In the era of anonymous Internet publishing, it can be difficult to determine who said what — and who didn’t. Just ask David Kaiser, a history professor at the Naval War College, who has struggled to dispel rumors that he authored a tempestuous anti-Obama rant (including, in the tradition of all political rants, a Hitler comparison) that went viral last week.
Mr. Kaiser clarified the attribution error on his blog this week, but has had little luck finding out who is responsible for propagating the rumor that he wrote the diatribe. He said another David Kaiser in academe — a scientist for an unnamed “well-known university” — has also received mail about the rant. “I have queried at least half a dozen of his and my ‘fans’ asking them who sent the article to them, in an effort to start tracing the fraud back to its source,” he wrote Monday, “but that seems to be a fruitless endeavor — only a couple have replied, and in both cases the trail immediately went cold.”
Mr. Kaiser wrote that he has been more amused than anything over the matter. “I suppose it’s another indication of the world that we are living in that, after a remarkably steady readership of about 800 readers a week for the last few years, the hits could have increased by about 40 percent thanks to my association with right-wing paranoia. … Crisis eras bring crazies out of the woodwork.” –Steve Kolowich
2 Responses to Anti-Obama Rant Misattributed to Naval War College Professor
timnichols1956 - October 9, 2009 at 2:40 pm
For my part, this has given me no reason at all to be concerned about President Obama, but many reasons to be concerned about the lost compass of American conservatives. The fact that so many of these kinds of speculative, baseless, irrational, pseudo-scholarly diatribes are apparently created by and circulated by folks who are politically and religiously conservative scares me. When conservatives stoop so low as to rely upon this kind of “evidence” to demonize and vilify the liberals I suspect that reasonable folks will rush to embrace the more reasoned and fair-minded conclusions of the liberals (whether those conclusions are correct or not). THIS is the trend or movement that is most dangerous in my judgment: The tacit approval that Republican leaders give to these baseless claims made by uneducated and ignorant muckrakers that are falsely attributed to credible sources and then distributed through the undisciplined and lighting-fast “forward this e-mail” network has apparently become a systematic method of discrediting the Obama administration.We, of all people, ought to be more interested in truth and reason than in casting unfair aspersions upon those with whom we disagree. We should be leading the way in calling for fairness, reasonableness, kindness, and justice for all rather than being gullible recipients of and transmitters of such nonsensical, unjust, unkind, unreasonable garbage.Just my thoughts.
wdarwin - December 30, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Mis-attributed, sounds like unnamed/anonymous source fill most stories coming out of the main stream media daily, yet no one discounts them?
Being that Professor Kaiser is not the rightful attributing author is pedantic. What would impress me is if he refuted the seriousness of the charges. He did not. In law and academia this would be dismissed for technical or procedural violations, but in the real world he did not refute the facts. It the world of the uncleaned,as you attributed, it does.
In the world of Saul Alinsky this is irrelevant. Demonize and dehumanize the messenger, the message will become forgotten.
This item is being circulated because the facts are correct. The soma-induced deltas and alphas will be educated and attacked respectively; whether you like it or not.
“fairness, reasonableness, kindness, and justice for all” – you mean; for some is acceptable but not conservatives and unenlightened. I say you are thin-skinned or the truth hurts. A Riddle: Madame Defarge is not your friend. Why?