Danielle Allen on the Obama Muslim Smear
The Washington Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the origins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.
I should start by saying that Allen is something of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doctorates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Humanities Division at the U. of C. she was the university officer most directly responsible for Chicago Review.
Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s validation of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been covered by him and others:
There’s some interesting stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doctorates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a marginal Illinois character named Andy Martin—without even resorting to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsessing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.
This kind of turf-guarding is fairly predictable, especially when it’s journalists and academics who are standing on opposite sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)
But Smith’s self-confessed superciliousness seems misplaced. [Read more]
