Rush Limbaugh fell for a blog post Friday that quoted from a ridiculous fake ten-page excerpt of a “thesis” alleged to have been written by Pres. Obama at Columbia. The excerpt was designed to mock the right’s socialism panic but perhaps predictably ended up fueling it. When Limbaugh’s researcher suggested he or she may have made a very silly mistake in thinking the thesis was real, Limbaugh of course didn’t balk. Instead, he used his blunder to attack Dan Rather and the President.

“I don’t care if these quotes are made up. I know Obama thinks it.”

Video after the jump.

Here’s the blog that created the hoax thesis excerpts.

Here’s the blog where poor fuming winger Michael Ledeen reported the thesis as real and where Limbaugh’s researchers came upon it. The laughs stack up near the bottom where Ladeen lashes the liberal press for criticizing Limbaugh for saying things Limbaugh never actually said. Pure gold.

[This is from] Obama’s college thesis, written when he was at Columbia. The paper was called “Aristocracy Reborn,” and in the first ten pages (which were all that reporter Joe Klein–who wrote about it for Time–was permitted to see), the young Obama wrote: “… the Constitution allows for many things, but what it does not allow is the most revealing. The so-called Founders did not allow for economic freedom. While political freedom is supposedly a cornerstone of the document, the distribution of wealth is not even mentioned. While many believed that the new Constitution gave them liberty, it instead fitted them with the shackles of hypocrisy.” That’s quite an indictment, even for an Ivy League undergraduate. I wonder if the prof–and I’d like to know who the prof was–made an appropriate marginal comment, something about historical context, about the Constitution’s revolutionary status in the history of freedom, and about the separation of powers in order to make the creation of any “shackles” as difficult as possible. Maybe instead of fuming about words that Rush Limbaugh never uttered, the paladins of the free press might ask the president about words that he did write. Maybe he’d like to parse “the so-called Founders,” for example.

Where’s the long form version of the thesis?!

Friday happy hour fun from the wingnut web.