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How uttery silly and impulse-control-challenged has our political discussion gotten? This silly and impulse-control-challenged : former Bill Clinton and Al Gore political consultant and author Naomi Wolf has suggested the ISIS beheading videos might have been staged. Which shows you that the afflication that causes some to suggest Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or 9/11 was a government or Israeli operation, or that Hillary Clinton killed Vince Foster isn’t limited to one party or ideology:
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Journalist and author Naomi Wolf suggested Saturday that videos of Islamic State militants beheading American and British hostages may have been staged.
The news site Vox flagged a series of Facebook posts in which Wolf questioned the authenticity of the videos, going as far as to imply that they were staged and that both the hostages and their parents were actors.
Wolf later deleted the post at the request of a New York Times reporter, whom Vox identified as foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi, after the reporter explained that the hostages’ abductions had been under a media blackout for two years.
Wolf went on to write several other posts insisting she was not “calling into question the authenticity of the ISIS videos” while arguing independent verification was indeed necessary to authenticate the recorded beheadings. Wolf accused the news media of “badly distorting” her comments Sunday in a rather lengthy, elliptical post and further tried to silence her critics by citing the insight she gained into how political narratives are crafted while advising former President Bill Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore.
Her response suggested that she’s still dangling out the possibility it was somehow staged.
And I suppose the devastated families who behind the scenes were trying to free their loved ones were taken in by false letters, fake messages from ISIS and that the British and American governments who confirmed the beheadings in the videos were real are either on on the plot (right) or incompetent (weellllllll….but not in this case).
It sounds like someone may have a condo up on the moon near Allan West.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.