Friday, May 18, 2012

Arizona goes birther, may kick Obama off ballot

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I'm not crazy... I'm not... Seriously!!!

Arizona's Republican secretary of state, Ken Bennett, may claim he's not a birther, and that he's just being responsive to constituents, but how else are we to take his statement that he may kick President Obama off the ballot in his state because he's really not sure he was born in the U.S.?

As Nick Martin writes at TPM: 

Bennett's comments came in an interview late Thursday with conservative radio talk show host Mike Broomhead on Phoenix station KFYI.

Bennett said he was following the lead of the state's eccentric Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fellow Republican who ordered an investigation into the president's birth certificate last year and concluded the document released by the White House is a forgery. Bennett said he is now trying to get verification from state officials in Hawaii that the certificate is authentic.

In doing so, Bennett caved to a fringe group of activists and writers who believe in a conspiracy theory that just never seems to die no matter how much proof they get. Hawaiian officials have said time and again that Obama was born there in 1961, yet the theory persists. 

Indeed it does, in large part because of idiots like Bennett and even more so Arpaio -- the former of whom, by the way, has designs on running for governor in 2014 and who therefore has an interest in sucking up to, if he isn't a card-carrying member of, the various right-wing extremist elements, including of the nativist-birther variety, of the state's crazy Republican Party

Steve Benen writes that Bennett is "stuck in the fever swamp" of birtherism, following a number of other relatively high-profile Republicans who have "publicly questioned Obama's citizenship status" in recent weeks. It may help electorally within the insanitarium of the GOP, in Arizona and elsewhere, but all these Republicans are doing is reminding voters how insanely crazy, not to mention disgustingly racist, they, and so much of their party, really are.

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1 Comments:

  • As Hawaiian officials have stated that President Obama's birth certificate is correct, doesn't Article IV, Section 1 of the US Constitution mandate that other states accept it as such? That won't stop private birthers, of course, but government officials may be held to a higher standard.

    By Blogger Colin Day, at 12:18 AM  

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