{"id":74,"date":"2008-10-23T08:14:45","date_gmt":"2008-10-23T08:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/cityofbrass\/2008\/10\/have-they-no-decency.html"},"modified":"2008-10-23T08:14:45","modified_gmt":"2008-10-23T08:14:45","slug":"have-they-no-decency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/2008\/10\/have-they-no-decency.html","title":{"rendered":"have they no decency?"},"content":{"rendered":"

As many have heard by now, Obama is suspending his campaign for a couple of days to fly out to Hawai’i to visit his ailing grandmother<\/a>. Normal human beings with compassion and love in their hearts would hear this news and say a prayer for his family, and recognize a basic human impulse in the act.Unfortunately, those in the throes of Obama Derangement Syndrome are far past “normal” – right-wing bloggers at the conservative Republican websites RedState.com<\/a> and The Minority Report<\/a> are speculating that Obama is in fact racing to Hawai’i to deal with a ludicrous lawsuit against him that he is ineligible for the presidency because he was not born in the United States as he claims, but was actually secretly born in Kenya<\/a> and hence is not a natural-born US citizen. The alternative theory that these insane fools are pushing is that Barack Obama is actually the illegitimate son of famil friend Frank Marshall Davis<\/a>. At any rate the details are sordid, disgusting, and utterly without merit (of course) given that the Obama campaign has already posted a copy of Obama’s birth certificate on his campaign website<\/a> (though in the fevered imagination of these bloggers, the document is clearly a forgery<\/a>). There’s something seriously wrong with these people.<\/p>\n

The best debunking of this nonsense, it must be noted, is by another conservative blogger, Ed Morrissey at Hot Air<\/a>, who stands up to these slime merchants and calls them out for their atrocious behavior<\/a>. Kudos to Ed for doing the right, but unpopular, thing.<\/p>\n

Related: Snopes.com debunks the “Obama not a US citizen”<\/a> smear. Note that the “not a citizen” smear is really an evolution of the muslim smear, by emphasizing his “foreign” heritage. FactCheck,org, neanwhile, actually saw the original document<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As many have heard by now, Obama is suspending his campaign for a couple of days to fly out to Hawai’i to visit his ailing grandmother. 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City of Brass is his weblog, which was founded in 2002 under the name UNMEDIA. He is a co-founder of the annual Brass Crescent Awards. The name City of Brass refers to the Story of the City of Brass in the Thousand and One Nights, and the poem by Rudyard Kipling of the same name: Here was a people whom, after their works, thou shalt see wept over for their lost dominion; And in this palace is the last information respecting lords collected in the dust. -- Thousand and One Nights, Story of the City of Brass IN A land that the sand overlays, the ways to her gates are untrod, A multitude ended their days whose fates were made splendid by God, Till they grew drunk and were smitten with madness and went to their fall, And of these is a story written: but Allah Alone knoweth all! -- Rudyard Kipling, The City of Brass (1909)"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/165"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/cityofbrass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}