That Michelle rumor still bubbling—I say ignore it

A correspondent sent to me and a few others an e-mail containing this link:

Re: Michelle Obama—The Smoking Gun on tape

I wrote back to the group:

I looked at the linked article. The author spoke to people who spoke to people who saw a tape. When the tape is on the Internet, I’ll believe it. I have no interest in rumors that get people all excited and then turn out not to be true.

Remember September 1998? Remember the Clinton “meltdown” before the grand jury that was going to destroy him when it was broadcast? Remember all the excitement by the conservative talk hosts? And then, when the tape was broadcast and there was no Clinton meltdown, the opposite reaction set in and from that moment Clinton was in the clear. It was the conservatives’ own over-eagerness to believe that “something” was going to happen that would automatically destroy Clinton which allowed Clinton to survive.

One of the correspondent wrote back:

I think you’re right. This could all be part of some elaborate “head fake” of the Democrats/Leftists. We have to be wary of those sorts of things.

- end of initial entry -

Greco writes:

Well, we might know very soon. Because both a Democrat (Bob Beckel on Fox News Channel) and a conservative (John Fund on the Laura Ingraham show) hinted yesterday (Tuesday) that the “bombshell” is supposed to drop TODAY. I think you’re right though. All this talk has a feverish feeling about it that I don’t trust. Neither of them had talked to anyone who actually saw the tape either!

LA replies:

I’d say the odds are 20 to 1 against its being real. If it was real, it would have been out there and we would have seen it. It wouldn’t have been preceded by weeks of frantic rumors.

I’ll be happy if I’m wrong. However, based on the fact that his membership in Trinity did not derail Obama’s campaign, I would not predict that a video of Michelle standing next to Louis Farrakhan and attacking “whitey” would derail it either.

N. writes:

People who are hoping for some “bombshell” or other magically to appear and somehow derail the candidacy of Senator Obama are just engaged in wishful thinking. We now have had not one, not two, but three “mentors” to the senator who ought to be completely beyond any public acceptance, and what has been the result?

Senator Obama’s supporters are “true believers” in the sense of the philospher Eric Hoffer’s book. Nothing, but nothing, can shake their faith in their leader during this election. Since a majority of the press corps, quite possibly a big majority on the order of 75 percent, are true believers in Sen. Obama, it is simply impossible for any “bombshell” to gain traction in the national media.

Of course, the downside of this kind of cult-of-personality phenomenon is the inevitable disillusionment that will set in, eventually. Just as the true believers in the Clintons eventually became fatigued, so will the true believers in Obama. The only question is, at what point will this happen?

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that someone in the Obama campaign might have deliberately leaked rumors of a “bombshell,” in order to mislead Obama’s opponents.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 04, 2008 01:43 AM | Send