Obama’s Bin Laden Whopper

Original Link: http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/08/11/obamas-bin-laden-whopper/

By Larry Johnson

How did Barack Obama turn a fabricated story into a well-played race card during the primaries?

Obama has been playing race card politics in this campaign for a long time, principally against Hillary Clinton. To be precise, he plays race baiting card politics, accusing others falsely of playing the race card against him.

Back in January, when Obama was posing as the victim of present and past acts of racial attacks he happened to mention a dramatic incident from his 2004 U.S. Senate campaign. Here’s the CNN report:

CNN/AP: Wednesday, January 24, 2007
Obama: It’s not all in the name

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t think name recognition is necessarily a plus as he seeks the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2008.

“When your name is Barack Obama, you’re always an underdog in political races,” the Illinois Democrat said Wednesday.

Appearing on CNN, Obama said that when he was running for the Senate, “there was an image of me superimposed over a picture of (al Qaeda leader Osama) bin Laden. I think people like to play with my name.”

Pretty awful, Obama’s face morphed into Osama bin Laden’s. Unfortunately, there’s a problem with Obama’s account. It never happened. At least it didn’t happen to him. It did happen to then Senator Max Cleland, Democrat of Georgia, Vietnam War hero, in a vicious TV commercial put on the air by his Republican opponent.

This particular smear was pioneered earlier in 2004 in the Democratic presidential primary campaign against Howard Dean. He was the first person to watch his face morphed into Bin Laden’s. Who would engage in such a nasty, underhanded dirty trick? Karl Rove? Nope. Guess again. The perpetrator of this smear tactic was none other than Robert Gibbs, who just happens to be Obama’s communications director. Read the Chicago Tribune report:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/obama/chi-o…

“Obama’s communications director and one of his closest advisers was once employed by a group that ran a television ad shortly before the 2004 Iowa caucuses that used a picture of bin Laden to criticize Dean’s foreign policy credentials at a point when Dean was the Democratic front-runner.”

Here is that hateful video:



“At the time, Robert Gibbs was working with a shadowy group called Americans for Jobs, Health Care & Progressive Values. The so-called 527 political group paid for the ad but refused to disclose in a timely manner who was financing the effort because federal law did not require it to do so.”

Let’s get this straight: Obama told Democratic voters he had been smeared in 2004 in a way that never happened to him. But the one who invented the smear was someone he decided was so clever he hired him as his communications director. Then, through innuendo, Obama subtly suggested by inference that Hillary might use that tactic against him in the primaries, or smear him in similar ways. That in itself was a smear.

You’ve got to hand it to Obama. He got away smearing Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton as racists while playing the race card and the victim card himself. And nobody has yet to catch up to all the lies.