In spite of the fact that Barack Obama has been elected twice and over 100 judges have tossed out every challenge to his tenure, the birthers and the loons keep on keeping on:
Most Americans have moved on from earlier dalliances with denials of the president's biography. National opinion polls have shown increases over the past three years in the percentage of Americans who agree that Obama was born in the United States and that he is a Christian. But a persistent minority — between a tenth and a fifth in most polls — still believe he is Muslim, foreign-born or a socialist.
Those voters tend to be vehement opponents of Obama, and on Inauguration Day, they will not be at the party — and they're still searching for ways to have the president declared illegitimate.
I really feel sorry for these poor souls. Their lives must really suck if this is all they have to live for.
By the way, what is wrong with being a Muslim, foreign-born, or a socialist?
Colin Powell only seems to make the news these days when he's stating the obvious about the party to which he supposedly still belongs. It's like the media treat him as a lone voice of sanity in an otherwise insane party, providing him with a platform to say what many in the media would no doubt like to say but for various reasons can't or don't want to. And it was the case again today, with Powell saying this on Meet the Press:
There's also a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is they still sort of look down on minorities.
He went on to identify Sarah Palin and John Sununu as examples, with their various racist comments about President Obama, as well as the whole Birther nonsense, and then provided some advice to the party:
In recent years, there's been a significant shift to the right, and we have seen what that shift has produced: two losing presidential campaigns. I think what the Republican Party needs to do now is take a very hard look at itself and understand that the country has changed. The country is changing demographically. And if the Republican Party does not change along with that demographic, they're going to be in trouble.
I visit Kansas every year. It's a beautiful place and there are a lot of nice people there that I consider to be good friends. But wow, they're raising an odd crop of elected officials there:
Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an informal advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said on Thursday he and his fellow members of a state board were considering removing President Barack Obama from the Kansas ballot this November. Kobach is part of the State Objections Board along with Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, all Republicans. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that on Thursday the board agreed to consider whether to take Obama off the ballot because they said they lacked sufficient evidence about his birth certificate. "I don't think it's a frivolous objection," Kobach said, according to the Capital-Journal. "I do think the factual record could be supplemented."
I've said it before, but it bears repeating: anyone who seriously purports that Barack Obama is not a citizen of the United States because of this birther nonsense is a racist asshole. Any elected official who tries to remove the president from the ballot because of birtherism is a loathsome douchebag who should be shunned, ridiculed, and heaped with scorn. (Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)
There is a thing. It's called "reporting." This is a thing that so very rarely happens in America these days.
There is a thing. It is called "transcribing." This is a thing that happens far too often in America these days, even at places where known journalism is said to occur.
This is an example of "reporting" (bonus video at link):
Christie said in a recent speech that "you can't lead by being a mystery, you can't lead by being an enigma," but denied that he was referring to Romney's unwillingness to disclose more of his personal financial information.
"I don't think he's been a mystery and an enigma in terms of what he stands for and what he believes," Christie said. "I think you can always look back in retrospect and maybe say 'I would've done this or that differently,' but in the end do I think any American voter is going to say, 'I'm not voting for him?' No. I think they're much more concerned about mounting debt and deficit and the other issues we're talking about, [like] joblessness, and those are things that are going to decide this election."
In less than five minutes, Matt Lauer made Governor Short Round squirm to any number of comments he's made in the past, and made Gov. Sammiches (Chris Christie, R-KrispyKreme) sound like a blithering idiot.
Not that Christie is a fount of intellectual wisdom, but he can put two sentences together, even off the cuff.
As an example, here's Christie's defense of Mitt Romney's recent birther "joke":
"I think if he had to do it over again, he wouldn't make the joke," Christie told Matt Lauer on TODAY Tuesday. "But you know what, when you're on camera 12, 14 hours a day, and you're at a big rallies and you're just going off the cuff, there are going to be times you're going to say stuff you wish you could take back. If you get a chance to talk to Governor Romney, I think he'd tell you that he wishes he could take that one back."
Er, shades of the 3 am phone call. Gov. Christie has just admitted that Mitt Romney is not up to the physical challenges of running for president, much less the 24-hour-a-day torture of actually being president.
When a president commits a gaffe, he's usually, generally, not making fun of another person. If a president pointedly makes a personal joke about someone -- like Donald Trump -- he means it, even if it's made in jest. Indeed, one reason kings kept court jesters was that court jesters could be brutally honest with a king, something no one else could be, simply because they were amusing.
Now, I suppose we can give some berth for the fact that Romney was on the campaign trail and needed to energize his lackluster base. That's fine. That's why a smart politician hires a warm-up act, either his vice-presidential nominee (Sarah Palin was a fine example) or another surrogate who can speak for the candidate without the responsibility of answering for him.
Bill Clinton, when Hillary was running in 2008, is a pretty good example of this. Clinton could raise the race issue -- pretty authoritatively, too -- while allowing Hillary the option to step away from his comments.
If Mitt really wanted to play the birther card, he has a myriad of folks lined up who would do just that on his behalf, some of whom haven't thoroughly disgusted the American people by now. If Mitt really did just, out of exhaustion, illness or plain mean-spiritedness, blurt it out, then he needs to take care.
After all, Obama has pretty effectively refuted that base canard, and while there is still a small but not insignificant minority (not insignificant in terms of a voting coalition) of people who cling desperately to the image of Obama as some kind of carpetbagger, a fascist Commie Muslim atheist -- go ahead, I'll wait... dum de dum dum dum, de dum, de dum ...OK, get it? -- the vast majority of Americans have, either willingly or grudgingly, accepted that he's a natural-born American and legitimately our president.
Conventional wisdom accepts that the convention (er, pardon the clumsy pun) is where the candidate gets to define himself. Romney, despite Christie's protests, is an enigma, and for the last month or so, has defined himself badly.
Indeed, this may have been the quietest I've ever seen an incumbent in recent memory. The Romney jokes have just written themselves from New Hampshire to England and back again. President Obama has literally been able to talk about the crabgrass and still seen his poll numbers improve.
Romney gets a bump, particularly tonight when Ann Romney speaks, humanizing her husband to "you people." Chris Christie will jab and poke President Obama and I'll be interested to read (I'm not watching. I have paint drying. More exciting.) how many blatant lies he tells.
Christie strikes me as a master politician, so I suspect he'll be long on interpretation and short on out-and-out misstatement of facts. But still, there's a lot of anger on the right and he may fall prey to his own vanity and go off the cuff.
I have no doubt Mitt Romney knows Barack Obama was born in the United States, which is what makes his silly little joke at a rally in Michigan that much more disturbing. His campaign team sees it for what it is, a gaffe, and have been trying to suggest this had nothing to do with the birther nonsense, but was simply Romney's attempt at humour to do with the Romney's "coming home" to Michigan. Well, that's ridiculous.
Of course Romney fully believes Obama was born in the United States. But in a way, that’s the point — he’s still willing to dabble in birther humor, either to rev up his base by proving that he’s willing to take it to Obama or whatever, or for a cheap laugh, or for some combination of the two.
Sargent continues by making the point that on the heels of Todd Akin "legitimate rape" controversy, this is a "reminder of the extreme voices in the GOP, which Romney has at times been slow to denounce."
The fact that uncomfortably large numbers still believe Obama has perpetrated an elaborate plot to fake his birthplace and ascend to the presidency illegitimately is a pretty damn big deal.
It will be easy for the Obama campaign to seize on this to raise questions about Romney’s judgment, temperament, and character. Wow.
I think that's all true, but I also think it's true that Romney's silly little joke betrays something he does believe, along with a disturbingly high percentage of conservative voters, and that is that Barack Obama's presidency is not legitimate. The birther controversy has always been short-hand for this perspective. Birtherism is short-hand for those who think this election is about "taking their country back." Why else would it continue to have legs long after it has been debunked by virtually anyone with a half a brain?
It wouldn't take long to find a series of clips in which Romney claims Obama's political positions are "foreign," or that he doesn't understand the way the American economy works, or the way the American people think, and other such nonsense.
You don't have to be a Freudian scholar to understand that jokes are frequently a passive-aggressive way to assert things we actually believe but that are too dangerous to say outright. Again, I don't think Romney believes President Obama was born anywhere but in the U.S., but I do believe he thinks Obama's presidency is illegitimate. Birtherism is a continuing bad joke to make that case.
Final comment: I found the youthful "indiscretion" of Mitt Romney holding down a fellow student who was "different," and violently cutting his hair, very instructive. Romney clearly has always had strong ideas about what it means to "belong," to be the "right kind of person," to be acceptable. From his earliest days, he has been more than a little annoyed by those who have failed to understand what is expected of them, who, perhaps, don't know their place.
No, these comments about Obama's birthplace and his foreign understanding shouldn't be taken literally, but their metaphorical sense is just as disturbing.
A group of former Special Ops personnel are coming after President
Obama, accusing him of taking credit for killing Osama bin Laden for
himself and leaking national security secrets for political gain. Small
problem: according to the Los Angeles Times, they've been leaking secrets themselves:
In politics, the story line rarely changes: Do as I say, not as I do.
Thus several former U.S. intelligence and special operations personnel
who have accused President Obama of leaking and "politicizing" national
security information have themselves talked publicly about sensitive
security matters.
They are members of a new nonprofit group called Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund.
Known as OPSEC, military shorthand for operational security, the group
says it has raised about $1 million for TV ads and a short film called "Dishonorable Disclosures," which criticizes the Obama administration
for alleged national security leaks.
The organizers say they don't intend to release a list of their donors or their members. Neither is required by law.
"It's time for President Obama and other administration officials to
stop jeopardizing national security operations for political gain," said
Fred Rustmann, an OPSEC member, who worked at the CIA for 24 years
before he retired in 1990.
Rustmann and two other key members of the group, all self-described
Republicans, have a history of talking openly to the media about
national security, a review of articles and transcripts shows.
Rustmann appeared on Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes" in 2005 to discuss Valerie Plame Wilson,
a covert CIA operations officer who was outed in July 2003 by members
of the George W. Bush administration. A federal jury convicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was chief of staff for Vice President Dick Cheney,
of four felony counts for his role in the crime.
There's another group of like-minded patriots called SOS that bases its opposition to Mr. Obama on the fact that he's Not One of Us:
President
Barack Obama is a socialist, was raised by communists, and wasn't born
in the United States, according to the former Navy SEAL who founded the
group Special Operations Speaks (SOS), which aims to portray Obama as
anti-military in this election season.
[...]
"I have to admit that I'm a Birther," said SOS founder Larry Bailey, a
retired 27-year veteran of the Navy SEALs, in an interview. "If there
were a jury of 12 good men and women and the evidence were placed before
them, there would be absolutely no question Barack Obama was not born
where he said he was and is not who he says he is."
Do the
Republicans really want to have a group going around reminding the
voters of who got Osama bid Laden when the last guy they had in office
couldn't be bothered? And it really doesn't help when they're as
loose-lipped with national security secrets as they claim the president
has been.
As for the other group, the general consensus is that as soon as you
come out with the birther line, you're nothing but a racist asshole and
therefore not worth listening to.
Daily Kos had a hilarious little post yesterday about the craziness of Maricopa Country Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his quest to prove Barack Obama's birth certificate a fake. It's all absolutely absurd, of course. If you really want to know what Arpaio thinks he found, go to the Daily Kos story. As I said, its very funny, but I haven't got the patience to explain it.
And then, because the grocery store tabloids love this kind of stuff, the Globe reported Arpaio's findings in all their glory.
Beside loving the cover shot, especially the sinister look on Obama's face, I've always been intrigued by these tabloids. When I was young, I spent a lot of time working the midnight shift in supermarkets outside of New York City. On breaks I would read these things for comic relief. Even as a kid I knew they were garbage, but they certainly sold well and there were a number of them in the rack to choose from.
It's frightening enough to think anyone is getting their political information from Fox News. I don't know what to think about the possibility that anyone reads these things with the thought they are actually learning anything.
Then again, it was the National Enquirer that broke the John Edwards / Rielle Hunter story. Maybe I should reconsider my bias. Oh, what to do, what to do...
(For more on the NG poll, see here. As for me, I certainly believe in UFOs. Which is to say, I believe that some flying objects are unidentified. The real question is whether you believe there is intelligent extraterrestrial life. I do. And, yes, I'd certainly hope to befriend aliens if they showed up. -- MJWS)
Yes, that's a real headline. Apparently National Geographic asked the question and this is how people answered. Here's more from press release:
In regards to national security, nearly two-thirds (65%) of Americans think Barack Obama would be better suited than fellow presidential candidate Mitt Romney to handle an alien invasion. In fact, more than two in three (68%) women say that Obama would be more adept at dealing with an alien invasion than Romney, vs. 61 percent of men. And more younger citizens, ages 18 to 64 years, than those aged 65+ (68% vs. 50%) think Romney would not be as well-suited as Obama to handle an alien invasion.
I have to say, this is information I am glad I have. I wonder why they didn't ask how many Americans think Mitt Romney is from another planet. How else to explain? And we could start a whole new birther movement. It would make as much sense as their birther movement.
Anyway, this is a good excuse to post the trailer to the original Men in Black, a movie I enjoyed.
A high-level surrogate for presumptive Republican presidential
nominee Mitt Romney's campaign said this year's White House race will be
about issues, not where President Obama was born.
Speaking on
CNN’s State of the Union, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) said both he
and Romney agree that Obama was born in America.
"I would say both Mitt Romney and I agree. The president was born in America," McDonnell said.
Mitt Romney, as you may have heard, is attending a fundraiser in Las Vegas today with no less a shining light of the GOP than Donald Trump (as well as with another party star, Newt Gingrich). In anticipation of the event, Romney was asked about Trump's birtherism:
Mitt Romney said Monday he wasn't concerned about Donald Trump's commitment to the "birther" conspiracy, one day before the GOP presidential candidate hosts a fund-raiser alongside the celebrity business magnate.
Asked on his charter plane whether Trump's questioning of President Barack Obama's birthplace gave him pause, Romney simply said he was grateful for all his supporters.
"You know, I don't agree with all the people who support me and my guess is they don't all agree with everything I believe in," Romney said. "But I need to get 50.1% or more and I'm appreciative to have the help of a lot of good people."
(Actually, he doesn't need 50.1% or more, he needs 270 Electoral College votes. But perhaps we should excuse him this apparent lapse of understanding of the rules of American democracy?)
What a steaming pile of horseshit. (No disrespect to our equine friends.)
Romney isn't a birther and could easily have said he thinks (or preferably knows) Obama was born in the U.S., brushing off the question and moving on, but instead he saw an opportunity to pander shamelessly and, as usual, took it. And to whom was he pandering? Why, to the many, many Republicans who are on Trump's side on the whole birther nonsense. To all those "good people" on the crazy far right, which is more and more the Republican mainstream, whose support he needs in November.
But even if you don't think he was pandering to the right, his refusal to take a side was also typical of his tendency to flip and flop like a shameless opportunist, so unprincipled is he, so utterly soul-less, so desperate for votes, so fearful of pushing any prospective supporters away. (He may tout himself as a successful businessman, but there are countless indications he's a terrible leader.)
Anyway, enjoy the Romney-Trump-Gingrich spectacle today. For more, see my recent posts:
ABC News reports on a funny thing that happened on ABC this morning:
This morning on "This Week," ABC News' George Will called Donald Trump a "bloviating ignoramus," questioning why presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney is associating with the real estate mogul, who once again falsely questioned President Obama's birthplace this week.
"I do not understand the cost benefit here," Will said on the "This Week" roundtable. "The costs are clear. The benefit — what voter is gonna vote for him (Romney) because he is seen with Donald Trump? The cost of appearing with this bloviating ignoramus is obvious it seems to me."
"Donald Trump is redundant evidence that if your net worth is high enough, your IQ can be very low and you can still intrude into American politics," Will added. "Again, I don't understand the benefit. What is Romney seeking?"
I don't know... approval from the powerful so as to fill some gaping hole in his soul?
(UPDATE: Trump has fired back, tweeting: "George Will may be the dumbest (and most overrated) political commentator of all time. If the Republicans listen to him, they will lose." I don't much care for Will, but I'd defend him here. There are many who are dumber. Has Trump ever watched Fox News?)
Look, I take (and for the most part agree with) Will's point, but there's the usual bloviating arrogance here:
First, while birtherism is a refuge for the ignorant, and worse, Republicans (that is, members of Will's own party) have for the most part spent the past four years, and more, questioning Obama's loyalty to America.
This more line of attack on first the candidate and then the president has taken a number of forms, but Romney himself has engaged in it repeatedly, accusing Obama of going around the world apologizing for America, a blatant lie. Yes, birtherism has been one of the ugliest forms of it, what with its more explicit racist component, and Trump has been one of the most visible of the birthers, and one of the loudest, but Will is just trying to distance himself and his beloved party from a movement, if you can call it that, that has been very much a part of the vicious Republican assault on Obama, one that's still going strong today.
Will often takes this smarter-than-thou approach in his punditry, and to his credit he has criticized the more extreme elements in his party on occasion, but you can't really have it both ways. Birtherism and similar lines of attack on the president (e.g., playing the affirmative action card, which Trump has also done) are a huge part of what the Republican Party has been about the past several years. If you count yourself a Republican, this is what your party is about. You can try to pretend otherwise, or wave off these elements as too silly to bother with, and you can try to make yourself look good by comparison in doing so, but that would be a gross misrepresentation of your party.
Second, Donald Trump is a popular Republican -- among Republicans -- as his high poll numbers last year indicated. Will may not like that, but it's true. And why is he so popular? It's his birtherism, sure, to a point, but perhaps more so his bullying views on foreign policy (advocating the America be a sort of global bully, pushing everyone around, including China, to get whatever it wants) -- indeed, this has become Romney's main foreign policy view as well: Russia's still Enemy #1 and America ought just to go around swining its supposedly massive dick. It's not exactly an enlightened position to take, but it's not like Romney is terribly enlightened on foreign policy.
Furthermore -- and this is really why Trump is so widely esteemed -- Republicans worship successful businessmen and the super-wealthy, and Trump is both (even if his record as a businessman has been full of massive failure*). Put another way, Republicans love rapacious greed, and Trump is nothing if not rapaciously greedy.
(*As I wrote back in February, if you want failure, you need look no further than Trump's own career -- for example, the USFL, the Trump Shuttle, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, massive debt, bailouts by banks, bankrupties... really, one could go on and on. See here and here for the details of these and other failures.)
Far more than birtherism, and even more than bullying American foreign policy and militarism, this is the core of today's Republican Party, with the chief policy goal being the significant lowering of those tax rates affecting the wealthy. The Republican Party is the party of plutocracy, not democracy, and it advocates a laissez-faire system in which the rich can acquire more and more wealth -- and of course more and more power. Will's views, admittedly, are more nuanced and complex than that, and he may not approve in full of this plutocratic agenda, or even acknowledge it, but basically both he and his party are fundamentally pro-Trump.
Third, while I agree that the benefits of appearing with Trump aren't clear, if indeed there are any, Romney has proven himself throughout this campaign to be a shameless panderer and suck-up who will do and say anything for votes. Given that, it makes sense he'd want to appear with a popular Republican celebrity like Trump. Furthermore, for someone lacking in charisma and broad public appeal like Romney, being at Trump's side is an opportunity to bask in a desirable glow of someone very much unlike himself. Romney and his campaign no doubt think he'll be able to benefit just from being in the presence of that glow.
But, really, Romney may simply want to be in the presence of another super-rich businessman. Look at who Romney is: a one-term governor and otherwise political failure who has made a fortune in the business world as a vulture capitalist. Trump has been critical of Romney in this regard -- "He'd buy companies. He'd close companies. He'd get rid of jobs." -- but that may not matter much to Romney. Or, rather, it may, but perhaps Romney sees in Trump what other Republicans do, business success, and perhaps that's all that really matters here.
Simply put, Trump is someone to whom Romney can relate on a deep personal level (more personal than political), someone even more successful (in a way), and even richer, than he is. If you view the world through a lens of plutocratic entitlement, as Romney seems to, Trump's a superstar. And who doesn't want to hang out with superstars?
So while there may be no obvious benefit to it, in terms of votes, is it really any wonder Romney will be appearing with The Donald -- and with Gingrich as well, making up what I've termed "the un-holy Republican triumvirate of 2012"?
The fact that George Will doesn't see this, or doesn't want to, is evidence that he doesn't understand, or doesn't want to, today's Republican Party, including its 2012 presidential flag-bearer.
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.?
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.
No, I never mean what I say. I don't even listen to myself when I speak.
To my mind, there is little more disturbing than the kind of comments made recently by Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colorado) about President Obama. While discussing the issue of Obama's birthplace, he said that "in his heart, he's not an American."
The full comment, as reported by Fox 31 Denver, was: "I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I do know this, that in his heart, he's not an American. He's just not an American."
He later gave some bullshit apology, probably only because he had to. It seems that his district has been redrawn to include fewer Republicans and this kind of incendiary remark may not help him with more rational voters in the fall.
His Democratic opponent, State Rep. Joe Miklosa (D-Aurora) has already jumped on it, calling Coffman "Colorado's version of Rush Limbaugh."
I do understand that local races are different than national races, but if Republicans continue to give Democrats this kind of ammunition, this kind of Tea Party, hate-filled rhetoric, to use against them, this isn't even going to be close come November.
If you, you stupid Republicans, really want to gin up the Democratic base, keep on suggesting that liberals, and the leaders with whom they identify, are not really American. Please. Go there.
Remember Rick Perry's flirtation with Birtherism the other day after a meeting with Donald Trump? Seems, as he tells the St. Petersburg Times's Adam Smith, he was only kidding:
Smith: Jeb Bush the other day said, the Republican
candidates for president should categorically reject the notion that Barack Obama was
not born in America. This came after you expressed doubts about that..
what would you say to him? Perry: Oh, I don't think I was expressing doubts. I was having some fun with Donald Trump. So I...
Smith: Are you comfortable that he's an American citizen?
Perry: Oh yeah. It's fun to... ya know, lighten up a little bit...
Adam: So you have no doubt he's an American citizen?
Smith: I have no doubt about it.
Oh, yeah, right. Haha. What fun.
But, you see, there's a bit of wiggle room here. The issue, for Birthers, isn't whether Obama is a citizen but whether he was born in the U.S. (and is therefore eligible to be president). All Perry says here is that he has no doubt Obama is a citizen. Now, he was just answering the question posed to him. It's not his fault that the question wasn't the one that consumers the Birthers. Still, it was conveniently posed, and it gives him an out should he wish to get back into the Birther game at some later date.
Otherwise, I highly doubt he was just "having some fun." More likely, he was told by his handlers that Birtherism doesn't fly anymore, except on the outer fringe of a party that is already well out on the fringe, or at least isn't something he should be pushing at the moment. It just makes him look even more unready and unserious than his embarrassingly bad debate performances do.
It's all about political calculation, stupid. Even Rick Perry gets that.
Well, too extreme to win the election, not necessarily too extreme in purely ideological terms (where he surely agrees with their extremist views).
But, as ThinkProgress puts it, "[y]ou know you've hit rock bottom when one of the most radical, hate-spewing figures in America calls you 'extreme.'" (Watch the clip below.)
My one quibble: I'm not sure this is rock bottom. Perry, Cain, Bachmann, and, yes, even Romney can still go much lower in their efforts to out-extreme each other. (Consider, for example, Perry's recent flirtation with Birtherism. Haley Barbour, occasionally known for being sensible, or at least pragmatic, is smart enough to know this is bad move.)
And it will likely get much, much worse as we head into 2012.
I still think Rick Perry has a good shot at the Republican presidential nomination. Not so much because of his strengths but because of Mitt Romney's weaknesses, not to mention the weaknesses of the Republican field generally. Simply, conservatives are looking for someone other than Romney, an establishment type with a decidedly unconservative past whose support remains stuck in the 20s despite the fact that no one on the right -- not Bachmann, not Perry, not Cain -- has been able to muster much of a challenge thus far (even if Cain is in the lead in some polls, and in some states -- there's no way he sustains his current momentum).
Perry's major strength is that he's very much what conservatives are looking for, an evangelical Christian, a supply-sider, a gunslinger, and very much the antithesis of liberalism. Indeed, as Jon Chait has put it, he's "the walking embodiment of the Republican id."
His performance thus far, not least in the debates, has been, well, uninspiring, suggesting that he's just not ready to be anywhere near the presidency, but, having cratered, he may now be on the upswing, doing fairly well in last week's debate (for him, anyway) and otherwise benefitting from ridiculously low expectations. And if he can tap into that right-wing id, well, you never know. Certainly there are many Republicans -- the majority, perhaps -- who would gladly back him (and reject Romney once and for all).
So it's hardly surprising that he's talking Birtherism after a meeting with another id-ster, Donald Trump:
That wasn't enough, however, to convince Rick Perry. In an interview
with PARADE Magazine, Perry said that he recently met with Donald Trump
and discussed the issue. Perry stated that he doesn't "have a definitive
answer" on whether Obama was born in the United States or "any idea" if
Obama's birth certificate is real.
Uh-huh. Sure. Maybe he really is that stupid. Or maybe he knows he can make an issue of this with his core constituency on the far right.
Perry recently secured the endorsement of Orly Taitz,
known as the "birther queen" for repeatedly filing lawsuits asserting
that Obama was born outside the United States. Taitz told ThinkProgress
that she believed Perry will use the birther issue to attack Obama.
He claims not. Actually, and amazingly, he claims he's the least racist person around. The proof he gives is that a black man, one Randal Pinkett, won The Apprentice a few years ago.
Once the guffaws subside, I'll leave you to judge that claim, and the proof, for yourselves.
If Trump wants to cite the Mr. Pinkett's success, however, we may respond by citing the lack of success of one Kevin Allen, another black man who was a contestant on that detestable show:
Apparently he doesn't like educated African-Americans very much,
said Mr. Allen, a highly-educated African-American who made it all the way to Week 14, just a week prior to the finale.
Sour grapes? Maybe, though Trump's condescending treatment of Mr. Allen was certainly inappropriate, if not outright racist.
But these are anecdotes from a reality TV show. More telling is Trump's enthusiastic embrace of Birtherism, which to a great extent is a mask for anti-Obama racism, as well as, more explicitly, his ridiculous assertion that Obama needed affirmative action to get into the Ivy League.
The
right-wing radicals and conspiracy theorists of the Tea Party fringe
revolution didn't embrace reality when President Obama released his
long-form birth certificate last week, a move that, by all legitimate
accounts, was a redundant nail in the coffin on the "birther" issue. As
we saw with the immediate demands for the president's college records,
the duplicitous truth did little to convince the boisterous bigots in
this great nation that a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama could
ever be a legitimate leader of the free world.
And so it is without surprise that America is forced to accept the emergence of another great conspiracy movement: the Deathers.
This
is not a joke. No, the paranoid skeptics of all things Obama are not
demanding a long-form death certificate – yet – but they are doling out
conspiracy after conspiracy as evidence that the president's
announcement of the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a hoax at
best and a bald-faced lie at worst.
Surprisingly, the explanations for how and why, though exhaustive, are quite compelling.
The
timing is too coincidental to go unnoticed, and the sharp minds of our
deep-thinking conspirators didn't miss a beat when it was pointed out
that President Obama announced bin Laden's assassination eight years to
the day from when President Bush infamously declared the end of combat
operations in Iraq under the banner "Mission Accomplished."
If
that's not enough, the announcement also "happened" to interrupt the
Sunday night episode of Donald Trump's reality TV show Celebrity
Apprentice, which some cognitively elevated theorists interpreted as
the president's way of getting even with Trump for escalating the
controversy over Obama's birth certificate in recent weeks.
Of
course, Obama already landed quite a few heavy blows against Trump at
the Saturday evening White House correspondents' dinner, but that too is
now up for debate as a possible reason for the timely announcement of
bin Laden's death. The president is consistently harassed by the
right-wing media every time he steps out for a round of golf or a few
laps up and down the basketball court – because obviously more pressing
matters are being ignored if the president has time for leisure – and so
it is possible too that Obama was preempting the expected criticisms of
his "night of laughs" by delivering bin Laden's head on a platter the
very next night.
Except bin Laden's head wasn’t delivered on a platter, which brings us to the other conspiracies.
His
body was dumped in the ocean out of respect for Islamic burial customs,
which the government conveniently cited as its reason for getting rid
of the body within 24 hours. The alleged DNA testing and facial
recognition scans that allegedly confirmed the alleged identity of the
alleged 9/11 mastermind are all that America has to go on as proof that
bin Laden didn't die seven years ago – as some claim; or that he never
existed at all; or that he was a fake enemy created to justify the
government's own role in hijacking planes on 9/11 and crashing them into
the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon; or that he was frozen several
years ago and kept in a secret (probably underground and
heavily-guarded) location until the political atmosphere in the United
States demanded a public announcement of his death.
And
where are the photographs of bin Laden's dead corpse? And where is the
video footage of the raid on his compound? And how could the Pakistani
government somehow not know that he was holed up in a million-dollar
fortress in a city full of retired and active-duty military officers?
And isn't it interesting that the announcement coincided with the
kickoff of Zombie Awareness Month?
In
all seriousness, the conspiracy theorists may not be far off the mark
when they question the truth and timing of Obama's announcement.
Capturing
and killing the most loathed and feared terrorist on the planet
provides an embattled president with a much-needed boost in the
popularity polls. It buries the argument, prominent among the right-wing
punditry, that Obama is weak and inexperienced not only as a commander
of the military but as a diplomat of a mostly undefined foreign policy
doctrine. Killing the mastermind behind 9/11 will not only boost the
popularity of the president himself; it will also bolster the
president's foreign policy agenda, which most recently added Libya to
the list of Middle Eastern interventions.
Most
importantly, it's approaching an election year, and as we all know,
politicians will do anything to maintain power. That is the real
conspiracy.
Obama
isn't lying. He didn't thaw bin Laden's frozen zombie corpse only to
throw it in the ocean after an alleged DNA test in order to get a boost
in the polls. Obama's more complex than that. He, too, is a big-picture
kind of guy – a long-term thinker. He ordered the raid and killed the
terrorist and announced the assassination and dumped the body all in one
day because it's too coincidental not to conjure conspiracy theories. It was conspiracy theories he wanted.
He held onto the photos and the videos not because he hoped to thwart a
backlash from al Qaeda radicals – who would surely try to avenge bin
Laden's murder if images of their bloodied leader were published around
the globe – but because doing so would encourage the already
hyper-active, dot-connecting, big-picture puzzling lunatics of the
extreme right to continue chasing invisible fairies on the South Lawn as
the news cameras document the revolution.
In
that sense, it is a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy to induce
conspiracies so that sane Americans will identify the Republican Party
as the responsible guardian of these idiots – first "birthers," now "deathers" – in the upcoming election.
The Democratic Party's bumper stickers are being shipped out of the press shop now: "Vote Sanity in 2012."
This isn't a conspiracy to trump Trump or get a bump in the polls. It's a conspiracy to get the conspirators conspiring.
Conservative renegade David Frum may describe Birtherism as a "disgrace" and a "phony controversy," as an issue that effectively ended with yesterday's release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate, and I credit Frum for asking how "this poisonous and not very subtly racist allegation [got] such a grip on our conservative movement and our Republican party" (that would be, his movement and his party) and for denouncing "these racialized attacks on Obama" (not just the Birther allegation but the new allegation, via Donald Trump, that Obama is basically a product of affirmative action, undeserving of his Ivy League education), but actually Birtherism and its various offshoots, however convincingly refuted, aren't going anywhere.
James Fallows explains why: "[Tuesday], about half of all Republicans thought Obama was foreign born,
and therefore an illegal occupant of the White House. How many
Republicans will think the same thing one week from now? My guess is:
about half. We've reached that stage on just about everything. It's
probably been true of human beings throughout time, but is more
obviously significant in politics now, that generally people don't act
like scientific investigators, or judges in moot-court competitions,
when parsing the logic and evidence behind competing arguments to come
up with political views. They go on loyalty, and tradition, and hope,
and fear, and self-interest, and generosity, and all the rest."
Quite true, but I think Fallows is too generous, and too universal in applying his theory. While I acknowledge that ignorance, willful or otherwise, has been a facet of the human condition forever, or almost forever, this isn't so much about "human beings throughout time" as it is about the current state of one of America's two dominant political parties, a party that to a great extent has rejected science in favour of a far-right ideology, mixed with a similarly far-right theology, that wants nothing to do with "logic and evidence" and everything to do with trickle-down economics and "Intelligent Design." Yes, much of this has to do with loyalty, tradition, fear, self-interest, etc., but a lot of it has to do with sheer madness -- and, as I have remarked a number of times, what I find to be one of the defining aspects of our time, politically speaking, is the Republican Party's descent into madness, or rather its ongoing descent into ever deeper levels of madness.
Many Republicans, needless to say, still aren't convinced. Some of them are crazies like Leo Berman, but the issue, in one form or another, will be kept alive by more mainstream Republicans like Trump, Newt Gingrich, and everyone else who, sincerely or not, is trying to appeal to the grassroots base of the party. And of course it will be kept alive on Fox News, on talk radio, and throughout Frum's "conservative movement."
It's ignorance, it's racism, it's madness. And the facts don't matter one bit.
A blog on politics, philosophy, science, sports, and the arts -- featuring news, commentary, and analysis by Michael J.W. Stickings and the Reaction team.
