Newsmax gives promoter of apparently fake Obama quote a speaker slot on its cruise

The upcoming Newsmax cruise features the usual suspects as its "guest speakers" -- Christopher Ruddy, Dick Morris and Ronald Kessler among them. One name caught our eye, though: James Humes, who will give a talk about Winston Churchill.

Last March, Humes wrote a Newsmax column in which he asserted that President Obama said of a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office, "Get that goddam thing out of here." In fact, there's no credible record of Obama ever saying such a thing. Humes anted up with an ugly smear suggesting that Obama "took umbrage at Prime Minister Churchill's actions in 1953 of wiping out the Mau-Mau, the Kenyan terrorists who made a specialty of slitting throats of sleeping white and Black Kenyans."

After the fabrication was caught, Humes' column was quietly altered to concede that "the story was never fully substantiated, despite frequent repetition on radio talk shows." But Humes offered no evidence that any radio talk show forwarded the claim at all, let alone did so "frequently." (The Mau-Mau smear, meanwhile, remains intact.)

It says a lot about Newsmax that it has rewarded the purveyor of this kind of hate and mendacity with the honor of being a "guest speaker" on its cruise.