That’s what the “Well, why not just give in to them and show them anything they want?” crowd doesn’t get – these people have their souls invested in this. Records will always be incomplete or faked, government officials will be liars or afraid to say the truth, court cases will be horrible judgments by liberal activist judges. Nothing will ever be good enough because they desperately need this belief that someday they’ll be proven correct and all this scary Obama stuff will go away.
I’m skeptical that even that one person was a Hillary supporter. There were a lot of fake Hillary supporters trying to use her as cover to attack Obama. What was that bogus Republican front group posing as disgruntled Hillaryites? the Cougars or something? In any case, it was de rigueur for a while for Republican operatives to try to plant Obama attack stories in places like Drudge, and then try to pass them off as having come from Hillary.
In any case, regardless of the origin of the birther nonsense, it never had any currency among Hillary fans and has been embraced, nurtured and fed entirely by righties.
I did not insinuate anything about the Clinton campaign; your sensors are misaligned.
And it wasn’t just one whackjob, either.
If you are going to throw stones at the Republicans for having fan base members who think this stuff, you should at least acknowledge that there are people who are Democrats who are willing to believe it, too. The difference, of course, as some have pointed out, is that the Democrats that represent them aren’t pandering to them with official statements and actions. If the shoe were on the other foot, now, … :dubious:
PUMAs. But they really were Hillary Clinton supporters, not GOP plants.
It’s just that PUMA was more or less two people, Darragh Murphy and Will Bower. They were unquestionably Democrats; I’m sure a lot of folks who gave money to PUMA were Republicans, but when you get right down to it, PUMA was two cranks whose opinion, in the end, wasn’t worth a cat turd.
As I have already said upthread, here in rural South Carolina, there are people who are Democrat by self-identification, who disbelieve the citizenship of the President. It’s not “fed entirely by righties.” Of course, it’s convenient to believe that so that you can demonize it and feel saintly about the situation. :rolleyes:
That’s ridiculous. Go find me a left-wing site that claims Obama isn’t a citizen. If you can find me one, I’ll immediately go find 100 right-wing sites that claim it.
This idiotic rumor is most certainly being fed by “righties”.
I reember that too, but it was PUMA I was thinking of. I remember going to their website once or twice and seeing that the boards there were dominated by McCain-Palin supporters without the slightest indiction that they cared about, or even agreed with a single policy supported by Hilary Clinton.
This is NEVER going away, t’other night G. Gordon Liddy was on Hardball and mentioned, without any contradiction, the thoroughly discredited story about Obama’s grandmother saying that she was present at Obama’s birth in Kenya :rolleyes:.
I think the more interesting aspect that comes out of all this, is reflected in the fact that the first “birthers” were Hilary supporters. When people are really invested in supporting one candidate against another, many of them will be in a state of mind where they’ll really, truly believe just about anything bad about the guy who’s beating them.
At first, it was Hilary supporters, because she was the first to fall. Now it’s the Republicans. But the overall story is more interesting and instructive. It shows how people can be whipped up into a frenzy of hatred for their opponents, whether in war or politics, over stuff that shouldn’t matter. Our brains seem to be hard-wired to be manipulated, and it takes some attention to critical thinking not to let that happen.
If I said “A person with the Straight Dope Message Board handle ElvisL1ves came from the camp of the Clintonites”, would it be inaccurate? If someone else said “A guy who likes cats came from the camp of people whose handle makes fun of Ayn Rand”, would cat haters have some genuine grievance?
Paranoid, don’t bother. Where ElvisL1ves is concerned, nothing I say can be taken as valid. Been that way for years, despite the fact that his viewpoint on politics is closer to mine than he perhaps realizes. Sadly.
