Shocker for Conservatives: Obama May Not Hate the Constitution

By Alex Koppelman

Salon.com

On Friday, it seemed for a moment -- at least to Rush Limbaugh's listeners -- that the right had finally found the smoking gun to prove that President Obama secretly hates the U.S., its founders and even the Constitution.

Limbaugh read his radio audience an excerpt from what he said was Obama's senior thesis, which he wrote while at Columbia University. After more than a year shrouded in secrecy by the Obama campaign and a compliant media, the thesis had finally emerged, and it was even worse than some had feared.

The excerpt read by Limbaugh:

[T]he 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.

Limbaugh was, naturally, up in arms about this, calling the college-aged Obama a "little boy," and saying, "he still shares those same feelings."

Only not so much. As a bit of basic research would have shown Limbaugh, Obama didn't technically write a thesis at Columbia -- at the time, Columbia didn't really have senior theses -- though he did write a thesis-length paper. But it was on Soviet nuclear disarmament, not the Constitution....(Remainder.)