Posted by Jed Lewison on Sat Jun 28, 2008 at 3:44 PM Pacific

It's your media

This is super-hilarious. The WaPo today describes how Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, discovered the origin of the Obama-is-not-a-Christian smear (which she received by e-mail in January), even though "experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin."

Allen discovered that theories about Obama's religious background had circulated for many years on the Internet. And that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert that the Illinois senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.

As Ben Smith, notes, The Nation's Chris Hayes made the same discovery last October:

But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable, it was still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved even more bizarre than I could have guessed.

On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage."

   
It's your media

This is super-hilarious. The WaPo today describes how Danielle Allen, a political theorist at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Studies, discovered the origin of the Obama-is-not-a-Christian smear (which she received by e-mail in January), even though "experts told her it would be impossible to trace the chain e-mail to its origin."

Allen discovered that theories about Obama's religious background had circulated for many years on the Internet. And that the man who takes credit for posting the first article to assert that the Illinois senator was a Muslim is Andy Martin.

As Ben Smith, notes, The Nation's Chris Hayes made the same discovery last October:

But even if the identity of the e-mail's author was unrecoverable, it was still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved even more bizarre than I could have guessed.

On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described "independent contrarian columnist" named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having "lied to the American people" and "misrepresent[ed] his own heritage."

   

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