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Commando raids, car crashes, arrests: The fake-news Obamas lead wild, exciting lives

The Obamas are leading a far more exciting life out of the White House than they ever did in it, if fake news reports are anything to go by. GETTY IMAGES

If a grab bag of dodgy sites are to be believed, the Obamas live much more exciting lives now than they ever did in the White House. Consider:

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  • As he prepared to leave office, one site claimed, Obama incited troops to mutiny against incoming President Trump: “Obama URGES Soldiers to Do the Unthinkable to Trump,” blared angrypatriotmovement.com. In fact, Obama (still president at the time) had made a fairly generic statement about freedom of speech, praising, ” … the universal right to speak your mind and to protest against authority, to live in a society that’s open and free, that can criticize a President without retribution.”
  • In late December, Sasha Obama was allegedly bought a used Bugatti Veyron for a Christmas present and shortly thereafter drove it into a pond at 90 miles an hour. The story checks many of the boxes of a classic fake news account, citing the Washington Times-Herald (which does exist — in Washington, Ind.), linking to the site’s front page, not to the story, which doesn’t exist.
  • On New Year’s Day, another dodgy site published a vivid account of Michelle Obama’s arrest for domestic violence, claiming that “The Secret Service, forced to draw their weapons until waved off by a higher authority, found themselves being told to stand down by former president Obama himself, who told investigators that he ‘just wanted the episode to be over.'”
  • On Jan. 9, a story claimed that the four officers of the Obama Foundation had been indicted, and, among other things, that “… the warehouse they pay for was being used as an illegal poker room.”
  • Much of the most ambitious fabrication was an account of a U.S. commando raid on “an Obama-controlled stronghold in Thailand,” clearly crafted by someone nourished on action movies. The story is packed with operational detail, involving a shell company that the former president was using to hide ill-gotten taxpayers’ money, a secret source in the Secret Service, and finally a 3 a.m. helicopter raid “including decoy craft.” In a twist, however, Obama — or his co-conspirators — had just left, leaving “freshly chopped vegetables and lukewarm coffee in the kitchen.” Tune in next week …
h/t Snopes, Politifact

What’s going on here? We get the sense of a hate machine that suffers somewhat from having run out of enemies (with control of the White House and both houses of Congress), and would be much happier in opposition.

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One new branch targets the traditional media, as in these two disturbing videos released by the NRA.

Another, perhaps less flexible, tries to squeeze a few more outrage clicks out of Democrats who in the past had been in or near the White House — though you’d think that Hillary Clinton’s email server, for example, was exhausted as a subject.

In fake news news:

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