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“Angry And Unstable”, The Birthers Eat Their Own

Say what you will about the birthers, but don’t call them partisan.

The people who brought you the Barack Obama birth-certificate hullabaloo now have a new target: Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a man often speculated to be the next Republican vice presidential nominee. While they’re at it, they also have Bobby Jindal, the Republican governor of Louisiana and perhaps a future presidential candidate, in their sights.

Each man, the birthers say, is ineligible to be president because he runs afoul of the constitutional requirement that a president must be a “natural born citizen” of the United States. Rubio’s parents were Cuban nationals at the time of his birth, and Jindal’s parents were citizens of India.

The good news for the birthers is that this suggests they were going after Obama, whose father was a Kenyan national, not because of the president’s political party. The bad news is that this supports the suspicion that they were going after Obama because of his race.

When I heard of the birthers’ latest targets, from a participant in my online chat, I figured it was a joke. But, sure enough, Alex Leary of the St. Petersburg Times reported that various bright lights of the birther community – Mario Apuzzo, Charles Kerchner and Orly Taitz – were casting doubt on Rubio’s eligibility.

“Senator Marco Rubio is not a natural born citizen of the United States to constitutional standards,” Kerchner writes on his blog. “He was born a dual citizen of both Cuba and the USA. He is thus not eligible to serve as the president or vice president.” A few months ago, Kerchner used the same logic to proclaim, “Jindal is NOT a natural-born citizen of the United States. His parents were not U.S. citizens when he was born.”

This relies on a rather expansive interpretation of “natural born.” At this rate, it is surely only a matter of time before birthers begin to pronounce candidates ineligible if they were born by C-section, or if their mothers were given pain medications during childbirth. Will Donald Trump demand to see their medical records?

The absurd accusations of the birthers by themselves won’t stop Jindal or Rubio from becoming president. There are far more serious impediments in their way—most recently a devastating report by The Post’s Manuel Roig-Franzia proving false the central narrative of Rubio’s political rise: that he is the son of exiles who fled Cuba under Castro. In fact, his parents left the island, apparently for economic reasons, 21/2 years before Castro came to power.

But the wild new turn the birthers have taken should serve as a timely reminder to Republican leaders that they need to push back more forcefully against the angry and the unstable in their ranks. Too often, they have done the opposite. Jindal, for example, encouraged the birthers this year when he announced his support for legislation that would require candidates for federal office to show proof of their U.S. birth before being allowed on the ballot in Louisiana. It was, as many pointed out, a sad gesture for a man born Piyush Jindal.

Similarly, few of the Republican presidential candidates have condemned the spectators at the presidential debates who applauded the death penalty, the idea that those without health insurance should be left to die and the sentiment that the jobless are to blame for being unemployed. And it seems doubtful that we’ll hear from Republican leaders about Tea Party Nation’s new effort to get business leaders to pledge not to hire people until the Democrats’ “war against business” ends.

Of course, extremism isn’t a uniquely Republican problem. My colleague Jennifer Rubin, noting a number of anti-Semitic messages seen at Occupy Wall Street events, asked last week: “Respectable politicians and media outlets, where is the outrage?” There’s no evidence that the demonstrators blaming Jewish bankers for the nation’s troubles are anything but a small minority. But that doesn’t excuse public figures from an obligation to push back against the extremes.

The higher prominence of loons of all stripes is a natural consequence of a political system that has lost every last vestige of a political center. But in the Obama age, this is particularly a problem for Republican lawmakers who are cowed into silence by the fear that any criticism of the crazies will invite a primary challenge. Now that the birthers have begun to eat their own brightest prospects, perhaps Republican lawmakers will finally feel compelled to say something.

By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 21, 2011

October 24, 2011 Posted by | Bigotry, Birthers, Conservatives, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, Media, Racism, Right Wing | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Birther’s Guide To Staying Relevant In A Post “Long Form” World

So you’ve spent the last few years constantly asking “where’s the birth certificate,” and now you have an answer. Do you give up? Do you stop constantly emailing journalists and bloggers accusing them of being part of the cover-up? Do you quit commenting on FreeRepublic? Return your WorldNetDaily survival seed bank unopened? No! Of course not!

Professional Birthers have expanded their investigations beyond the question of “where was the president born,” because even before today it was quite obvious that he was born in Hawaii. True birtherism — not the lazy, low-information “I heard he was born in Kenya or something” birtherism of amateurs — has already gone baroque, asserting that Barack Obama never had or possibly lost his American citizenship for reasons that go far beyond the simple fact of his “birthplace.” As Justin Elliott already reported, the conspiracists have other conspiracies developed and ready to explore. And that is how birtherism and its associated theories will live on.

The certificate is a forgery

Ahem. Some FreeRepublic commenters are already on the case:

“Look at the document…it is superimposed on a different background that contains Onaka’s signature (hint: look at the curling on the left-hand margin of the text fields).”

“In 1961, blacks were called negro, colored, darkie, and several other less accepted names, but they were NEVER called ‘African’ as Urkel’s father was in this document. An American adult in 1961 would no more have called a negro ‘African’ than they would have called a homosexual ‘gay’. That alone is enough to raise huge questions about this document.”

“The Security Paper is a Photoshop. If you look at the full form, the ‘Security Paper’ is a background, the ‘Certificate of Live Birth’ appears like it was scanned from a book, the paper made to be transparent – and the ink and borders were then laid on a backdrop with the “Security Paper” background.”

His “African” father disqualifies him

One popular theory has it that “natural born citizen” does not mean what you think it means. Apparently, a “natural born citizen” has to have two American parents. So while Barack Obama has definitively proven that he’s a “native-born citizen,” he is still not a “natural born citizen,” thanks to his father being African. (This would also disqualify a number of past presidents, including Woodrow Wilson, Andrew Jackson, and Chester Arthur, but no one would miss them.)

Something about British citizenship and the Kenyan constitution

I dunno, I don’t really get this one. Barack Obama had dual U.S./British citizenship which became U.S./Kenyan citizenship which then became Kenyan citizenship because he never renounced it.

He lost his citizenship

As WND has written: “Several court cases challenging Obama’s presidential eligibility have argued he gave up his U.S. citizenship in Indonesia and used an Indonesian passport to travel to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship.

Still a secret Muslim

One big hope of the long-form birthers was that Obama’s birth certificate would finally reveal that he is a secret Muslim. It does not reveal that, but there’s no reason they can’t still say it.

How did he get into Columbia?

Donald Trump already brought this one up, but the new frontier in questioning the president’s legitimacy is asking about his college years. Because, in their minds, there is simply no way a black man gets into a good school without receiving special favors or somehow cheating, the Schoolers are developing weird, complex theories about how Barack Obama transfered from Occidental to Columbia (and then got accepted into Harvard Law). The new rallying cry will be “release the transcripts.”

This will probably be the most popular of the new avenues of birtherism, though may not bleed into the mainstream discourse with as much ease as the birth certificate stuff, because it has no bearing whatsoever on the president’s qualifications to be president. Schoolerism is simply about proving that the president’s a phony who duped the world with his hoodoo, “the biggest affirmative action baby in history” in the detestable words of Mickey Kaus.

In the imaginings of the crowd desperately searching for evidence that Barack Obama is who they wish he was, the president was obviously, transparently unqualified to go to an elite university, because just look at him.

So birtherism will survive. It will mutate and adapt. There’s no satisfying some people.

By: Alex Pareene, Salon War Room, April 27,2011

April 28, 2011 Posted by | Bigotry, Birthers, Politics, President Obama, Public, Racism, Right Wing | , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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