Obama's long-form birth certificate
Will releasing this document do any good?
To anybody who could be swayed by actual evidence, it was long ago obvious that there was no real issue here. During the 2008 election, the McCain campaign looked into the "not natural-born citizen" claim, rightly concluded that there was no substance to it, and dropped it.
The only people still using this line of attack are those to whom it’s a matter of faith — evidence isn’t the point, and no amount of it will ever sway them. In fact, maybe faith is part of the problem. Conservatism in this country has become a religion-centered phenomenon, and religion teaches that it's a virtue to believe things without evidence, or even in spite of massive contrary evidence. Once that mentality is embraced for the sake of belief in God, the historicity of the Bible, and a 6,000-year-old Earth, is it any wonder that global-warming denialism, death panels, and all this birth-certificate stuff easily follow?
And it's not just a small fringe of the right. A recent poll showed that 45% of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the US, and I see no sign that the long-form birth certificate will change that very much. The nutters are already claiming that it's fake, or that even if Obama was born in Hawaii, he’s still not a natural-born citizen because his father blah blah blah (more on that here).
A comment here raises another point:
.....there is reason to be upset that a bi-racial man should be the only president to find it necessary to produce his birth certificate .....some African-Americans are deeply distressed that he should even have to do this; it's a mark of just how racist and ignorant many people still are in these United States, and I'm sure the emotional impact is that of being told that even if you're elected president, you're STILL going to be treated as a second-class citizen subject to special rules and limitations. More hoops, always more hoops, that you need to jump through.
(Found via a thoroughly-fed-up Shaw Kenawe.)
A firm and sustained repudiation of this madness by mainstream Republican leaders could probably have squelched it. They chose not to try. Let the electoral consequences be on their own heads.
It will never completely end. Even after Obama leaves office in triumph in January 2017, there will still be a few of these fuming troglodytes in shacks in Montana writing semi-literate pamphlets claiming the whole Presidency didn’t count because blah blah Photoshop blah blah British subject blah blah socialist Muslim ACORN Hitler mumble mumble.
The long form won't convince the crazies. They are unreachable. But it will lead them on to embrace new heights of insanity, making themselves and those who coddle them even more repellent to the vital center.
To anybody who could be swayed by actual evidence, it was long ago obvious that there was no real issue here. During the 2008 election, the McCain campaign looked into the "not natural-born citizen" claim, rightly concluded that there was no substance to it, and dropped it.
The only people still using this line of attack are those to whom it’s a matter of faith — evidence isn’t the point, and no amount of it will ever sway them. In fact, maybe faith is part of the problem. Conservatism in this country has become a religion-centered phenomenon, and religion teaches that it's a virtue to believe things without evidence, or even in spite of massive contrary evidence. Once that mentality is embraced for the sake of belief in God, the historicity of the Bible, and a 6,000-year-old Earth, is it any wonder that global-warming denialism, death panels, and all this birth-certificate stuff easily follow?
And it's not just a small fringe of the right. A recent poll showed that 45% of Republicans believe Obama was not born in the US, and I see no sign that the long-form birth certificate will change that very much. The nutters are already claiming that it's fake, or that even if Obama was born in Hawaii, he’s still not a natural-born citizen because his father blah blah blah (more on that here).
A comment here raises another point:
.....there is reason to be upset that a bi-racial man should be the only president to find it necessary to produce his birth certificate .....some African-Americans are deeply distressed that he should even have to do this; it's a mark of just how racist and ignorant many people still are in these United States, and I'm sure the emotional impact is that of being told that even if you're elected president, you're STILL going to be treated as a second-class citizen subject to special rules and limitations. More hoops, always more hoops, that you need to jump through.
(Found via a thoroughly-fed-up Shaw Kenawe.)
A firm and sustained repudiation of this madness by mainstream Republican leaders could probably have squelched it. They chose not to try. Let the electoral consequences be on their own heads.
It will never completely end. Even after Obama leaves office in triumph in January 2017, there will still be a few of these fuming troglodytes in shacks in Montana writing semi-literate pamphlets claiming the whole Presidency didn’t count because blah blah Photoshop blah blah British subject blah blah socialist Muslim ACORN Hitler mumble mumble.
The long form won't convince the crazies. They are unreachable. But it will lead them on to embrace new heights of insanity, making themselves and those who coddle them even more repellent to the vital center.
posted by Infidel753 at 2:13 AM
6 Comments:
Totally. Gullibility is considered a virtue in this country. It's sickening.
And it is racist at the root, with some xenophobia thrown in. If he'd been a white person who happened to spend time in other countries and have "Hussein" as a middle name he would have been handicapped but this silliness would not have persisted.
Mornin Infodel, thanx for the post, I hadnt done nothing on this, but been looking at it .... aint this all some shit Guy? This just absolutely blow's me away ... Man ... I never even seen a bloody long form of my birth certificate for that matter. And folk's are STILL bellyaching over this ... geeezz.
BTW Infodel ... maybe some of these folk's dont realize that Hawaii is in the USA ... they may think it's Southeast Asia and placed in the open Pacific by God 4000 year's ago (after the dinosaur's became extinct) to be the Gateway to Hell because of the fire and lava from the volcano's?
Heh, heh, heh, heh, heh
Politifact has a post with links to nine docs that prove Obama's citienship in one way or another:
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2011/apr/27/links-documents-involving-president-obama/
I'm sort of losing patience with these morans and am finding it more and more difficult to be "civil."
LA: Yep. Doubting Thomas was the bad guy, because he went by evidence instead of faith.
I think any Democratic President would have run into some degree of paranoid hostility, given the mood of the right these days. Whether it would have been as bad as what Obama's faced, we'll never know.
RC: Some people get obsessed with things like this -- they're certainly not going to drop it now.
It would be interesting to poll those 45% of Republicans to see how many of them know Hawaii is a state and how long it's been one.
TNLib: I don't know how obviously-flaming-batshit-insane a "question" has to be before we lose any obligation to respond in a civil fashion, but when it's asked 100 times after being decisively answered, I give up.
I wrote a post on this issue, but then did not post it. I am struggling. Everyone with a blog has commented. Could I really add to this body of work, or would I just be duplicating part of it?
Hmmm.
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