The Southern Poverty Law Center’s placing of Joseph Farah on its list of profiles of people “at the heart of” the patriot movement has generated the expected response: a huffy, indignant WorldNetDaily column by Farah in response. (He is notoriously thin-skinned, after all.)
Farah seems most put out by the SPLC saying that he “could not be reached for comment,” but he peddled his old deceits about what he has and hasn’t said about Obama’s birth:”I have never said or written that he ‘was not born in Hawaii, but in Africa.'” As we’ve detailed, that’s revisionism. The point of view of WND is the point of view of Farah, and WND spent a good chunk of last week uncritically repeating assertions that Obama was born in Kenya. For Farah to suggest that this is not essentially the same as saying the exact words that Obama “was not born in Hawaii, but in Africa” is utterly disingenuous.
Farah then expanded such parsing to his previous work:
Next: “Farah is a veteran practitioner of conspiracy ‘journalism,’ having repeatedly hawked the tale of the supposed cover-up of the death of Clinton aide Vincent Foster – thought to be a murder, not a suicide, by anti-Clinton conspiracy-mongers like Farah and his ilk.”
Stop right there! Again, I don’t retract a single thing I have ever said or written about Vincent Foster’s mysterious death and the amazing, official cover-up that followed it, but I have never said or written that he did not commit suicide or that he was murdered. Isn’t it amazing how some people care so little for facts?
Farah is actually outright lying here. He did, in fact, hawk the tale that Foster was murdered as the head of the Western Journalism Center. The WJC’s main activity under Farah’s leadership, as we’ve detailed, was publicizing Christopher Ruddy’s conspiratorial work on Foster.
The fact that Farah is telling the same lie about his Foster work and his birther work is more evidence that he’s cynically running the Clinton playbook against Obama.