Birthers... one more time

[lokisnow]

I read this article on Holocaust deniers earlier today, and the end quote seems apt to the birther conspiracy theorists

One scholar of Holocaust denial told me, quoting a friend, that Holocaust deniers they “are like the shit you step on in the street—it has no relevance unless you fail to scrape it off before entering your home.†In part, I understand the sentiment: I often felt as if Weber, in particular, had come home with me, invaded my office, even my bedroom. But I don’t share the scatological disgust. Instead, I remember what the theologian Stanley Hauerwas once told me about premillennial dispensationalists, those fundamentalist Christians who extrapolate from the Bible extremely complicated, unbelievably detailed, scenarios about the end times, like those in the Left Behind novels. “They’re very smart,†Hauerwas said. “You can’t be stupid and come up with that. God gave them minds, and they need to use them.†In other words, forbidden by their religion from developing real intellectual curiosity, they turn their brainpower toward half-baked biblical exegesis that makes sense according to its own hermetic logic. Weber and Smith are trapped like that. Holocaust denial is, like more benign species of fundamentalism, a well-furnished playground for immature and sometimes deranged intellects. It isn’t necessarily about Jews, or even about the Holocaust; it’s about finding something to do with one’s mind. These people aren’t stupid or cynical: Smith does seem to have a noble libertarian streak, and Weber is smart and industrious. And if they could scale the walls that they’ve built for themselves, and look around at the world outside the playground, they might even do some good.

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics...e-denial-twist/

[Mad Monkey]

I'm guessing they're confusing Pakistan with Cuba. It's an honest mistake, they've both got the letter "a" in them.

[Crazydog7]

At least the loony far left is constant in its dreadful yammerings about 9/11 was an inside job and FEMA is constructing concentration camps.

The right so consumed with Obama hate when they can't find a real issue they just have to make shit up.

As long as they don't start taking the moon landing was staged and the hollow earth people seriously I guess I'm ok.

[Crazydog7]

To me it's a pretty simple thing to figure out. Obama himself claimed to have visited Pakistan in 1981. He was either telling a lie, or he was using a non-U.S. Passport. So, he's either a lying sack of horse manure (like just about every other politician on the planet), or he is not a U.S. citizen.

I won't go all the way to throwing my total support behind his removal from office based on this fact though (mainly because I do not want to have someone silence me).

Dear God you can't be serious? You can't believe that anyone who posts on this board is worthy of a political assassination? Some form of neatly arranged accident? Hate to burst the bubble pal but just like the rest of us you are just a poster on a message board. EHK God rest his snarky soul would have a field day with your post.

Well the issue is different but the sentiments expressed in this article are the same

http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=911_morons

If there really was some kind of gigantic conspiracy honestly do any of us know anyone with the capacity to keep that bog of a secret?

Oh well Naive little liberal me just can't fathom the depth of Obama's insidious mind control powers.

All glory and honor to the Hypno Toad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiVYjRbZMe0

[The_BlauerDragon]

This seems like a non sequitar to me. Since when haven't US passport holders been allowed to visit Pakistan? Probably news to all the Pakistani-Americans who travelled back and forth during that time. Or Charlie Wilson for that matter.

That was kind of my point. I hate Obama as much as the next American, but this argument over his birth certificate seems like it is about 80% as pointless as a dog chasing it's tail.

This Article does a pretty good job of dismantling the entire passport angle of the article.

[CloudFlare]

At least the loony far left is constant in its dreadful yammerings about 9/11 was an inside job and FEMA is constructing concentration camps.

These two moron-memes are about equally spilt between right-loonies and left-loonies.

During the end of the Bush I presidency and throughout the Clinton years the right was all up in arms about the FEMA concentration camps being constructed in various remote locations. Certain stickers on the back of road signs could lead you to them, ahem, supposedly.

During the Bush II presidency the FEMA camps fell off the radar more or less, until Katrina came up. Then it was split between right and left.

The 9/11 Truthers are mostly right wing as well, but there are some on the left shrieking "Haliburton did it!".

[Trencher]

That was kind of my point. I hate Obama as much as the next American, but this argument over his birth certificate seems like it is about 80% as pointless as a dog chasing it's tail.

This Article does a pretty good job of dismantling the entire passport angle of the article.

The fact that Hillary's goons didn't find anything on this is enough to put it to rest. I can't see them leaving any stone unturned. Today on the radio John Gibson spent about an hour letting the "Birthers" try and convince him they weren't nuts. All the while they played the Art Bell Coast to Coast theme music in the background. It was hilarious.

[Andriy Czarchenko]

TDS ran a segment about this stupidity yesterday.

[sologdin]

about equally spilt between right-loonies and left-loonies.

yeah, some lefties are into the 9/11 tinfoil hatism, but most tend to agree with chomsky that conspiracism is not a useful area of investigation when the whole premise of left activism is the structural critique of militarism, the structural critique of capitalism, &c. (personally, i don't believe the US account of what happened, but i don't think bush & cheney ordered it or allowed it.)

the FEMA camp stuff strikes me as an alex jones montana-militia compound hysterics, or like sandpoint, idaho "medical" "research" into HIV.

at least these things are fairly important; the BHO birth certificate is about the dumbest thing over which to make a conspiracy--usually, there has to be something at stake for a group of people to form a plan to commit crimes in its furtherance.

[Watcher]

If the Birthers can prove Obama isn't the president then they are the heros protecting the country from a fraud. Otherwise they are no different then the commie left who only protest because they hate America.

[Tsavong Lah]

If the Birthers can prove Obama isn't the president then they are the heros protecting the country from a fraud. Otherwise they are no different then the commie left who only protest because they hate America.

Sarcasm, or no? Hard to tell.

The left (or "commie left" as you put it) protest not out of hatred for America, but out of opposition to certain actions in an effort to elevate the country to what it can be. I believe the right-wing protesters, like the teabaggers, believe they are doing the same. It is simply a matter of difference of opinion on exactly what it is that makes America great and what the problems are on the road to a more perfect union.

One of the local blogs I frequent (lefty blog, but a lot of right-wing posters in the comments) has a discussion about Birthers. One guy claims to not be a birther, but that he is pushing for more discussion of the issue because supposedly by not giving it any credence the left-wing is violating free-speech. Anyway, he is totally hung up on the issue of the "Certificate of Live Birth" and can not understand that in Hawaii that is more important than the birth certificate itself and that it is an official document.

[Minaku]

I don't really understand this phenomenon. It doesn't matter whether or not Obama has the birth certificate, as his mother was an American, and therefore he is one as well. Hell, I'm an American citizen and my original birth certificate has been lost or destroyed, don't know. I've asked my mother for it and she says she lost it. I have a new one, but it's with my changed name, so the original is gone.

I can't believe no one else in the thread has raised the possibility that racism plays into the birthers' beliefs. Would they be just as incensed if Obama was a white guy, or if his name was Michael David Obama? He's a first generation American with family back in Kenya, but it doesn't make him any less American than the other first generation Americans.

[DanteGabriel]

I can't believe no one else in the thread has raised the possibility that racism plays into the birthers' beliefs. Would they be just as incensed if Obama was a white guy, or if his name was Michael David Obama? He's a first generation American with family back in Kenya, but it doesn't make him any less American than the other first generation Americans.

I simply take it as a given that these "birthers" are fucking racist swine.

[Minaku]

I simply take it as a given that these "birthers" are fucking racist swine.

Yeah, I'm going to have to agree with you on that one.

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

I actually just had this argument with someone at work last week. He was trying to explain to me how the President must be someone born within one of the 50 states, so that's why the Hawai'ian birth cert mattered. I kept trying to say that no, the requirements are that the person be over 35, a natural-born citizen, and the residence requirement. He was having absolutely none of it.

I don't know if all of the birthers would also be confused about that -- either that citizens are only born within the country OR that being President requires more than natural citizenship -- but it's the only explanation I can think of.

[DanteGabriel]

Salon's Joan Walsh on the birthers:

I give Chris Matthews a lot of credit for venturing to say the Birthers' problem with Obama "isn't documentation, it's pigmentation." When you hear that unhinged woman at Rep. Mike Castle's town hall, wailing "I want my country back!" – well, every time I hear it I get a little more concerned. Obama won the presidency with a bigger share of the popular vote than in any first election since Lyndon Johnson's (and Johnson was of course carried by the tragedy of the Kennedy assassination.) The idea that these people "want their country back" from an allegedly illegitimate president can't be separated from race. It's frankly racist.

Of course the Birther movement persists because it scratches so many itches for the intolerant Republican fringe: It lets them obsess over Obama's father being a Muslim; it lets them remind people he's vaguely "other," with one parent from Kenya, and then, for the trifecta, the obsession with his "birth," subconsciously or not, lets the Birthers focus us on the facts of his conception, that he's the product of -- OMG! -- interracial sex, that old taboo. There's so much that's unsavory about Obama, from a certain blinkered world view, it's hard to know where to begin -- so let's just begin at birth.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/?last_s.../23/liz_cheney/

She also goes into some detail on Liz Cheney and other "mainstream" Republicans who are walking the tightrope of trying not to offend the xenophobic Frankenstein that their party has created, while trying not to get too close to their radioactive hatemongery.

[Hereward]

I simply take it as a given that these "birthers" are fucking racist swine.

Most, probably. But how then to explain dirjj, a fanatical "birther", or so Google tells me. :wideeyed:

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

Dirjj is a birther?? Dirjj Dirjj?

[Minaku]

I can believe a lot of things about Dirjj but this?

[drawkcabi]

Dirjj is a birther?? Dirjj Dirjj?

Between the 2006 elections and Obama's victory in '08, I think something must have snapped in him. When I first came to the board in '02 he was still conservative but he made logical and sometimes persuasive arguments, and was very amiable. Over time he just seemed to become more and more unhinged. Just my opinion.