Our gay president, and how he got that way

FRIDAY, JANUARY 3, 2014
The Weekly Screed (#658)

Our gay president,
and how he got that way

by David Benjamin

“If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” – Adolf Hitler

MADISON, Wis. — In a documentary film that few will ever see — The Unknown Known by Errol Morris — the filmmaker catches former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a barefaced lie about torture at Guantánamo Bay and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. After Morris — on camera — confronts Rumsfeld with proof that he’s lying, Rumsfeld shrugs it off and sticks with his story.

Rumsfeld knows a basic truth about telling lies: The bigger the liar, the truer the lie. Rumsfeld is a larger-than-life public figure whose words and deeds will echo through history books for the next century. Errol Morris? Even if he wins an Oscar for The Unknown Known, he’s nobody, an obscure documentarian making movies favored by a handful of eggheads, cinema buffs and bleeding hearts.

As he dismissed Morris, Rummy was practicing a variation on the “Big Lie,” devised by Joseph Paul Goebbels and deployed by Hitler. But even as lesser tyrants perpetuate the Feuhrer’s most lasting legacy, a new and possibly more pernicious form of mendacity threatens to supplant the Big Lie. Call it the Viral Lie.

Viral lies are everywhere. Chances are you believe dozens without realizing it. A viral lie, either intentional or inadvertent, can start anywhere. But viral lies infest the Internet, and their most fertile soil is the manure-rich bottomland of the paranoid blogosphere. Viral lies are the opium of the Apocalypse.

For instance, let’s say that World News Daily — a sort of bellwether of the lunatic fringe (“Kim Jong-Un Fed Uncle To Starving Dogs”) — eructs one of its typical factoids, with no discernible source, no foundation in reality nor any corroboration. Let’s say this groundless assertion reads: “Obama Is Gay.”

Actually, the “Gay Obama” canard has been circulating on the racist phobisphere for years. If it hadn’t been out there already, it might just as well have sprung one day full-grown from the brain of WND founder and crackpot-in-chief Joe Farah. Either way, its emergence, in black and white, on the popular WND website, confirms its veracity to all who are inclined to believe. For millions who see the “Gay Obama” revelation as the sum of all their fears, it becomes an article of faith as fixed as the knowledge — also provided by the World Wide Web —that Hillary Clinton has sex twelve times a week with Elvis Presley’s Martian twin.

That’s right, Elvis was from Mars. Still is. He commutes (by beaming) — with Jimi Hendrix and Michael Jackson.

But I digress. And as I do, our viral lie is migrating from the Web to the great aural sprawl of right-wing talk radio. There, it’s manifested not so much in outright declarations, but as offhand phrases and sly innuendo. For example, Rush Limbaugh might mutter, “Frankly, Barack Hussein Obama’s sick sexual orientation doesn’t matter to me…” Or Glenn Beck might begin a sentence with, “Hey. So what if the Kenyan interloper in the White House is a flaming faggot…”

As these remarks proliferate, and the paranoid blogosphere seethes with a mounting sense of homo-hysteria, the tipping point comes: Fox News wades in.

Fox News is the Typhoid Mary of the viral lie. As the most popular cable news outlet in the media universe, Fox News can, in one day of focused emphasis on a single untruth, institutionalize the lie, turning it epidemic and forcing acknowledgment from the legitimate press. The genius behind this process, as any student of journalism knows, is Fox News head honcho Roger Ailes.

As Ailes has proven repeatedly, his Fox News talking heads need not openly affirm a story as preposterous as the “Gay Obama” rumor. They need only deny it halfheartedly, saying, “Oh, nobody really believes that the President is a fruit.” Or they pose the issue as a vexing quandary: “Who really knows what lurks in the loins of Barack Obama?” Best of all, they might issue a demand that the object of the slander take responsibility for it: “Why doesn’t the President tell the American people once and for all, and end this divisive controversy? Is he gay or isn’t he?”

Fox News could also leap forward, beyond the story, neither confirming nor denying, but broaching a subject that treats the viral lie as a fait accompli: “How long must Michelle Obama endure the secret hell of living with a man who can’t stand to touch her! Who, we ask, is the real father of Malia and Natasha?”

Fox News gives a sort of projectile force to a viral lie. Ailes and his tireless propagandists — repeating the story shamelessly for 24, 48, even 72 hours to a fanatically loyal viewership — have unparalleled power to intimidate every other major news outlet. As scurrilous as the “Gay Obama” story might be, it’s “out there” and must be reported, if only to debunk it. But, ironically, the dismantling of the lie — by the Times, the Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN and, most stridently, by MSNBC — tends to burnish what Stephen Colbert calls its “truthiness.” The viral lie grows in prestige. Its believers, now persecuted, are confirmed in their faith.

The fatal blow to Obama’s purported heterosexuality will come on a Sunday morning. “Meet the Press” host David Gregory, a slavish parrot to Fox News’ talking points, will recast the issue by asking a panelist (ideally, squishy conservative David Brooks), “How do you think these clearly false, but persistent rumors — that President Obama sends Secret Service agents to prowl bus-station men’s rooms in search of underage male prostitutes — will impact negotiations for the retention of a residual U.S. military presence in Afghanistan?”

As Orwell explained long ago, the lie has been made gospel, and our hapless Obama has become, inexplicably, as queer as a three-dollar corsage.

Or, as Lady Gaga put it: “I’m telling you a lie in a vicious effort that you will repeat my lie over and over until it becomes true.”