The last time we checked in on Jack Cashill’s Obama obsession, he was hinting about a new film by charlatan filmmaker Joel Gilbert — who made a 2014 film that pushed the immediately discredited claim that Barack Obama’s mother posed nude for longtime Obama conspiracy target Frank Marshall David — claiming that Michelle Obama will run for president in 2024. Cashill gave Gilbert’s latest factually questionable hit jjob the full promotional treatment in his July 6 column:
With prominent Democrats – Hillary Clinton, Gavin Newsom, Amy Klobuchar – openly jousting for the Democratic 2024 presidential nod, it seems a little bit suspicious that the Dems are not promoting their most formidable candidate, Michelle Obama.
Suspicious, that is, to everyone but Los Angeles filmmaker Joel Gilbert, producer of the stunning new documentary and complementary book, “Michelle Obama 2024: Her Real Life Story and Plan for Power.”
[…]Gilbert’s slogan speaks to the vulnerability of Michelle’s candidacy: “Only the truth can stop her.” The truth is not Michelle’s best friend. Gilbert makes the case that she has been pretending to be something she is not since she first emerged on the national scene as her husband’s demure helpmate in 2004.
From the beginning, Gilbert argues, Barack’s handlers have positioned Michelle as the “South Side” girl, the descendant of slaves, the ordinary, everyday black working mom in contrast to her husband’s airy elitism.
In fact, as Gilbert shows, Michelle has been running from the black community her whole life and, when not running from it, exploiting it.
Unlike most pundits on the right, Gilbert pounds the pavement to get his story. With chutzpah to spare, he talks about Michelle to people most oppositional journalists would not dare approach, including her mother, her hairdresser and, perhaps most tellingly, Michelle’s thesis adviser at Princeton with whom he had three lengthy conversations.
[…]Unfortunately for Michelle, Gilbert did his homework. It wasn’t easy, but he discovered that the guidance counselor who discouraged Michelle from Princeton was a highly respected black female educator who knew Michelle intimately.
And the counselor was right. Michelle was not Princeton material. Her test scores were not good at all. She floundered academically before finding refuge in Afro-American studies. Her godawful senior thesis confirmed her counselor’s caution.
“To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb,” said the late great Christopher Hitchens. “This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
Barack Obama won the presidency promising racial healing. At that task, he failed spectacularly. Michelle will run implicitly threatening racial strife if she loses. At that, she might have more success. Only the truth can stop her.
Unfortunately for Gilbert, he’s not known for caring about the truth. This is a guy, after all, who was revising the promos for his anti-Obama film on the fly as its claims were discredited, and whose claim that Obama’s wedding ring contains Arabic writing turned out to be so demonstrably false that even birthers were moved to debunk it.
The truth is also not a friend to Cashill, who inexplicably stands by Gilbert despite his lengthy and inescapable record of mendacity. Then again, he’s a lot like Cashill in that he’s also a conspiracy freak who has trouble with basic facts (remember when he spent a column attacking the wrong newspaper?).