Posted on 08/02/2015 11:53:07 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
Seven long years into the presidency of Barack Obama, The Washington Post continues its obsessive quest to suggest that Obama may be lying when he professes to be a Christian.
The latest fringe assertion from the Post about Obama’s religion emanated this weekend from national political correspondent James Hohmann. A previous instance occurred in February.
Both recent times when the Post raised questions about Obama’s private religious beliefs, the newspaper also focused on Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker. The reasons that the Post has used reporting about Walker to channel its bizarre questions about Obama’s Christianity remain unclear.
At a Republican donor meeting in California on Saturday, the Post notes, Walker claimed (for a second time) that doesn’t particularly care about and can’t possibly know Obama’s inner-religious beliefs.
“As someone who is a believer myself, I don’t presume to know someone’s beliefs about whether they follow Christ or not unless I’ve actually talked with them,” Walker said.
“He’s said he is, and I take him at his word,” the Wisconsin governor added.
In his story about Walker’s Saturday statement, the Post’s Hohmann refused to state flatly and factually that Obama adheres to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
“Obama has repeatedly professed his Christian faith and attended Christian church services,” the Post correspondent carefully writes. (Emphasis added.)
The Post’s question about Obama’s real religion in late February came from two reporters, Robert Costa and Dan Balz, who spent valuable interview time asking Walker whether he believes Obama is a Christian. Walker’s response of “I don’t know” served as the paper’s hard-hitting headline fodder.
The Post’s tenacious, ongoing strategy to question — publicly and skeptically — the legitimacy of Obama’s Christian beliefs appears to suggest deep doubt on the part of Post reporters.
“It seems that the mainstream media is very confused about whether or not Barack Obama is a Christian, to the point they’re even asking presidential candidates whether or not they think he is,” one Republican operative told The Daily Caller.
Also, The Washington Post’s obsession with the validity of the president’s religious beliefs has been ongoing since well before Obama took office.
As early as the summer of 2008, the Post’s “Fact Checker” was furiously investigating Obama’s possible non-Christian or Muslim origins.
“Obama was ‘enrolled as a Muslim’ in a Catholic school in Indonesia in 1967,” the Post dutifully reported. “He was six years old at the time.”
The same school also listed Obama “as an Indonesian,” the Post “Fact Checker” felt compelled to observe.
What’s more, the Post claimed, Obama showed “little interest in organized religion” until suddenly seized by the Gospel in the 1980s. The Post hinted that Obama’s Christianity was politically convenient, putting “found Christ” in quotes.
Walker has been frustrated by the Post’s peculiar line of questioning about the president.
“To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press,” the 2016 Republican contender said in February. “The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about.”
The Post’s persistent efforts to discredit Obama by questioning his religion and background put the once-prestigious newspaper in league with WorldNetDaily, a conspiracy-minded website which has reported that Obama is really “Barry Soetoro” because that name belonged to the future president when he lived as a child in Indonesia.
As noted by Politico, an obscure Illinois political candidate named Andy Martin became the earliest person to proffer the slur that Obama is a Muslim or is otherwise insincere in his Christian beliefs — way back in 2004.
Also, the various conspiracy theories leveled against Obama first took off thanks to efforts in 2008 by bitter-ended supporters of Hillary Clinton who called themselves PUMAs (Party Unity My Ass). This largely female group of dedicated Clinton supporters was largely responsible for propagating the notion that Obama was not born as a U.S. citizen, The Daily Beast has explained.
For various reasons, though, he may PRETEND at times that he has.
________________________________________
From AsiaTimesOnline
Feb 26, 2008
"Barack Obama received at least some instruction in the Islamic faith of his father and went with him to the mosque, but the importance of this experience is vastly overstated by conservative commentators who seek to portray Obama as a Muslim of sorts. Radical anti-Americanism, rather than Islam, was the reigning faith in the Dunham household. ...
Barack Obama is a clever fellow who imbibed hatred of America with his mother's milk, but worked his way up the elite ladder of education and career. He shares the resentment of Muslims against the encroachment of American culture, although not their religion. He has the empathetic skill set of an anthropologist who lives with his subjects, learns their language, and elicits their hopes and fears while remaining at emotional distance. That is, he is the political equivalent of a sociopath. The difference is that he is practicing not on a primitive tribe but on the population of the United States.
There is nothing mysterious about Obama's methods. "A demagogue tries to sound as stupid as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is," wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are the world's biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama speak, Sinclair Lewis' cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone Power's portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noire Nightmare Alley. The latter is available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt uplifted by an Obama speech. ..."
Article: Obama's women reveal his secret
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JB26Aa01.html
bkmk
It’s the emperor has no clothes proposition. Everybody knows what the real answer is but deniers keep asking the same old question as if doing so will change reality.
You are what you do.
Haven’t they attended church maybe 4 times since in the WH? And once was to hear a muslim speaker.
The reasons are not unclear.
It’s a “ gotcha” question and we must find a GOP candidate who is smart enough to refuse to be “ got”. so far Trump is the only man smart and brave enough to call out the press for its tactics and to refuse to answer irrelevant questions.
The standard across the board answe is “what relevance does this question have to my campaign ...... or to America? Obama has served for 7 years and is gone January 2017. We are here to talk about where we go from there. NEXT question...”
I've heard something similar...
They aren’t asking this to challenge Obama. They are asking this to trip up Walker worth his base who a lot believe Obama is a Muslim.
All this is water under the bridge, it is history, it is a distraction to keep Republicans attacking Obama the victim, and this is why selected reporters continue to raise this question.
The guy has no balls.
There is no reason to doubt “I”bama’s word.
I mean its not like he is a pathological liar or anything.
Well he wasn't baptized back then, so they probably went with the religion of the father.
Tangential question I've never heard anyone ask...apparently he was baptized at Jeremiah Wright's church. What is the form of baptism they use there, and is it Trinitarian and valid?
The correct answer for this particular ‘gotcha’ question is, “That’s between him and the Lord. Why ask me?”
???
???
Yeah valid. Not sure what they do at your church, but most churches judge a baptism invalid unless the correct form is used.
Meaning basically, it didn’t work. The person has not become a member of the Church.
So their obsession is not with Obama’s religion but their need to prove that Republicans are obsessed with it.
??
2007
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