Know He Thinks It, Don’t We?
October 23, 2009
BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Michael Ledeen has posted something today that dovetails with this. This has surfaced just today. “Obama and the Constitution: He Has His Doubts.”
Michael Ledeen: “I missed this first time around. Brian Lancaster at Jumping in Pools reported on Obama’s college thesis, written when he was at Columbia. The paper was called ‘Aristocracy Reborn,’ and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein — who wrote about it for Time — was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote: ‘[T]he Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned.
“’While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.’” I don’t care that it’s just now surfacing, but they kept it suppressed until now, but here it is showing up. So “the so-called Founders...” and how many times have you people sent me e-mails, “Rush, be very careful when you start saying the president of the United States looks at the Constitution as an obstacle”? He doesn’t like the Constitution! I’ve said it over and over again, and now here are his own words. “[T]he Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders...”
This is his thesis, his college thesis at Columbia: “The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document...” Supposedly? Political freedom supposedly a cornerstone... “the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned.” Now, Ledeen says, “That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate. I wonder if the prof — and I’d like to know who the prof was — made an appropriate marginal comment, something about historical context, about the Constitution’s revolutionary status in the history of freedom, and about the separation of powers in order to make the creation of any ‘shackles’ as difficult as possible.” The Constitution is the most liberty-promoting and freedom-acknowledging document in the history of the world, and this little boy in college is writing about it with utter disdain, and he still shares those feelings.
Ledeen writes: “Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write. Maybe he’d like to parse ‘the so-called Founders,’ for example. I’d like to know what he thinks of those words today. And what about the rest of the thesis?” This is Michael Ledeen. What’s the name of Ledeen’s book? Find it. Go on Amazon and find it real quick. I want to plug it because it’s a great book. It’s about what’s going on in Iran and US foreign policy. Now, we have audio of Barack Obama saying much the same thing only about the Supreme Court, not the Constitution. This is from 2001, eight years ago, long after his college thesis, on an FM radio station in Chicago. He was asked this question: “We’re joined by Barack Obama, Illinois state senator from the 13th District, senior lecturer in the law school at the University of Chicago.” This is what Obama said.
OBAMA 2001: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that, uh, I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and — and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
RUSH: So the court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth. So his college thesis: In the Constitution, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. So here is who we have as our president of the United States: an anti-constitutionalist, main who finds it an obstacle and is finding ways around it on purpose, unconstitutionally. Much of what he’s doing is unconstitutional, and I’m waiting for the lawsuits to be filed by some of these people at some point. Anyway, how is that hope and change working out for ya, folks?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, Barack Obama is seriously dangerous. To say that distribution of wealth is economic freedom is intellectually insane. They are mutually exclusive. Economic freedom means you don’t have somebody take your money and give it to somebody else. Distribution of wealth? We’ve already done it. How many trillions have we transferred from workers to nonworkers in the war on poverty, in the Great Society, and all of LBJ’s programs? We are redistributing wealth like crazy. How many Americans don’t pay income taxes? It’s approaching 47%. Where has this guy been? We’re already redistributing wealth whether the Constitution addresses it or not. I don’t know if he’s read the Federalist Papers, because the Founders talked about this all over the place.
Here is Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Joseph Milligan, April 6th, 1816: “To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association — the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” So, Mr. President, our Founders were brilliant. They didn’t put redistribution of wealth in there ‘cause they didn’t believe in it! That’s why they are “so-called Founders” to him.
Here is Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, March 4th, 1801: “A wise and frugal government which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.” Thomas Jefferson, “so-called Founder.” Thomas Jefferson: “Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated.” So-called Founder. John Adams, A Defense of the Constitutions of Governments of the United States of America, 1787: “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” We’re there, folks.
“If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ were not commandments of Heaven, they must be made inviolable precepts in every society before it can be civilized or made free.” (interruption) I have to translate this? What I just read about John Adams is not crystal clear? All right. “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the law of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.” The moment what is yours can be taken by someone else, when your stuff is not your stuff anymore, when your stuff becomes somebody else’s stuff, anarchy and tyranny commence. When your property is no longer your property, tyranny and anarchy commence. In other words, it’s over.
“If ‘Thou shalt not covet’ and ‘Thou shalt not steal’ —” those are two of the Ten Commandments, and do I need to translate that? Thou shalt not covet, that means you shall not also want Monica Lewinsky because she is Bill Clinton’s. Thou shalt not steal, meaning Barack Obama shall not be able to get away with what he is doing, and that is stealing people’s worth, their work, and their industry, or their money. If those two commandments were not commandments of Heaven — i.e, God-d — they must be made inviolable precepts in every society, meaning they must be part of any society’s culture and morality before that society can be civilized or made free. Founder, so-called founder John Adams. Barack Obama said these guys didn’t talk about wealth distribution. They most certainly did. He just doesn’t know, wasn’t taught, or knows about it and is lying about it. How is that hope and change working for you?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: By the way, Michael Ledeen’s book is Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West. It is a superb read on what is actually going on and what we actually face in the Middle East, particularly with Iran. We’ll put it up at RushLimbaugh.com so you can link to it, too. Accomplice to Evil: Iran and the War Against the West.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So Joe Klein at TIME Magazine has known for a long time about Obama’s college thesis when he was at Columbia. Why didn’t this come out a year ago at this time? Why didn’t this come out before the election in November? If you’re just joining us, here is what Barack Obama wrote in his college thesis at Columbia University: “… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.”
Economic freedom and distribution of wealth are mutually exclusive. You cannot have economic freedom and the redistribution of your wealth! You can’t have economic freedom if somebody like Obama can come grab your stuff and give it to somebody else. When that happens then you have the beginnings of anarchy and tyranny. The Founding Fathers — and I’m not going to go through the quotes again — the Founding Fathers discussed the whole concept of distribution of wealth. They wrote letters to each other about it. The “so-called Founders,” I’m sorry, the “so-called Founders.” They knew all about it, they knew that it was incompatible with the Constitution of the United States that they wrote. Now, this is relevant in another way, ladies and gentlemen. In the Virginia governor’s race, Republican candidate Robert McDonnell wrote a graduate thesis 20 years ago that could be politically damaging to his campaign. This has been in the Washington Post.
That decades-old thesis has been covered by the Washington Post on August 30th and again on September 1st. It has been reported on in some depth across the spectrum of media outlets, from NPR, to US News, to the Christian Science Monitor to Fox and on and on. Now, maybe a decades-old claim that the US Constitution didn’t give early Americans liberty but fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy doesn’t deserve some questions like, “What do you mean by that, and when and how did your thoughts change, if they have?” So the Washington Post is trying to drum McDonnell out of governor’s race in Virginia by talking about his college thesis, but where the hell is any exposure to Obama’s? And the appropriate question, “Do you still believe it Barack? The “so-called Founders”?
We know he believes it because he said it again about the Supreme Court in 2001.
[Watch him SAY IT WITH HIS OWN MOUTH] - VIDEO:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html
[NOTE: The liars who peddled the fake Rush quotes could not come up with any real quotes of Rush saying anything of the kind, so their accusation that “even though he didn’t make those statements, we know that is what he believes.”]
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: In the first hour of this program, I cited a statement that Michael Ledeen found on the blog Jumping in Pools reporting on Obama’s college thesis written when he was at Columbia. The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages Obama wrote the following: “[T]he Constitution allows for many things but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believe the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.” Now, I got a note from a researcher who has been scouring the Internet, and the note says this:
“Rush Limbaugh: Mini-warning on these quotes.” Because the paper that Obama wrote, “Aristocracy Reborn,” the first ten pages were all that reporter Joe Klein was permitted to see; and it says here that Klein did write about it for TIME Magazine. A researcher has been scouring the Internet and can’t find any sources for the quote. “The blog that Ledeen cites doesn’t have supporting info,” supposedly. The source post that was from August, says it’s going to be in an upcoming report from Joe Klein, but the researcher can’t find anything that has come out since, and nothing in Klein’s blog. There have been no matches found on the Internet for any of the info or quotes other than the source posting. So I now say that the blog from which this came has no sourcing data other than Joe Klein upcoming report and Joe Klein hasn’t written his upcoming report.
So we have to hold out the possibility that this is not accurate. However, I have had this happen to me recently. I have had quotes attributed to me that were made up, and when it was pointed out to the media that the quotes were made up, they said, “It doesn’t matter! We know Limbaugh thinks it anyway.” Sort of like Dan Rather said, “I don’t care if these documents are forged. I know that Bush did what he did at the National Guard. I don’t care if the documents are forged.” I don’t care if the Limbaugh quotes are made up. So, I can say, “I don’t care if these quotes are made up. I know Obama thinks it. You know why I know Obama thinks it? Because I’ve heard him say it.” Not about the Constitution, but about the Supreme Court. Again, 2001, FM radio station interview in Chicago when he was a state senator in Illinois.
OBAMA 2001: If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to vest formal rights in previously dispossessed peoples so that, uh, I would now have the right to vote, I would now be able to sit at a lunch counter and — and order and as long as I could pay for it I’d be okay. But the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society.
RUSH: Now, he’s talking about the Warren Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.” So we’ve got a supposed piece from his college thesis at Columbia where he complains that the Constitution didn’t talk about the distribution of wealth. So we know that it’s on his mind. So even if he didn’t say it, I know he thinks it. That’s how it works now in the media. And I do know he thinks it because I just heard what I heard, and so did you. Let’s see.
[Watch him SAY IT WITH HIS OWN MOUTH] - VIDEO:http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html
[NOTE: The liars who peddled the fake Rush quotes could not come up with any real quotes of Rush saying anything of the kind, so their accusation that “even though he didn’t make those statements, we know that is what he believes.”]
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m also told that the blog containing the passage on Obama’s thesis is a satire blog. So it’s one of these sites like ScrappleFace or The Onion or some such thing. So I shout from the mountaintops: “It was satire!” But we know he thinks it. Good comedy, to be comedy, must contain an element of truth, and we know how he feels about distribution of wealth. He’s mad at the courts for not going far enough on it. So we stand by the fabricated quote because we know Obama thinks it anyway. That’s how it works in the media today.
END TRANSCRIPT
Read the Background Material...
• PajamasMedia: Obama and the Constitution; He Has His Doubts - Michael Ledeen
• American Thinker: Obama’s Columbia Thesis Excerpt Surfaces
Got to tell you that is pretty much as I recall it being said and entering my hearing.
Thank you for setting the record straight.
[Rush did a nice riff on Rather’s “fake but accurate” stand on W’s national guard experience.]
Good, I have to depend upon youall for what Rush says!
Columbia says he didn't write a thesis. It wasn't a requirement at Columbia, like it is at Princeton, and they say that the option didn't exist at that time.
You're free to doubt that, but Obama didn't graduate with honors, which might lead you to think that he didn't write a thesis.
This started when Michael Baron, who claimed to be a teacher of Obama's at Columbia, started talking about a course paper Obama wrote for him as a "thesis," but the consensus is that he was wrong and that there is no thesis in Columbia's files waiting to be unearthed.
You’re welcome! bttt
Yes exactly, great point! I agree totally. These “so called” journalists are completely clueless and it doesn’t take much to show them up with their lack of education, lack of information and liberal bias.
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