The Michelle Obama tape

If the tape exists and comes to light, it's not going to matter. His supporters lack the mental clarity to accept logic and reason. The are, quite frankly, so enamored by the mantra of "change and hope" that the vast majority of them didn't even exhibit the mental capacity to realize that they were holding their signs upside down during his latest speech.

Found a link Bob Beckel On Fox & Friends: 'Bombshell Heading Michelle Obama's Way' (Updated)..  with this explanation:The Michelle Obama Rant Tape was filmed between June 26th - July 1st 2004 in Chicago, IL at the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition Conference at Trinity United Church: specifically the Women's Event.

Michelle Obama appeared as a panelist alongside Mrs. Khadijah Farrakhan and Mrs. James Meeks.

Bill Clinton spoke during the Conference, as did Bill Cosby and other speakers, but not at the panel Michelle attended.

Michelle Obama spoke at the Women's Event, but referenced Bill Clinton in her rant --- his presence at the conference was the impetus for her raving, it seems.

For about 30 minutes, Michelle Obama launched into a rant about the evils of America, and how America is to blame for the problems of Africa. Michelle personally blamed President Clinton for the deaths of millions of Africans and said America is responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis and other ethnic groups. She then launched into an attack on "whitey", and talked about solutions to black on black crime in the realm of diverting those actions onto white America. Her rant was fueled by the crowd: they reacted strongly to what she said, so she got more passionate and enraged, and that's when she completely loses it and says things that have made the mouths drop of everyone who's seen this.

The "tape" is a DVD that Trinity United sold on its website, and possibly offered free for download up until March 2008 when Trinity's site was scrubbed and the DVDs were no longer offered for sale.

This outburst happened just one month before the 2004 Democratic Convention, when Barack Obama delivered the keynote address.

It never ceases to amaze me how often the disinformation theory works, whether intentionally or by accident. Other examples:

• In 1999, Al Gore risibly claimed to have "[taken] the initiative in creating the Internet."  Rather than being appropriately derided for what he had actually said, he was widely misquoted as having claimed to have "invented" it, and voilà.  The real quote went down the memory hole, and now the whole story was just another urban legend.
• In 2002, the British Government learned that Saddam Hussein had recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, and advised the U.S. government accordingly.  Some schmuck forged documents purporting to show that Iraq had actually purchased significant quantities of uranium in Niger.  The forgeries were obvious and played no role in the Brits' determination, but to this day, everyone to the left of John McCain "knows" that BushLied^TM when he said in the 2002 SOTU address that "the British Government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
• In 2008, Barack Obama turned Memorial Day into just another political stump speech.  In so doing, he betrayed complete ignorance as to what the day was all about, by delivering a perfunctory line about fallen heroes followed by a statement that many of them were there in the audience.  Everyone chortled about Obama seeing dead people and/or expecting dead voters from his home town, but in the end, everyone knew that he didn't really mean either.  So we all missed the point that he had missed the point of Memorial Day itself, which was not honor the fallen, not the ones he hoped might vote for him in November.
• Mere days later, Obama displayed some undetermined combination of (a) an appalling ignorance of history and geography and (2) self-serving chutzpah by having his non-uncle help to liberate the best known mass extermination camp in Poland rather than a relatively obscure slave labor camp in central Germany.  Right wing bloggers pounced on the fact that he doesn't have an uncle on that side of the family, and speculated that his great uncle hadn't really served in the Army, either.  It turned out that some guy related to Obama had indeed helped to liberate something, and again, that was enough to make the whole incident go away.

This doesn't sway me one way or the other.  I mean, in the 1990s, Tom Clancy ended a book with a scenario eerily close to the 9-11 attacks on the Pentagon.  Does that mean we should have discounted the early reports on 9-11 with the Pentagon?  (I know there's important differences, but you catch my drift).  Heck, just the fact that he wrote a book about an African American Senator with a nutty pastor is a heckuva coincidence.

This is exactly what the Cylons did for Baltar early in the new Battlestar Galactica series.  They created some falsified photo's of him accessing the planetary defenses to turn them off, letting the planet be destroyed by the Cylons.   He actually did do it.. but once the falsification was proven... future inquires were cut off in the same way.  Then he was able to eventually go on to become vice president and then president...

Not really a relevant comment either way on the subject at hand.. but thought it was amusing.