What is behind the Birther Movement?<\/p>\n
Racism.\u00c2\u00a0 Mixed with Nativism.\u00c2\u00a0 Two different impulses, though perhaps the difference between the definition of the two words is a distinction without a difference.\u00c2\u00a0 But Barack Obama is Black., and comes from off the mainland.\u00c2\u00a0 And his father is from Kenya, and he extolls those roots.<\/p>\n
A few days back, I heard a caller to a conservative talk radio show — the same sort of woman as the “I Want My country Back” lady who\u00c2\u00a0made famous\u00c2\u00a0a town-hall meeting with Mike Castle<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0— made this concrete.\u00c2\u00a0 The radio show was, um, the Sunday morning I should have the\u00c2\u00a0radio on to NPR and “This American Life” but for some reason have it on here instead<\/em>\u00c2\u00a0 Kramer and Abrams — which actually is, to be fair, a conservative and a quasi-liberal show with a a conservative listener and caller base…<\/p>\n The woman went off on Sonia Sotomayer, and demanded to know why they were not covering the fact that Sotomayor was an illegal immigrant who didn’t really have a Harvard Law Degree.\u00c2\u00a0 And then she asked why they weren’t covering Obama’s Birth Certificate controversy.\u00c2\u00a0 The two items go hand in hand, and are the product of the same premise, inextricably linked.<\/p>\n The best lines of comparison for the Democratic side on this fringe into mainstream movement are the “Stolen Elections”, (in particular 2004 and Ohio; I say that by way of\u00c2\u00a0lending my own credence to Florida and 2000),\u00c2\u00a0and the 9\/11 Truth Movement — which is to say, Democrats and Liberals holding town-hall meetings uncomfortably squirm with audiences peppering them on questions over those matters.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 Ohio 2004 can be explained by Florida 2000, directly.\u00c2\u00a0 9\/11 Truth is a tad more complicated, but it comes in part from the manner people concoct fanciful conspiracies due to the fanciful conspiracies that actually exist, the less than stellar motives of people and institutions in power, and their not wholly democratic nature.<\/p>\n My point is “9\/11 Truth” is a marginally more sympathetic cause than the “Birther’s”, because their underlying assumptions have more grains of truth than the “Birthers”.\u00c2\u00a0 The Birthers come from a simple distruct of black (and, as that\u00c2\u00a0radio talk show caller showed,\u00c2\u00a0brown) people.<\/p>\n To what degree does the Republican Party have a “Birther” Problem?\u00c2\u00a0 They have more of one than they might be willing to admit.\u00c2\u00a0 We have seen a rise in legitimizers of this “movement”.\u00c2\u00a0 <\/a>There is, by dent of a large number of co-sponsors to a presidents must show birth certificate bill, a Birther Caucus in the House of Representatives — I suppose every constituency needs to be fed.\u00c2\u00a0 Rush Limbaugh has poked one step beyond his previous joke (which I defended on this blog) to a statement.\u00c2\u00a0 (And why not?\u00c2\u00a0 He cites World Net Daily with all seriousness, which is a source that is right there in\u00c2\u00a0“Birther\u00c2\u00a0Land”). \u00c2\u00a0The “Fox Nation” website, a strange blunter version of Fox News, has a forum for discussion of Obama’s birth certificate.\u00c2\u00a0 And there are several conservative radio hosts, if you flick your am dial back and forth, who discuss this seriously. The opinion journals should take the matter head on.\u00c2\u00a0 As a means of comparison, Eric Alterman for the Nation wrote an item a few years ago where he addressed the groups of 9\/11 Truthers who always poked that question in his book and speaking tours.\u00c2\u00a0 This inevitably makes him a “Gate-keeper” for the conspiratorialists,\u00c2\u00a0and that is the point.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0(As well Markos Moulitsas who banned that thing from his blog).\u00c2\u00a0 National Review gives us this<\/a>, from David Horowitz (after some mild “raising of the issue” from Jim Geraghty).\u00c2\u00a0 I\u00c2\u00a0think we can say that “Birth Certificate Madness” is more extricably tied with the Republicans than 9\/11 Truth is for the Democrats — so I suppose a brusk and regular mocking in the bullet-points section of those magazines might serve them well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What is behind the Birther Movement? Racism.\u00c2\u00a0 Mixed with Nativism.\u00c2\u00a0 Two different impulses, though perhaps the difference between the definition of the two words is a distinction without a difference.\u00c2\u00a0 But Barack Obama is Black., and comes from off the mainland.\u00c2\u00a0 And his father is from Kenya, and he extolls those roots. A few days […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4381"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4383,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4381\/revisions\/4383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAs well Lou Dobbs.<\/p>\n