Bin Laden Death Photo Coverage Is Media’s New Birther Moment
On Tuesday morning, counterterrorism official John Brennan was interviewed by NPR’s Steve Inskeep about the death of Osama bin Laden. For about eight minutes, listeners were treated to a serious and in-depth exploration of the circumstances surrounding bin Laden’s discovery and demise.
But then, right at the end, Inskeep couldn’t help himself. “In a few seconds, Mr. Brennan, why haven’t you released photos of Osama bin Laden?” Inskeep asked. Over the final minute of the interview, he repeated that important question four times.
And you couldn’t help thinking: Here we go again.
Wasn’t it just, like, hours ago that the media had assumed a posture of deep introspection about their role in fueling outlandish conspiracy theories?
On one hand, there were people like Shepard Smith of Fox News urging the media to “look in the mirror” because questions about President Obama’s birthplace were “a load of crap” and journalists “knew it from the very beginning.” (Amen.) On the other, there was Bob Garfield of NPR’s On the Media arguing that the attention paid by the media to Donald Trump’s birther claims was necessary to help the public distinguish between a “carnival barker” and a “responsible leader.” (Oh, I get it: Loons raise loony questions, the media repeats them over and over again, and, in so doing, exposes them to an audience far larger than the loons ever could have dreamed of reaching on their own, and thus we need the media to help us identify the loons. Wow, what an indispensible service.) No consensus, perhaps, but at least they were grappling with the question.
Not anymore, evidently.
Just hours after President Obama addressed the nation, no less than J. Michael Waller posted a blog entry opining that bin Laden should be displayed naked in lower Manhattan, then chopped into bits and dumped into the New York City sewers because while he may be dead “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Who’s J. Michael Waller you ask? Who cares! Questions have been raised! The public needs help identifying the carnival barkers! Summon the media!
So, there was Inskeep pressing Brennan. The Chicago Sun Times editorialized that a photo should be released to stop the conspiracy theories. The Associated Press moved a story headlined “Wanted: Visual Proof that the U.S. got him.” (Though you might reasonably ask why, given that the proof detailed in the story included DNA evidence, photographic identification, bin Laden’s wife apparently calling out to him by name during the firefight, and “[t]ellingly” an al Qaeda spokesman calling bin Laden “a martyr” and offering “no challenge to the U.S. account of his death.” Mighty suspicious!)
In fairness, there are differences between the birther stories and whether the United States should release a photo of bin Laden. To be sure, the latter has actual foreign policy and national security implications, and, now that the administration has decided not to release a photo, it may be that serious issues, rather than the increasingly hairbrained ideas of conspiracy theorists, will drive the media’s coverage but … I’ll believe it when I see it.
If the media would like us to believe it has serious, as opposed to sensationalistic, intentions when it covers a story like this, the nature of the coverage has to change. Raising a baseless charge again and again, day after day, and concluding that you’ve done your job if “both sides” of the story are represented does everyone a remarkable disservice. The reason: It gives the media’s imprimatur of legitimacy to a charge that is baseless, and it leaves the impression that there are two sides to an issue that is, in fact, indisputably settled.
Instead, if the media is going to give such issues any coverage at all, it should turn its camera in the opposite direction, focusing on the people who cling to preposterous beliefs and asking what that tells us about them, our culture, and our country. That may be a worthy journalistic pursuit, but we’ve seen very little of it.
Of course, there may be a bright side to all of this: The secret to getting media coverage has been revealed.
Therefore, I would like to announce the following: I believe the moon is made of elephants.
Media: Come and get me.
By: Anson Kaye, U.S. News and World Report, May 5, 2011
Is Obama “American” Enough For The Far Right Now?
Now that President Obama and his national security team have proven their mettle in pursuing and finally eliminating the supreme Islamic terrorist, a question arises: Will the not-insignificant chunk of voters who have rejected the president’s basic legitimacy — expressing skepticism about the circumstances of his birth in the face of conclusive proof that he was born here — be more likely to view Obama as “American” now?
On CNN’s “Reliable Sources” over the weekend, Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson suggested that the birther movement may not be about race. She compared the buzz around the issue to those conspiracy-minded individuals who tied Bill Clinton to the “murder” of Vince Foster in 1993 — an observation that other have made as well. It just seems too easy to describe the ruling passion of those who label President Obama a secret Muslim (or, to recall Mike Huckabee’s infamous slur, a Kenyan revolutionary), as strictly racist. History, though, yields enough clues to suggest that journalists who look for alternative explanations are wrong.
Birtherism has a distinctive history. If you go to the birther.org website, you will find a history lesson along with their creed: “The Birthers: Dedicated to the Rebirth of the Constitutional Republic.” Much like the Tea Partiers, birthers have linked themselves to America’s founding fathers. Their fealty to the Constitution is centered on a single phrase in Article II that requires the president to be a “natural born citizen.”
What does the all-important phrase mean? Birthers interpreting Article II say that “the president must above all else be loyal to this nation.” It is a “self-evident” truth that such loyalty is drawn from nature–and they are quite explicit about what that means: “kinship, our most primitive and natural form of citizenship, from blood”; a nativity which comes “from the soil,” or “place of birth.” It is an ideal of kinship that energizes the birther movement—the transmission of civic identity by descent, through bloodlines, from parents to children.
The website also makes it clear that, for birthers, a natural-born president must have natural-born parents, and that civic identity only exists in a homogeneous population. “If the parents were split in their loyalties,” the website declares, “the child would be split in loyalty to America.” Mixed heritage is thus a liability, for it undermines proper patriotic breeding. Indeed, for the birthers, the breeding question is inextricably linked to a person’s genetic vulnerability.
President Obama was raised by his white, midwestern mother, and her parents. But his actual upbringing matters not a bit to birthers. For most of them, Obama is his father’s son, because kinship is measured though the traditional order of the father’s line. To make their claims stick, birthers have had to erase President Obama’s mother from the fanciful narrative of his African birth. Just as Glenn Beck indelicately declared that Obama had an instinctive hatred of white people, birthers divorced him from his mother’s family. The father he hardly knew remains the dominant force in his life; the president cannot be an American because he is loyal to his patriarchal line, that is, to his father’s race.
Not surprisingly, the birthers have the Constitution all wrong. The delegates who attended the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 were not much concerned with the president’s nativity. In establishing the chief executive’s qualifications, the initial proposal focused on age and duration of residency, and said nothing about his being a “natural born citizen.” The founders made no mention of any requirement that the parents of the president be natural born citizens either. Nor, for that matter, did they require the president to be a Christian. Abigail Adams, the wife of the second president, referred to her daughter-in-law, Louisa Catherine, who married John Quincy Adams, as a “half blood”; by this cultural (though not legalistic) designation she meant that one parent was American, the other English. In sum, the founders could easily have specified that the president have “natural born” parents. But they did not. The reason is obvious. Any talk about kinship and bloodlines bore the taint of aristocracy and royalty, a caste system the founders had rejected during the Revolution.
The convention delegates did, however, vigorously debate the requirements for senators and representatives. Some delegates expressed fears of “foreign attachments”; future vice president Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts indulged in some wild conspiracy mongering when he proposed longer residency requirements for House members to prevent the possibility that foreign governments (he meant the British) might send spies to infiltrate the federal government. He hoped that, in the future, only the native-born would be eligible to serve in the House.
Yet even Gerry could never have imagined the 21st-century birther conspiracy, the most extreme versions of which evoked the “Manchurian Candidate,” a plot so cleverly devised that the institution of the presidency could be subverted by placing a secret Muslim in the White House. In fact, the deepest fear the founders expressed had nothing to do with the president’s qualifications. Instead, it was the military powers with which the Constitution endows him. They worried that as commander-in-chief, he might be bought off by a foreign government and drawn into unnecessary wars at the behest of an ally to whom he felt personally indebted. To counteract their fear, the framers insisted that Congress alone be authorized to declare war.
Despite all their efforts, the birther movement cannot look to the founders for its inspiration. Their ideas grow out of a traditional obsession with the legal status of free blacks and mulattos in the decades before the Civil War. When a firestorm of debate flared over Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1819-1820, northern and southern congressmen tangled and principles yielded to racial prejudices. Missouri’s proposed constitution barred blacks from entering the state who were not the legal property of white men. While northerners argued that free blacks were not “aliens or slaves,” but “free citizens,” opposing politicians and jurists twisted the law to justify the argument that native born free black Americans could be denied the same constitutional protections that native-born white Americans claimed. In the years before the South finally seceded, judges issued decisions in which free blacks were described as “our wards” or “strangers to our Constitutions.” Mississippi’s highest court categorized free U.S. residents of African descent as “alien strangers.”
The question of how to define a natural-born citizen reached the Supreme Court in the notorious Dred Scott case of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney (appointed by unapologetic slave-owner Andrew Jackson) argued that free blacks were never contemplated by the founders as part of the national community. Insisting that African Americans were not recognized as citizens in any state, before or after the Revolution, he dismissed all contrary evidence. To Taney, as with the birthers, facts were irrelevant.
Taney’s goal was to restrict citizenship to one of two processes: naturalization or biological inheritance. Blacks had been explicitly excluded from citizenship in the federal Naturalization Act of 1790, he noted. Even more telling, according to constitutional historian James Kettner, Taney wished to ignore “volumes of judicial precedents emphasizing place of birth without regard to ancestry.” Taney thus transformed “natural born citizen” into a racial category.
The birthers have the same idea in mind. Ultimately, they don’t really care what it says on President Obama’s birth certificate, short or long form. For these modern-day Taneyites, Obama’s citizenship is questionable because his civic identity is tainted by descent — he is, unmistakably, the son of an African man. The birthers, like Taney, believe that a natural-born citizen must be possess the right pedigree: he must descend from the same race as the founders, or be born on U.S. soil in the image of the founders. For Taney, the national community was a closed community. Even if they haven’t gone so far as to say so explicitly, for today’s birthers the presidency is an exclusive club.
Their obsession with placing Obama in Africa at the moment of his birth was a means to diminish the influence of his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham. Republican hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee deliberately circulated the strange story that Obama’s politics can be traced, genetically, to the anti-colonial revolutionary rhetoric that once existed in his father’s homeland.
But what about the equally ridiculous claim that Obama’s paternal grandmother testified to her grandson’s birth in Kenya? Why did that idea capture birthers’ imaginations? Here, historical precedent may again shed light. In 1907, a law was passed in the United States stating that any natural-born female who married an alien automatically lost her citizenship. She was expatriated without her consent. Compare that to the law that prevailed from 1855 to 1922, by which any alien woman who married an American citizen immediately became a citizen, bypassing the normal naturalization process.
It was a longstanding tradition in American history that a wife’s civil and political rights came through her husband. Under the law, marriage made husband and wife “one person.” The argument that citizens cannot have two allegiances was applied to wives: her first allegiance was to her husband. She could not vote or exercise political rights, because she had no independent civic identity. Her husband acted as her political proxy, voting in her stead. Recall that women did to receive the right to vote until 1920.
The birthers, too, in recurring to antiquated racist assumptions, assume that President Obama cannot have dual allegiances. Either he is all-American or else his true loyalty resides elsewhere. Birthers have made Obama’s mother a cipher all over again. Her political identity was subsumed into her African husband’s. In effect, he “voted” for her. Because she is deceased, it has been easy for birthers (not to mention the hubristic Donald Trump) to erase the president’s mother from the picture. She was never able to testify. And her World War II hero father presumably had no need to; his service to his country should have spoken volumes.
At the time of the 1907 law, women who married aliens were considered unpatriotic. Until 1967, interracial marriages could still be considered illegal in most southern states. What matters to birthers, subconsciously or otherwise, is the taint of foreign blood, the taint of African blood, Obama, Sr.’s alien status. Stanley Ann Dunham had made an unnatural and unpatriotic choice of a husband.
The racism of the birther movement, then, is not just a wacko conspiracy. Adherents of this new old cause have a large following because of our country’s troubled history. Of course, Americans are by no means the only culture to rationalize discrimination on racial and gender grounds. It happens on every continent, constantly. In the modern age, anxiety over what makes a “real” American is most often tied to wartime, or “Cold War time”; but in this case, it was the “national emergency” of a person becoming president whose physiognomy tapped into vestigial fears.
Finally, there is the newly hatched probe (thank you, once again, Donald) into the president’s educational pedigree. For hardcore birthers, President Obama cannot possibly deserve his office. There must be a catch somewhere. How, akin to “uppity” free blacks past, did he move into elite circles from which black aspirants were traditionally barred? The world has been turned upside down for birthers.
The term “birther” has always sounded idiotic. If they want a more legitimate-sounding name, they should call themselves “descenters.” For what they really seem to be defending is that every child inherits his nationality from his father, just as he inherits his surname: Barack Hussein Obama II instead of Barry Dunham.
In their campaign to unearth the secret life of President Obama, birthers make descent more important than consent — the republican principle that Americans choose their officeholders by popular election. For them, nature trumps consent. According to their logic, natural-born presidents have natural-born American parents. And by nature, they mean the traits passed down from one’s ancestors to his rightful heirs. We’ve seen this logical construction before: it worked for something known as the “divine right of kings.” Loyalty to the sovereign? Didn’t we, at some point, declare national independence in order to move beyond that sort of thinking?
So maybe those who suggest that it’s not just racism that motivates the birthers really are on to something. Maybe it’s something that really is un-American..
By: Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg, Salon War Room, May 4, 2011
Osama bin Laden Vanquished: Can We Have Our Country Back Now?
Eight years to the day after President Bush stood before a banner announcing “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq, prematurely declaring the end of combat operations there, President Obama announced Sunday night that an operation he authorized had killed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. The spoiled son of privilege, who thought it his birthright to dispatch thousands of innocents to their death for the crime of not sharing his twisted vision of Islam, is dead.
After more than 7,000 American deaths and tens of thousands of casualties in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the move against bin Laden seems to have been accomplished by a small group of American military special forces. It is too early to say what role the massive American military operations in the region played; we’ll be asking that question for a long time.
We’ll be asking a lot of questions: Are we safer? Or, at least in the short term, does bin Laden’s killing make retaliation more likely? We’re set to draw down forces in Afghanistan soon: Will that happen; will it happen more quickly; or will there be a local backlash that keeps us there longer?
It’s my job to think about all those consequences of this stunning news, which came near midnight Eastern time on a Sunday night. I also couldn’t help noticing it came roughly 24 hours after the president had dispatched his bizarro-world enemy, Donald Trump, another spoiled son of privilege, coincidentally. How strange was that? The contrast between the general idiocy of 24/7 American politics, and what’s really at stake in all of Obama’s decisions, had never been so stark.
For his part, the president used the event to reinforce his view of America and its place in the world. He began with the personal, talking about the way “the images of 9/11 are seared into our national memory,” while noting “the worst images are those that were unseen by the world, the empty seat at the dinner table … 3,000 citizens taken from us, leaving a gaping hole in our hearts.” He reaffirmed what he noted was also President Bush’s stance: “The United States is not, and never will be, at war with Islam: bin Laden was not a Muslim leader; he was a mass murderer of Muslims.” He urged Americans to “think back to the sense of unity that prevailed on September 11. We reaffirmed our ties to each other, and our love of community and country. No matter what God we prayed to, or what race or ethnicity we were, we were united as one American family.” And he closed with a rededication to his version of American exceptionalism: “We can do these things not just because of wealth and power, but because of who we are: One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”
After Obama’s remarks, pundits were quick to score his achievement politically. NBC’s Chuck Todd called it “the most significant accomplishment for the president in this term.” And it may be. A crowd assembled, chanting and singing, outside the White House. There was a spontaneous gathering on Sixth Avenue in New York; up in the Bronx, students at Fordham University clustered in the main campus green to celebrate the news and remember those who died. For the families of victims, it’s a long wait for closure; I can’t presume to know how anyone who lost a loved one on 9/11 feels about bin Laden’s killing. I hope it helps.
After years of Catholic school, I am constitutionally unable to feel joyous about anyone being killed, but I got close tonight with bin Laden. He killed thousands of innocent people — and again, it was that incomparable American tableau: Muslims, Jews, Catholics; waiters, firefighters, investment bankers; gays and straights; mothers and fathers of every race. For months, reading the New York Times “Portraits of Grief” felt like a responsibility of American citizenship; every day you’d find someone almost exactly like you, but also as different from you as possible — except they also loved Bruce Springsteen (a lot of them did) or had a child your age or were born on your father’s birthday. We saw the beauty and bravery and diversity of America in that tragedy, and I wish it didn’t take a tragedy for us to do so.
I also wish this achievement could mean we get our country back, the one before the Patriot Act, before FISA, before rendition and torture and Guantánamo; before we began giving up the freedom and belief in due process that makes us Americans, out of our fear of totalitarians like bin Laden. It won’t happen overnight, but I’m going to choose to think this could be a first step.
It’s not a night for political gloating: President Bush issued this gracious (I guess) statement, which Laura Bush, kind of bizarrely, or maybe not, posted on Facebook:
Earlier this evening, President Obama called to inform me that American forces killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al Qaeda network that attacked America on September 11, 2001. I congratulated him and the men and women of our military and intelligence communities who devoted their lives to this mission. They have our everlasting gratitude. This momentous achievement marks a victory for America, for people who seek peace around the world, and for all those who lost loved ones on September 11, 2001. The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done.
A victory “for those who seek peace around the world.” Hmmm. I hope so. I’m going to take the former president at his word, and pray that’s our direction from here.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, May 1, 2011
Birthers And Birtherism: An Embarrassment To The Country
This Wednesday morning became one of the most surreal and ridiculous moments
in the history of American politics when the White House decided to release copies of President Barack Obama’s “long form birth certificate,” in an attempt to quiet conspiracy theorists who believe the president was born elsewhere. The president had already released a version certified by the state of Hawaii, but because of the “volume of requests” for the birth certificate, the president asked the state to make an exception andrelease the original document.
It’s tempting to make this simply about reality television personality Donald
Trump, who rocketed to the top of the Republican presidential field by promoting
the slander that the president wasn’t born in the United States. But there are a
number of other factors that created the current situation. Chief among them is
that Trump’s lunacy emboldened conservative media sources to fully embrace
birtherism. According to Media Matters, Fox News has spent over two hours promoting false claims about Obama’s birthplace across 54 segments, and only in ten did Fox News hosts challenge those claims. This isn’t just about Trump. All he did was encourage the communications wing of the conservative movement to go into overdrive in an attempt to make birtherism mainstream.
Aside from being one of the most idiotic moments in American political
history, this marks a level of personal humiliation no previous president has
ever been asked to endure. Other presidents have been the target of crazy
conspiracy theories, sure, but few have been as self-evidently absurd as
birtherism. None has been so clearly rooted in anxieties about the president’s
racial identity, because no previous American president has been black.
This whole situation is an embarrassment to the country. Yesterday Jesse
Jackson described birtherism as racial “code,” but there’s nothing
“coded” about it. It’s just racism. I don’t mean that everyone who has doubts
about the president’s birthplace is racist. Rather, the vast majority have been
deliberately misled by an unscrupulous conservative media and by conservative
elites who have failed or refused to challenge these doubts.
And birtherism is only one of a number of racially charged conspiracy
theories that have bubbled out of the right-wing swamp and have been allowed to
fester by conservative elites. Those who have spent the last two years clinging
to the notion that the president wasn’t born in the United States, who have alleged that the president wasn’t intelligent enough to write
his own autobiography or somehow coasted to magna cum laude at Harvard law, are
carrying on new varieties of an old, dying tradition of American racism. Similar
accusations dogged early black writers like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis
Wheatley, whose brilliance provoked an existential crisis among people incapable
of abandoning myths of black intellectual inferiority.
Whether this farce ends or continues is entirely dependent on those who
nurtured the rumors in the first place. This is an opportunity for conservative
elites, who have finally come around to the possibility that the outsize hatred
of the president they’ve cultivated as an asset for the past two years might
actually hurt them politically, to purge birtherism from mainstream conservative
discourse.
Sadly, those who fostered doubts about the president’s citizenship are
unlikely to relent in the face of factual proof, because birtherism was never
about the facts. For its most ardent proponents, it was and is about their
inability to accept the legitimacy of a black man in the White House. Nothing
about the decision to release the president’s birth certificate can change that.
By: Adam Sewer, The Washington Post, April 27, 2011
How The Right Brought The Trump Birther Madness On Itself
GOP primary voters should reward substance, rather than pols who masterfully exploit hot button issues. So why are so many Republicans embracing Donald Trump? They’ve been trained to elevate politicians based on the “tough” rhetoric they use rather than the record they’ve amassed. And to rally around anyone seen as being disrespected by the dread mainstream media.
The talk radio right bears much of the blame for these pathologies. Caught up in the Tea Party excitement, guys like Mark Levin used their platforms to act as apologists for Republicans like Sarah Palin and Christine O’Donnell. Didn’t they fire up the base? Weren’t they unafraid to zing President Obama? As Donald Trump rises in the polls, however, Levin is having second thoughts. The right is suddenly foolish to embrace demagogues with thin resumes and incoherent political philosophies. For all their differences, folks like Ross Douthat, David Frum, Reihan Salam, David Brooks, Daniel Larison, and many others have long been urging the GOP to pick its champions based on substance. You’ll never hear any of them urge that Donald Trump be taken seriously.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin is defending Trump. Will Levin call out the woman whose political judgment he has frequently touted? Rush Limbaugh is inviting Trump on his show for softball interviews, and telling callers to his program that the celebrity billionaire ought to be taken “half-seriously.” Having announced that taking Trump at all seriously is idiocy of the highest order, will Levin openly criticize his fellow talk radio host? Or does this bully lack the courage to go after anyone with a bigger audience than his? Remember that the next time he tries to tell you that the reformers embody what’s wrong with the right. Like all bullies, his targets aren’t chosen based on desert.
In failing to call out the people most responsible for the right’s pathologies, Mark Levin is not alone. As Adam Serwer notes:
Trump’s candidacy is largely a problem of the GOP’s own making. It’s a symptom of circumstances Republicans have spent the last two years tacitly cultivating as an asset. Republican leaders have at best refused to tamp down the most outlandish right-wing conspiracy-mongering about the president and at worst have actively enabled it. The result: A substantial portion of their base believes a complete myth about the president’s birth certificate, and Republicans are stuck with a candidate shameless enough to exploit the issue without resorting to the usual euphemisms more respectable Republicans tend to employ when hinting at the president’s supposed cultural otherness. I don’t know how you solve a problem like Donald Trump, but I know it’s a problem the Republican Party brought on itself.
Indeed, half of the Iowa GOP are birthers. It’s so much of a problem that Ann Coulter and Karl Rove are out there assuring everyone that President Obama was in fact born in the United States. In doing so, they frame Birtherism as a trap liberals are setting. They’re implicitly criticizing all the mainstream voices on the right who’ve flirted with Birtherism, but are uninclined to name names, or to come right out and state that what those conservatives did has come back to bite the right.
Some of us have long insisted that the conservative movement was going to pay for its embrace of demagoguery, anti-intellectualism, bombast in place of substance, and shameless pandering. For our trouble, we’ve been dismissed by talk radio hosts and conservative bloggers, who took an ends-justify-the-means approach to the 2010 primaries and opposition to President Obama generally. Lo and behold, the conservative movement is now paying a price, exactly as predicted. The GOP has a weak field for 2012, and although Donald Trump isn’t going to win the nomination, his early status as a front-runner is an unwelcome distraction and may end up pulling other candidates toward the sort of absurd populism that will hurt them in a general election.
Even Mark Levin, Ann Coulter and Karl Rove now see these pathologies on the right, and the dangers they pose. So are they going to criticize the most prominent conservatives who brought these conditions about? Nope. There is never direct intra-movement criticism of Rush Limbaugh or Roger Ailes. There is never any appreciation of the pathologies encouraged by everyone who supported Sarah Palin. Instead we get self-righteous criticism that is too little, too late, and a cowardly refusal to confront the culpable parties in a way that would prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, April 21, 2011
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