Conservative Politics Today

I reported that Larry Johnson at No Quarter alleges the Obama Camp denied to the media the existence of any “whitey” tape, then provided bloggers with a doctored or concocted script.

In response to my report, an individual going by the name “Dimensio,” left a lengthy reply. In that reply, he claims to know the origin of the allegation made by Johnson about the transcript alleged to have been provided by the Obama camp. He stated in part ” Following the outbreak of reports on the rumour of the existence of the video, a Fark user named “1000 Hurts” speculated that what would be presented would be a video of Michelle Obama saying “why’d he” several times and that the quality of the audio made it more or less easy to misinterpret the phrase “why’d he” as “whitey”. Note, however, that this claim was pure speculation; it was not based upon any actual known video or audio recording of Michelle Obama.

Other internet forum users began repeating the speculation on other Internet forums. Unfortunately, in so doing they reworded and restated the initial speculation when doing so and, over successive iterations, the claims have been misinterpreted as fact based upon a known (though wholly unsourced and undemonstrable) recorded speech.

I followed the link provided, and after digging through a few pages on the thread I found the following post made by a “1000 Hurts” at 7:21 p.m., yesterday, June 1, 2008. Here it is in full:

“Here’s whats gonna happen, the tape is supposedly a speech Michelle made concerning Bush et al. regarding Katrina. In it she says “Why’d he…” several times, which given the quality of the audio, sounds like “whitey”. And so will begin the great tin-foil hat of bonanza of the summer of ‘08″

Dimensio then goes on to provide a reasonable explanation of how this could well have manifested into an alleged “doctored or concocted transcript” being provided by the Obama camp to bloggers. It’s like Kindergarten class, when the teacher whispers something in one child’s ear, tells them to whisper to the one next to them, and before it’s over final version is unrecognizable to the originator.

Individuals promoting the fraudulent claim of such a video — either because they wish for the claim to be true or because they are knowingly promoting a lie — have since utilized this misunderstood speculation as proof of the existence of a video; their reasoning is that the attempts to “explain” Michelle’s wording is evidence that those promoting the “explanation” must have seen the video. Larry Johnson has gone so far as to claim that the “why’d he” explanation was released by the Obama campaign, which is simply false.

It would appear that the alleged transcript excerpt is also based upon this speculation, incorporating the misunderstood hypothetical explanation of Michelle saying “why’d he” combined with an actual use of the word “whitey” in an attempt to show that the explanation, while true, does not vindicate Michelle Obama against charges of racially-tilted rhetoric.”

I have attempted to contact Mr Johnson to see if he has received this same information. I have no doubt he is very busy right now and does not have the time to respond. I do hope that if the opportunity presents itself he will kindly do so.

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