“First, we fake his birth in the US 47 years ago. Next, he gets elected. But it’s not enough to win just the popular vote, he also has to win the electoral college. Now the next step is where it gets complicated…”
I just about snorted milk through my nose.
They showed a clip of some dingbat screaming at a senator or congressman at some townhall meeting, waving her birth certificate in a plastic bag and in a steadily rising voice saying “…and my birth certificate shows that I am an American citizen and BARACK OBAMA DOESN’T HAVE THAT HE IS NOT AN AMERICAN HE IS A KENYAN!” (cheers of other nimrods in audience)
Yeah, I was thinking about this. Why would the dingbat assume some random politician is going to be carrying around Obama’s actual birth certificate? The cheers were the worst part of that clip, though.
And of course the GOP politicians don’t dare correct the dingbats, because they’re their base.
I know that nationality is indeed in question, but how does race come in to play? Or are you the type of person who will cry “racist!” at everything directed at Obama. Of course, the birthers are clearly nutty but please explain your point.
And not too fine a point on it, wouldn’t they have been much better off finding a white baby to be their Manchurian candidate ? How likely would it have been thought, 47 years, that by 2008 a black American would be a viable Presidential candidate ?
I mean, I can understand the logic of the Moon landing deniers, and the Kennedy conspiracy theorists :- there’s a (somewhat) reasonable chain of thought there. People might have wanted to kill Kennedy and blame a nobody, faking a Moon landing could possibly have happened in a realistically maginable scenario (faintly realistic, but realistic).
Can anyone provide a logically associated and sequential chain of events,actions and motives that approximates to what the Birthers are claiming happened ?
That, to me, out of all the stupidity spouted regarding this CT, is the most laughable part. Even the nuttiest nut-nuts aren’t contending Obama’s mom wasn’t a US citizen. Why would a US citizen bent on raising a future president for nefarious purposes not take the easy and necessary step of actually giving birth in her home country? It’s not like anybody would have had any reason to turn her away at the border if she showed up pregnant. The whole point of him being born outside the US is…what, exactly, when the plan could be derailed entirely if exposed?
It’s as if the birthers think that part of the impetus for the Plot To Elect A Muslim Extremist Non-Citizen As President So He Can Destroy The USA From The Inside is to make him as difficult to actually elect and as illegitimate a president as possible. Make sure He Has Dark Skin. Give him a Dangerous Foreign-Sounding Name. Have him Deliberately be Born Outside the US - But Then Carefully Cover It Up. Send him to School In a Muslim Country. Have him be an Admitted Drug User. Have him Mentored By a Black Racist Reverend Who Spouts Hate From the Pulpit. See, if I were an foreign extremist group trying to engineer a foolproof, 47-year-long nefarious plot to destroy the US by getting an inside man elected President, I’d make my candidate’s life as white bread and innocuous as possible with no dirt whatsoever, but maybe that’s just me.
I’m surprised nobody’s brought up the idea that he’s not actually 47, but under 35 and hiding it. Perhaps because to start, that would have necessitated planting the fake birth announcement 12 years before he was born, long before his mother ever met his dad and knew what name to put in the paper. But I’m probably giving them too much credit. I’m sure they just haven’t thought of how scary and involved THAT part of the conspiracy would be.
More delusional? The Moon Landing deniers by far. They get no benefit from denying it, and just do so out of stupidity.
More hateful and evil? The birthers. Some are no doubt loonies, but some (I’m looking at you Lou and Rush) are fascist scum - in the loose sense of fascist we used in the '60s, for you nitpickers.
It’s basically the current version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, circulated by the same type of people - just hating a different group this time.
I’m going to say the moon landing hoaxers, from the standpoint that there are hundreds, if not thousands of different types of solid evidence that Apollo spacecraft landed on the Moon, whereas the ‘birthers’ argument, idiotic as it may be, pretty much stands or falls on one piece of evidence (Obama’s birth certificate).
Also, the birthers don’t get any credit for filing lawsuits. Lawsuits are easy to file; it’s whether the suit actually goes to court that matters, and I’d be surprised indeed if this one ever does.
There actually were some righties during the Republican primary who tried to make McCain’s Natural Born Citizenship an issue. I think it was mostly Ron Paulers, but there was some crossover from the Bible fascists as well. Remember, there was lot of wingnut opposition and grumbling about McCain early on.
Did anybody accuse Michael Dukakis of secretly being Greek? Both of his parents were immigrants, compared with one of Obama’s. The number of people who bought into the fantasy of McCain not being a citizen was only a fraction of the number who say the same about Obama. If the president’s father was from France and his name was Jacques Eauxbama, do you think these people would be saying he was secretly born in Paris and smuggled into the country? And if Eauxbama had lived in Italy for a couple of years as a child but joined a Protestant church as an adult, do you think they would say he was a secret Catholic?
I’m saying no. At its root, this birth certificate is about lunatics refusing to accept that a black guy is as American as they are. The fact that he’s got recent African ancestry makes it worse. A white candidate never would have been accused of being a secret Muslim either.
I’m deeply disappointed that this thread hasn’t yet been hijacked by birthers and moonies each denouncing the others as delusional loonies whilst defending their own rigourous and evidence-based theories.
Well, four. Besides the birth certificate, we also have birth announcements in two different newspapers, and the governor of Hawaii says she saw the original.
Disregarding the 47-year-old birth announcement in the paper, that “sole” piece of evidence has been examined and certified by multiple experts, including the Hawaii Department of Health, and yet people with supposed credibility (Lou Dobbs I’m looking at you) say that it’s never been properly debunked. That’s some powerful, mental-illness level denial there.
How about a House bill then? The bill doesn’t stipulate that a candidate provide any more evidence than Obama already has, true, but when one of the co-sponsors says “[Obama’s] never produce[d] documents that would say one way or the other” and another gets into a shouting match with Chris Matthews when he refuses to say that he believes Obama’s a citizen, then it’s hard to argue that this is is solely an attempt to avoid this kind of rumor in the future, rather than about trying to discredit the guy currently in office.
Well, at least they had a fact to go from-- McCain was born outside the borders of the US, even if he was born on a military base. There’s a shred of a shred of a case there. For Obama, it’s just conspiracy theory nuttiness.
As far as who is more delusional, I am going to go with the moon hoax nutters. The Birthers are motivated by partisanship; they believe they can remove him from him from office, and failing that, they can hurt him politically. They have overestimated the persuasiveness of their argument, but their motivation is political gain.
But what do the Moon hoax nutters have to gain? An “I told you so!” moment? Vindication of the the other kooky delusions rattling around in their heads?
At least the Birthers have good old fashioned political back stabbery at the root of their outrage. The Moon hoax nutters do it simply for the sake of their delusions.
I dunno, as an Obama supporter, I love the Birthers, they don’t seem to be hurting Obama any, and are making his detractors look like weirdos. Certainly the GOP Senate candidate in the Daily Show clip is hoping they’d just go away. And if they weren’t spending all their time hunting through the jungles of Kenya looking for Ann Dunham’s placenta, they would probably find some other urban legend to spread around that might actually do some damage (like Al Gore inventing the internet or John Kerry faking his Vietnam service).
