Cheat Seeking Missiles

his definitely warrants looking into.

That’s the subject line of an email received by Institute for Advanced Study scholar Danielle Allen - and, boy, did she end up looking into it.

Allen’s field of study is the machinery of politics and her candidate is Barack Obama, so when she received this email claiming Obama is hiding his Muslim roots and could be Islam’s Manchurian Candidate, she decided to dig. After all, her job required nothing more of her than that she think - no classes to teach, no papers to publish.

The whole deal is laid out in a four-clicker from WaPo today, and it’s a marginally interesting read from an Internet sleuthing angle … and a raucous read from a freedom of speech point of view and definitely from blind political bias point of view.

WaPo’s Matthew Mosk never probes far into the email’s content itself, other than to dismiss it with a wave of the wrist - saying that five Islamic scholars have rejected its contention that because Obama was born of a Muslim father, he is a Muslim, and that the mainstream media had repudiated a claim that he was educated in a madrassas.

He never addresses any of the other claims in the email, which I haven’t read so cannot fisk here. I assume, however, like all effective viral slams - and I agree that at its base the Obama/Muslim emails are a slam - they contain elements of truth that more sensational elements are linked to. Mosk doesn’t even bother to address this because the purpose of the story isn’t to analyze the content but to tell the story of the sleuthing - because the writers are criminal in his mind.

Never mind that a significant percentage of Americans are frightened - rightly - by Islamist plots against our country. Never mind that a stealth Islamist candidate is an intriguing storyline. Never mind that the Left is full of Halliburton-runs-the-presidency rumors. These are not angles Mosk is going to pursue.

Nor does he write a single word about the fact that an entire branch of Obama’s family in Muslim, so of course he doesn’t discuss how people might process that information as they think about who to vote for. As the email said, this definitely warrants looking into. What is different between the questions raised by Obama’s Muslim roots and Mitt Romney’s Mormon roots? Or JFK’s Catholic roots?

One difference, of course, is that Romney’s still a Mormon and JFK was a Catholic to the grave, but the matter cannot be dismissed that easily. His Muslim roots mattered enough to Obama that he traveled to Kenya to explore his African/Muslim heritage, and then to write about it at length, but they are not supposed to matter to us? That’s the message I took from the WaPo story’s dismissive handling of the matter.

We can ask questions about what it means for McCain to be third generation military, but we are not allowed to ask what it means that Islam wafts through Obama’s life story - is that it?

The media bias in the story is as profound as the PC dismissal of any questioning of Islam. Here’s perhaps the most egregious passage:

The idea of unsubstantiated charges whispered through gossip trails has been a tried-and-true political technique since well before Machiavelli’s time, Allen said. Traditionally, the best approach to combating them has been to “flush the charges out into the open.”

That was easier when the rumors flew off a printing press, or when they appeared — as with Swift boat attacks against Kerry — in television ads paid for by a well-funded group of partisans.

“Unsubstantiated charges?” Mosk has clearly strayed far, far from journalistic objectivity if he refers to the Swift boat claims as unsubstantiated because (1) there were dozens of sources verifying the claims of Kerry’s cowardly actions, and (2) Kerry never released his military records, which could have proved the Swift boat claims false.

If Mosk errs so gravely in dismissing the Swift boat vets’ claims, and is aided and abetted in that by his editors, then what basis of trust does he have when he asks us to dismiss the Obama/Muslim claims as unfounded?

And more troubling, if witch hunts like Allen’s are glorified in front page WaPo stories, what effect does it have on free speech and public political discussion? Had Allen succeeded in nailing the perpetrator of the memo, what then? Prosecution?

And what of the rumor-mongers on the Left? Would they be prosecuted as well?

So what if, as the article says, 13% of Americans think Obama is Muslim. The paper doesn’t share with us the break-down of the data: How many think that’s great and they’ll vote for him because of it; how many think he is but it doesn’t make any difference; and finally, how many will not vote for him because they think he’s Muslim? Fewer than wouldn’t vote for Romney because he’s Mormon, I’m sure.

The free American political marketplace is more than capable of handling this without exposes and witch hunts.

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