Last week, while trolling around the intertubes for content for this venerable blog, I came across this article when I noticed it popping up in a few of the darker right-wing corners:
Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is extremely frustrated with orders that the White House is contemplating. According to sources at the Pentagon, including all branches of the armed forces, the Obama Administration may break with a centuries-old tradition.
A spokesman for General James Cartwright, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, states that the Obama Administration wants to have soldiers and officers pledge a loyalty oath directly to the office of the President, and no longer to the Constitution.
While I dismissed it as an obvious hoax, those dedicated journalists at WorldNetDaily decided to contact the Joint Chiefs for comment, only to be told that “there was no substance because the issue wasn't under discussion and hadn't been under discussion.”
And then, just for good measure, WND reported on some of the lunatics who were actually taken in by this obviously fraudulent story and who offered rather convoluted attempts to justify their own paranoia:
One of those who acknowledged the report was Orly Taitz, the California lawyer whose cases at various levels of the court system are challenging Obama's qualifications for the Oval Office under the Constitution's requirement that the president be a "natural born" citizen.
She later explained why the report didn't seem far-fetched.
"Why do we believe everything bad, illegal and unconstitutional when it comes to Obama?" she wrote in a followup.
"Will Obama really change the military oath? Will there be changes to the Constitution? We don't really know. The main reason is that Obama has zero credibility. When a man spends [a] reported $800,000 on attorneys to keep [his] original birth certificate sealed, you know that this birth certificate shows him as ineligible for presidency, otherwise he would've shown it to us," she wrote.
"I hope each and every member of the military or any other citizen for that matter should write to him and demand written assurance that he will not be making any changes to the Constitution and demand to see all of his records under FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) in order to find out what is his legal name and what is his citizenship. Until BO steps up to the plate, the citizens will believe anything and everything about him, and rightfully so," she said.
Columbia Christians for Life, an organization that also had alerted its constituency about the report, apologized for what appeared to be "satire."
"On the other hand, I wonder if it may have been fabricated and the story floated on the Internet to see what kind of a response there would be (e.g., in the blogosphere) if such a thing were to be attempted," an organization spokesman said.
"It still makes me wonder … if someone did not learn of this issue actually being discussed by the WH and Pentagon and then building (fabricating) a believable news report around it?" the organization said. "If you are a Christian, pray such a thing never does come to pass in America, as it did in Hitler's Third Reich."
So these folks aren’t just gullible and paranoid – it’s that Obama really is engaged in a massive cover-up to conceal the fact that he’s ineligible to be President and is sending out fake news reports about something he intends to do in order to gauge the response and throw everybody off the trail.
How do you argue with that sort of logic?
