It sure is tragic that African Press International, a distinguished media group whose only apparent outlet is a recent free account on blogspot, never released those damaging Obama tapes. One shudders to imagine the horrors revealed if someone would only forward their bank account information to cover a small transfer fee.
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Josh Hueco
You really need to include Edroso on your blogroll, guys. He is a national treasure.
Comrade Darkness
"Internet-fu FAIL" :
handy
I love how they claim they operate out of Norway. What the hell is up with that?
mick
wasn’t that senxis sexius guy from norway or something?
kommrade jakevich
I’m surprised Larry Johnson, Secret Agent! didn’t sell his toupee, his sainted mother and his virtue in an attempt to raise enough scratch.
What, that’s his real hair?
Bwhahaha snort mmph!
handy
@kommrade jakevich:
Hey he ain’t "Agent Flowbee" for nothing.
eyeball
You know, every time I want to feel the least bit charitable toward the rightists and not tell them to go sit in a corner and shut up and die because that’s no way to treat people with opposing POV’s, i see something like this and it all just goes away again.
The Tool-ocracy must be destroyed.
Objective Scrutator
This was a very unoriginal scam, concocted by liberals in order to take pressure off of the LA Times, which DID have tapes that would have exposed B Hussein as a radical Islamist
protected static
There do appear to be small Kenyan ex-pat communities throughout Scandinavia. Go figure. My impression, looking at the content of API, is that they’re basically scamming funds for some political faction in Kenya…
Delia
I think it’s simple. Agent Flowbee convinced the poor guy that some friends of his have the tapes and he’ll get them to him real soon. It’s a variation on the whitey tapes scam.
Nylund
To all the wingnuts, on behalf of the African media, I say this:
Gotcha.
JGabriel
eyeball:
You’re obviously not a Republican blogger, pundit, Congressperson, or judge.
.
Andre
Haven’t you heard? Chief Editor Korir will release the tape any day now!
What’s truly tragic is how much some of the people on there want to believe. They’d rather trust an obvious scam website with nothing to back it up and with no evidence over the fact that, you know, a majority of people voted for Barrak Obamas as President. And Korir keeps stringing them along, his posts getting more and more outrageous.
Every conspiracy theory, when you get right down to brass tacks, is someone saying "Most people aren’t smart enough to figure this stuff out, but I’m different."
eyeball
HELP!
Can someone please tell me:
– what the fuck that is all about
– whether i need to give a shit
thanx.
Andre
@eyeball:
Go here, here, here and here for a summary, Sadly, No! style.
As to more recent history-the big blogs quietly dropped their support of API after he didn’t deliver, and it’s only now a small group of disaffected low information conspiracy theorists that still think he has anything.
Jay Ballou
Poe.
Nash
@eyeball:
In a nutshell?
Remember the supposed tape of Michelle Obama saying "whitey" that Larry Johnson went crackers trying to find?
Okay, well . . . a bunch of scammers made a website on WordPress and dubbed themselves "African Press International," or API. They claimed to have a tape of an interview with Michelle Obama that would prove Barrack Obama was a muslim or a Kenyan or a Kenyan muslim or some other damn thing.
And they’ve been so good at the scam, they’ve been stringing the wingnuts along for weeks, swearing up and down that the tape will be released. Except, you know, they won’t. Because the dog buried it. Or the cat shit on it. Or something, I dunno.
In any event, it’s been utter hilarity for the left.
HeartlandLiberal
You have to wonder if the API site is really nothing more than a prank, this is just someone with brains punking the bottom feeding anti-intellectual, know nothing residue of the populace, who will believe anything if fits their narrow, bigoted, hateful predisposed world view.
Right now it looks to me like the ‘editor’ of the site is just having a blast jerking posters around and leading them on, sometimes so blatantly it completely illustrates the total lack of critical thinking skills they bring to the table.
They are being owned, pwned, punked!
Maybe the actor behind Borat had time on his hands to learn WordPress blog construction skills.
Xenos
@HeartlandLiberal: It really does look like a brilliant prank. A whole swath of wingnuttia and professional GOP operatives seem to have latched on to the issue, and even now think that there is some legal basis to overturn the election.
So they won’t ever let it go… because there will always be some new theory to claim that the official documents from the State of Hawaii are not official, not the ‘original’ document, or are forged, or are issued by corrupt Obama plants in the Department of Vital Statistics, or whatnot.
It is like rubbing a pot roast on a dog’s tail, and letting him spin in circles.
JGabriel
Xenos:
Except that the R’s deserve it.
.
HeartlandLiberal
Google is our friend. It is easy to quickly find plenty of sites dissecting and commenting on this obvious hoax. The first one below is a wing nut waking up. The second just goes into detail on the absurdity of the threads and comments.
The Betrayal » African Press International hoax investigation
African Press International Hoax â Blogs, Pictures, and more on …
Josh Hueco
@Objective Scrutator:
The kerning on those tapes was a bit fishy though.
Steve K.
Oh wow. Small world.
Without going into names, looking at the photos of the staff at API, I’m almost certain I actually know one of them, or at least knew him 10 years ago. We were only casual acquaintances, but he seemed like a really decent fellow — at the time, he still considered himself a Republican, but he was heavily into international human-rights activism (Human Rights Watch? Amnesty International? can’t remember), and appeared close to being at his last straw with the Republican Party. All in all, a really smart, thoughtful, non-crazy person, and, at that time at least, definitely not the sort of person prone to insane anti-Obama smears. Indeed, I would guess that he’s a strong pro-Obama enthusiast.
Take that for what it’s worth.
eyeball
Isn’t this the same sort of shit that fooled Pierre Salinger like 15 years ago? Man, people just wanna be stupid.
JR
@Steve K.: I’m almost positive the "staff" photos are of people not associated with API and they may not even know their pictures are being used.
Some of the believers have even given the scammers their phone numbers and offered to send money. I do not feel sorry for them one bit.
Steve K.
Well, the guy I mentioned above is pretty clearly associated with API unless API is just lifting his writings from elsewhere on the web and trying to pass them off as part of their site (and using his real name, too).
ilsita
I totally got sucked in over there last week — my eyes were seroiusly bleeding, because I had to read every last one of the 1000+ comments. It’s nuts. Awful. Fascinating. These rightists took on some weird, stilted deferential language that you’d never hear from them anywhere else: "Bless you, Mr. Korir, you are a brave man who is protecting the American People, and you will be remembered…….gah!" (It’s like they found their own "Magic Negro")
Anyway, I was looking around API, and found this weird thing, which must be of great concern to Kenyan expats in Norway, right?: http://africanpress.wordpress.com/2008/09/29/why-i-cant-stand-judge-judy/
JR
@ilsita: WTF? I was relieved to see that was copied and pasted from Las Vegas Weekly. But still…