“Birtherism”—the ugly term for the even uglier charge that Barack Obama was not born in the United States—always suffered from one fatal flaw: a birth announcement that appeared in the Honolulu Advertiser on August 13, 1961, declaring the arrival of young Barack.
To believe that Obama was not born in the United States, therefore, was to surmise that his mother, Ann Dunham, correctly predicted that he would seek the U.S. presidency in five decades—and that he would therefore need to appear to have natural born American citizenship, even though he was actually, super-duper secretly, born in Kenya. Thus, she planted a fraudulent birth notice to ensure that Barack could reach the Oval Office. Which is, you know, crazy.
Which brings us to the Joy Reid affair. Reid, an MSNBC journalist with a wide following as a heroine of the “resistance,” has in recent days found herself in hot water. A left-wing critic of Reid has dug up several blog posts, dating from a decade ago on her now defunct site, in which she (a) expressed disgust at male homosexuality, (b) claimed that gay men prey on “impressionable teens” and (c) declared her opposition to gay marriage. The posts were accessed through the Wayback Machine, the indispensable website that caches web pages and archives them.
Reid could simply have owned up to the objectionable material, apologized, and attempted to move on. It wouldn’t be hard, since her policy view didn’t differ significantly from the contemporaneous conventional wisdom of most Democrats—including Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Indeed, she already apologized last December when it was found she had called Florida politician Charlie Crist “Miss Charlie.” (There have long been rumors about Crist’s sexual orientation.) She apologized for the insult and was forgiven.
But this time, Reid has gone, well, birther. She has claimed that her blog was “manipulated” and “compromised” by some undetermined third party or parties. This beggars belief for a number of reasons.
For starters, the posts sound like Joy Reid and are clearly written in her style. So if she didn’t write them, then the hackers were also very clever writers. (How often do those two skill-sets overlap?)
But the timing of the “hacking” itself doesn’t make sense. There are two ways a hacking could have happened: Either the Wayback Machine itself could have been compromised at some point in the recent past, or Reid’s site could have been hacked before it was archived by the Wayback Machine.
The administrators of the Wayback Machine have investigated the first possibility and found no evidence of it. Which leaves open the question of whether or not Joy Reid’s site was hacked back when it was live, before she was a TV star.
Here’s where birtherism parallel comes in: To believe that version of events, you have to believe that some ten years ago an enemy of Joy Reid (a) Suspected that Reid would become a prominent media personality (she wasn’t when the posts were authored), (b) known that a left-wing gadfly would go trawling through her defunct website’s archives a decade later, and (c) that during the intervening years the conversation around gay rights would change so drastically that expressing opposition to gay marriage would become a career-ending transgression. (To reemphasize: During the period in question, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton also opposed gay marriage.)
Apparently Joy Reid has an enemy whose precog skills rival that of Ann Dunham.
