Rush Limbaugh has become the global center for spreading lies and smears about Barack Obama, but yesterday (September 16) he sunk to a new low, declaring that Obama did not write his own books. According to Limbaugh today, "Obama has two autobiographies which I refuse to believe he wrote." He of course has absolutely no evidence to support this crazy idea.
Limbaugh went on a long diatribe exposing the shocking, shocking possibility that Obama as a small child may not have witnessed the Apollo mission pilots in person as he remembered. But finally, Limbaugh got back to his original lunacy, claiming that Obama "hasn't lived a life long enough to write two chapters," let alone two books. Since the books are all about his life, which numerous press accounts confirm that Obama lived, the notion that "he hasn't lived a life long enough" to write two books is insane. Yet Limbaugh claims that the books were "written to hide and disguise who Obama is." As anyone who has read Dreams From My Father knows, it's not the sort of book someone would write to "hide" their past. In fact, Obama has gotten more media scrutiny about his past than any other politician in American history, precisely because he wrote about it in so much detail. But Limbaugh thinks that randomly throwing out smears against Obama, even when they can't possibly be true and don't make any sense, is acceptable to try to win an election for his side.
That's not the only lie Limbaugh is telling. On September 13, Limbaugh declared about Obama, "He organized to keep the ROTC out of school." There's not the slightest evidence to support this. There's not even one of those fake email rumors about Obama. I've never even heard that ROTC at Columbia University was even an issue when Obama was there, let alone that Obama had any role in it.
And earlier yesterday, Limbaugh referred to "Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the mentors of Barack Obama." This is just silly. Even the worst of the "guilt by association" critics of Obama don't imagine that Ayers and Dohrn were his "mentors."
It's tempting to dismiss the lies of the far right because they're so crazy. But we need to document and refute all of these lies, which is what I'm working on right now. Please email me via ObamaPolitics or post a comment about lies and smears against Obama which you've received or read or heard on talk radio.