Fact Check

Was Barack Obama Described as an 'Empty Suit'?

An opinion piece pulled few punches about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

Published Aug. 26, 2008

 (AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
Image Via AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File
Claim:
Editorial by Dr. Jack Wheeler describes Barack Obama as an "eloquently tailored empty suit."

The below-quoted opinion piece about Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama was published under Dr. Wheeler's byline on his own To the Point web site on 5 June 2008.

Example:  

The O-man, Barack Hussein Obama, is an eloquently tailored empty suit. No résumé, no accomplishments, no experience, no original ideas, no understanding of how the economy works, no understanding of how the world works, no balls, nothing but abstract empty rhetoric devoid of real substance.

He has no real identity. He is half-white, which he rejects. The rest of him is mostly Arab, which he hides but is disclosed by his non-African Arabic surname and his Arabic first and middle names as a way to triply proclaim his Arabic parentage to people in Kenya. Only a small part of him is African Black from his Luo grandmother, which he pretends he is exclusively.

What he isn't, not a genetic drop of, is "African-American," the descendant of enslaved Africans brought to America chained in slave ships. He hasn't a single ancestor who was a slave. Instead, his Arab ancestors were slave owners. Slave-trading was the main Arab business in East Africa for centuries until the British ended it.

[Rest of article here.]

Dr. Jack Wheeler is described by SourceWatch as:

A NewsMax.com Pundit [who] has had two parallel careers for many years: one in the field of adventure and exploration as the owner of Jack Wheeler Expeditions; the other in the field of political and economic freedom as president of the Freedom Research Foundation.

Wheeler is editor of ToThePointNews, "an online geopolitical intelligence service."

Wheeler's articles are also published by WorldNetDaily.

Dr. Wheeler doesn't appear to be fond of either major-party candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election, having previously written such wide-swinging editorials as one in which he accused Barack Obama of using "either amphetamines or cocaine" and called for the candidate "to be drug tested," and another in which he described Republican nominee John McCain as "clinically nuts" and suggested that the former POW had collaborated with his Communist captors during the Vietnam War in exchange for "an apartment in Hanoi and the services of two prostitutes."

Sources

Eggert, David.   "Michigan State Asked to Punish Professor for Anti-Muslim E-mail."     Associated Press.   24 April 2006.

David Mikkelson founded the site now known as snopes.com back in 1994.

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