On the left, Stanley Ann Dunham, mother of President Obama. On the right, Marcy Moore, bondage model and celebrity clone. Apparently, the mad scientists have been onto this stuff longer than I thought! Image source: This Youtube video, at the 57 second mark.
My flying monkeys brought in this tidbit recently. It has been swirling around the conservative blogosphere for years now: apparently, Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, had a celebrity clone who was a bondage model back in the 60s, named Marcy Moore.
Devout readers of this blog, if there are any, will recall that I
found a politically-oriented celebrity clone some time ago: former Saturday Night Live comedian Victoria Jackson turned conservative political activist has a celebrity clone named Holly Morgan, who's a porn star.
In that article, I took the opportunity to point out my immense moral superiority to imaginary political operatives who would stoop to claiming such a photo was for reals.
I think you can see where this is going: ladies and gentlemen, meet Joel Gilbert, the filmmaker behind "Dreams of My Real Father." Mr. Gilbert's video's concept is that Frank Marshall, a U.S. academic and "socialist" (I don't know if Mr. Marshall is a socialist or not, I put the word in quotes because the term in modern far right circles has been so overused that it now means little more than "not a far-right conservative")was the actual father of President Obama.
And what's more, Marshall was supposedly an amateur photographer who took lots of fetishy photos to launch a fetish magazine which bombed, and who then sold the photos for his failed magazine to other, more successful magazines, like Bizarre Life and Exotique. And, according to Gilbert, one of the models that was in those photos was: Ann Dunbar, Obama's mother.
Left to right: President Obama's mother, Ann Dunham (1), Bondage model Marcy Moore (1), Dunham (2) and Moore (2). Are they the same woman? I don't think so. They both have large, slightly underslung jaws and similarly shaped mouths and noses. But Dunham's jaw is larger than Moore's, and the shape is different. Moore's jaw is rounder, while Dunham's is squared off. Dunham's cheeks' are flatter, as well, and the brow is shaped differently. The shape of the eyebrows, the shape of the eyes and the size of the lips are all ascribable (potentially) to skilled use of cosmetics. But basically, these are two different women, I think. Granted, the way anyone looks in a photo can vary a lot depending on angle and lighting and how they emphasize or de-emphasize features -- my search for celebrity clone images is often informed by that. You could look at most of my celebrity clone images carefully and find reason to suppose they are not the same woman. It's not a problem for me though, because I never make that claim. I only claim that they look alike. Smart of me! Image sources: various sites around the Web.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I think it's fair to say that Gilbert is making an extraordinary claim here. And hard evidence is not in evidence here. Basically, he has about the same evidence I have when I make claims about celebrity clones in bondage/porn. All he has beyond the resemblance between Ann Dunham and Marcy Moore is a theory that the sofa, a hi-fi and a bit of flooring that is seen in some of the porn shoots is the same as was in the house Marshall lived in when he was friends with Obama's mother.
Now to make clear just how shallow Gilbert's theory is, I must reveal the deep, dark secret of my celebrity clone articles, and hope you will not lose whatever respect you have for me, if you had any in the first place. (Yes, I know, this is not a major risk). Are you sitting down? Good! Here it is: you can find celebrity clones of practically ANYONE if you look hard enough, because so many pornographic images have been taken that there's a huge amount of material out there.
I know, not much to it, but it's true: the fact that images of any given non-porn person can bear a strong resemblance to some person who has done porn is darned near meaningless. Which is why I have always had the good sense to treat it as what it is: a joke.
Marcy Moore being genuinely pornographic, circa 1970. Nice! Image source: The Internets.
Now the thing is, this story about Dunham being Marcy Moore has been floating around in conservative circles for years. It has never gotten into the conservative mainstream, much to the credit of the conservative mainstream, probably because of the general lack of evidence for the claim. Only real trash like
World Net Daily have covered it. Now that's a remarkable thing to say, because this is the same conservative mainstream that has presented Birther nonsense (i.e., Obama was not born in Hawaii) long after it was demonstrated to be idiocy. And which has given a platform to intelligent design advocates, despite, basically ALL the evidence on evolution being against them.
Conservative mainstream media people are not HUGELY dependent on evidence is what I am saying, in the sense that they routinely ignore all of it that does not fit their political agendas. I'm assuming that the real reason they ignored the story is that it would be see as a pointless and vicious attack on Obama's mother by everyone who was not a hard-core conservative. And you gotta give them credit for at least being able to understand that, given the evidence-free nature of many of mainstream conservatives' bloviating.
Gilbert is attempting to give new legitimacy to the story with his research into sofas and hi-fis in old bondage magazine photos. Now you would think that I would be very happy if his theory went to the exact same nowhere that the story went to when it first surfaced. Not true!
I want this story to make it in the conservative media, not because I support it in any way, but because I want to enjoy the spectacle of conservative talking heads poring over old bondage photos and talking in assured tones about the resemblance between Dunham and Moore and this hi-fi and that hi-fi, while I laugh my ass off at them. It would be REALLY nice if I could watch their last bits of self-respect dry up and crumble, leaving them entirely hollowed-out shells while they do it, but that rarely happens on camera.
I'm not worried about the story gaining any traction beyond conservative media, because the story is in fact pointless. Suppose Ann Dunham DID pose for fetish photos in her hot and racy youth? SO WHAT? She's not the President, her son is, and after four years of Obama, most people know what they have in him, one way or the other, and are happy with him or not.
(For the record, I am not at all happy with Obama, because I'm a progressive, and to me the next election is a choice between Obama, whom I see as basically a Reagan Republican, and Romney, who basically represents wealthy conservative political oligarchs and no one else. Obama is just way too far to the right to suit me. So by conservative logic, if Obama is a socialist (as they keep saying) I'm a fucking crazy anarcho-ultra-radical revolutionary screaming Marxist with a bomb in each hand and a rocket up his butt. Just sayin! I think of myself more as a European style social democrat, which in Europe tends to be considered moderate to slightly right of center.)
Could that be Barbara Bush, mother of George W. Bush, letting it all hang out of that straightjacket? Naaaaaaa ... Image source: Hogtied.
