Are We At the Bottom of the Barrel Yet?

WorldNetDaily strikes yet again:

Church Dunham WND

Obviously, this is meant to imply that something fishy is going on, and it should be seen in the context of the attacks on Obama’s late mother which WND editor Joseph Farah is now focusing his energies on – recently, Farah put forward the idea that Dunham was in fact Obama’s sister, and that she only pretended to be his mother to disguise an adulterous union by Obama’s grandmother. This comes on the tail of various irrelevant insinuations  from Jerome Corsi: that Obama’s parents did not live at their supposed address in Hawaii (unless they lived in a “small cottage behind the house”, he anti-climactically concedes) or that Dunham was enrolled at university at a suspiciously short time after giving birth. It’s easy to see why Farah and Corsi do this – as well as generally promoting the idea that Obama’s family background means that he is somehow uniquely mysterious and questionable, Farah knows that the last thread of hope for the “birther” movement is that Dunham somehow managed to have a false place of birth recorded on Obama’s birth certificate. There’s no evidence that she did this, or even any credible speculation as to how this could have been achieved in theory, but  if Obama’s mother’s character can be blackened it might bring out a few more screaming gun-toting nutjobs at town hall meetings.

In fact, as expected, the headline refers to a posthumous “baptism” performed in Dunham’s name by the Mormon Church, which has a well-known and controversial history of “baptising” dead people without the consent or knowledge of living relatives. Following complaints (especially from Jewish groups), the practice now undertaken more cautiously, and the Church is “investigating” Dunham’s baptism because it may have breached its own guidelines. The original Politico story makes this clear with the headline “Mormon Church investigates baptism of Obama’s mother”.

Various stories on WND that involve Mormonism all identify the Mormon Church as such specifically – so why did Farah scrub the word “Mormon” from his link on WND? The answer is obvious – Farah, a man devoid of shame, decency, or even dignity, has seen a chance to misled a few of his readers into thinking that someone is generating bogus documentation about Dunham’s life. It would therefore follow that documents about Obama might also be bogus, and that there must be some dark secret behind it all; Farah’s redacted headline further hints at an attempt to create a false religious affiliation, making a subtle play for the “Obama is a Muslim” conspiracy theory.

3 Responses

  1. […] of all, Bartholomew’s Notes on Religion asks “Are We At the Bottom of the Barrel Yet?” in regards to Joseph Farah and his latest libelous escapade at World Net […]

  2. […] last November’s anti-Islam “Preserving Freedom Conference” in Nashville), birther conspiracy-mongering, and for running adverts about “one weird spice” that cures […]

  3. So, I just came back across this post and can’t help but think … wow … We thought we were near the bottom of the barrel in 2009.

    How quaint.

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