Back in 2006, before any Democrats had announced their intentions to run, I was cheering the quality of our potential field, which included such top-notch Democrats as Gore, Edwards, Clark, Clinton, and Obama. I also wrote:
I hope that having such a high-quality field won't, perversely, lead to a greater-than-normal number of gratuitous potshots being taken by Democratic bloggers and diarists
Well, if only I had a nickle for every one of those gratuitous potshots!
Today we have a recommended diary on MyDD which charges a Democratic presidential candidate with lying (in capital letters, no less!) - and the charge is so cockamamy that even to call it cockamamy is to elevate it too much. Yet, alas, the diarist is not too embarrassed to pen it in his diary, and the recommenders are not too embarrassed to press the Recommend button.
The issue? Obama has more than once said he was "a law professor" or "a constitutional law professor" at the University of Chicago. He did indeed "serve as a professor of law" at this university, according to the university, but his staff title was "Senior Lecturer," not "Professor." Thus he was a small-p professor, not a big-P Professor.
Did Obama nefariously imply that he was a big-P professor? Should he have been very careful, as the diarist argues, to say "I taught law" rather than "I was a professor of law". After all, people may not hear the a and may well conclude in any event that he was a big-P and not a small-p professor.
As if it needed to be stated: this Democratic presidential candidate has a great deal of expertise in the field of constitutional law, which is what allowed him to be hired to teach constitutional law at a prestigious law school. Thus, no one who has come to believe that this Democratic presidential candidate has a great deal of expertise in the field of constitutional law, has formed a false belief.
Giving the diarist the benefit of the doubt, I would assume he is a fine and loyal Democrat. Nonetheless his diary unfortunately exhibits the characteristics of both trolling and concern-trolling. Trolling because the title of the diary makes a completely over-the-top charge that a Democratic presidential candidate is guilty of "lying", and concern-trolling because the diarist asserts that if Obama wasn't fibbing, then in the best case he was foolishly careless to use the word "professor" since it could be used against him!
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