Donald Trump joins the Birther cult

By R.K. Barry

So Donald Trump has jumped onto the birther bandwagon. Yes, he too is questioning the fact that President Obama was born in America. If you haven't seen his latest, which I would find hard to believe, you can get a sense of his idiocy from the clip below from his appearance on The View.

Typically I pay no attention to this blowhard, but it is getting a lot of coverage so I suppose we have a responsibility to think a little about what it all means.

One possibility is that in America we seem to pay way too much attention to what rich people think simply because they are rich. We assume that because they found a way to make themselves a lot of money, what they think about any number of topics unrelated to their particular expertise must be of value. I don't know why Americans think this, but they do. Perhaps the simplest reason is that because there is no commonly accepted standard of judgment that can be used to gauge the intrinsic worth of human beings, we use money as a proxy. I find this sad, but it does seem to be true.

Another sad but true fact is that fame is also a currency we use to determine the worth of people and the value of the things they say.

Lucky him, Donald Trump is both rich and famous, so we pay attention. Charlie Sheen is also rich and famous. Gee, I wonder where he thinks Obama was born?

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)