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NYT Profile Leaves Out McCarthy’s Bigotry, Conspiracy-Mongering

The New York Times runs a profile of former prosecutor, current National Review contributor Andrew McCarthy, presenting the NRO wackjob as a brave dissenter against using the U.S. legal system to deal with terrorism cases.

While the Times profile does touch on some of McCarthy’s extremist views, such as that lawyers who offer legal assistance to alleged terrorists detained by the United States are “volunteering their services to the enemy,” the article barely skims the surface of the conspiracy-mongering and anti-Muslim prejudice that characterizes McCarthy’s writing.

In October 2008, McCarthy asked “Did Obama write “Dreams from My Father”… or did [Bill] Ayers?”

I’ve finally read Jack Cashill’s lengthy analysis in The American Thinker. It is thorough, thoughtful, and alarming — particularly his deconstruction of the text in Obama’s memoir and comparison to the themes, sophistication and signature phraseology of Bill Ayers’ memoir.

There is nothing in Obama’s scant paper trail prior to 1995 that would suggest something as stylish and penetrating as, at times, Dreams from My Father is.

McCarthy has often found himself to the right even of National Review’s editors. Last July, he protested the magazine’s attempt to put the birther conspiracy to rest, insisting that questions still remained about where the president was born:

What Obama has made available is a Hawaiian “certification of live birth” (emphasis added), not a birth certificate (or what the state calls a “certificate of live birth”)… This certification is not the same thing as the certificate, which is what I believe we were referring to in the editorial as “the state records that are used to generate birth certificates [sic] when they are requested.” […]

Regardless of why people may want to see the vault copy, what’s been requested is a primary document that is materially more detailed than what Obama has thus far provided.

McCarthy also challenged the president’s version of his own upbringing, accusing the president of having “airbrushed his personal history on the fly”:

It’s now apparent, however, not only that [Obama] was raised as a Muslim while living for four years in the world’s most populous Islamic country, but that he very likely became a naturalized citizen of Indonesia. […]

There’s speculation out there from the former CIA officer Larry Johnson — who is no right-winger and is convinced the president was born in Hawaii — that the full state records would probably show Obama was adopted by the Indonesian Muslim Lolo Soetoro and became formally known as “Barry Soetoro.” Obama may have wanted that suppressed for a host of reasons: issues about his citizenship, questions about his name (it’s been claimed that Obama represented in his application to the Illinois bar that he had never been known by any name other than Barack Obama), and the undermining of his (false) claim of remoteness from Islam. Is that true? I don’t know and neither do you.

Reacting angrily to National Review’s admission last Augusts that Sarah Palin’s “death panels” claim was false, McCarthy claimed that “death panels” was a useful lie because “Obama is not a normal politician. He’s a visionary, and using health care to radically expand the scope of government happens to be central to his vision”:

The editorial’s contention was that there wouldn’t “literally” be death panels. To me, that’s not much different from quibbling over “what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” The stakes here couldn’t be higher, time is short, and “death panel” cuts to the chase… They are what we’re sure to get if Obamacare isn’t killed first.

In January 2009, defended Israel’s bombing of Gaza — which killed some 1300 people, including 300 children — as an attempt to “educate” the Palestinians, McCarthy suggested that the real “question is whether the Palestinian people are educable.”

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The most important thing to understand about Andrew McCarthy is that he has parlayed his long-ago success as a prosecutor in a high-profile terrorism case into a second career as an “expert” on Islam, peddling various conspiracy theories combined with a comically biased and bigoted view of the Muslim peril that threatens America’s vital essence, and of the role of President Obama and The Left in exposing America to that peril. For some reason the New York Times left that part out.