Saturday, January 12, 2019

The Obama truthers

Trumpism (increasingly indistinguishable from the Republican party overall) has been obsessed with Barack Obama's 2009 Cairo speech since it was delivered. It's that obsession which resulted in US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's clunker of a speech on Thursday, again in Cairo.

The real time context for that obsession is important. At the time (and right up until well into his campaign in 2016, when he suckered rolling news channels into yet more free coverage), Donald Trump had been trafficking in theories that Barack Obama was not born in the USA and was secretly a Muslim. That "secret Muslim" idea, whose entry into the Republican mainstream is a story worthy of Inception, has in turn driven Trump's Middle East views, and those of the people he has around him. And they've now contorted themselves into a set of alliances and stances that will eventually blow up -- as Iran (their other obsession) did in the 1970s. 

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