UPDATED Thursday, 1:23 PM: After seeing some of the nutbar reactions that the birth certificate has launched, I’ve come to believe that if Obama had been delivered via C-section, there are people who would declare that that makes him ineligible to be president because the Constitution says “natural born” and anything except a vaginal birth is not natural.
Not sure what the point was. Because I’m sure you can clock with an egg-timer how long you’ll see the following two talking points:
1) Why did he wait so long?
2) How do we know it’s not a forgery?
The people who think the whole birther thing is idiotic don’t require it to be convinced, those who are birthers, or just seize upon any pretense to get Obama out, will never be convinced. And conservatives who aren’t birthers but hate Obama and/or liberals will just claim that this is a non-issue that the liberal media has invented.
PAD
Updated 5:56 PM: Having now seen Obama’s actual press conference, I had two further thoughts.
First, I think Obama wanted to speak to broader issues but, as he said in his comments, just wanting to do that wouldn’t have gotten network attention. Discussing national security wouldn’t have gotten the networks to break in; the birth certificate, thanks to idiots like Trump and Fox, is news. Releasing his birth certificate had the same effect as the old gag of writing “SEX” at the top of fliers in high school and then below that, “Okay, now that we’ve got your attention, the AV club will be meeting on Tuesday.”
Second, it was evocative of the sequence in “The American President” toward the end when the president addresses non-issues like his girl friend and flag burning and talks about the need for serious people and serious discussions. Go to youtube if you don’t believe me.
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I suspect the intent is to get to those people on the fence who’ve heard rumblings about it and could possibly have been swayed to the Birther movement. It’s not going to accomplish much though.
There are people on the fence? Wow.
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PAD
They’re not actually on the fence, but there’s a tangent of the birther crowd that a fellow at the American Prospect (I can’t remember his name) labeled “birther curious.” These are the people who know that birther movement is full of it but pander to its members with code-phrases while trying to sound like reasonable to sane people. They say things like “I personally believe President Obama is an American” or “I’ll take him at his word” when these things are patently obvious. They will then wonder why he hasn’t released the “documents people are asking for” to “end the controversy.” Thus they signal to the crazies that they’re really with them. They know that no amount of documentation will dispel the convictions of the birthers. To a conspiracy theorist, evidence disproving the conspiracy theory is just proof that the conspiracy is more powerful and devious than was previously thought.
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I’ve read people speculate that this move by the President is an attempt to force people step off this rhetorical fence and either admit the obvious fact that the birther movement is bunk or embace them and show themselves to be crazies and/or hacks. I don’t know if this is correct and I don’t know if it will work if it is.
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My best guess as to the thinking behind this is that the main goal is to make the major press organizations commit to calling the crazy birther conspiracy theory a crazy conspiracy theory and stop giving and credence to people who voice even implicit support. I’m not sure that will work on the real new organizations and I know it’s not going to work on Fox. The first headline I saw from them said that the Whitehouse had released “what it claims is President Obama’s birth certificate.” Bringing us directly to your point 2.
Quasi-birthers like pretty much every GOP and rightwing talking head out there. It’ll be fun watching them twist themselves into yoga pretzels trying to not alienate the birther base.
Meanwhile, The Donald has retreated to his fallback position, questioning Obama’s intelligence, and saying he “just heard” that Obama only got into Ivy League schools because there was a quota for under-privileged (and -performing, apparently) foreign students…
Actually, The Donald’s immediate response to the release was to say that he was glad the long-form certificate was released, “if it turns out to be real…”.
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Guy’s either an idiot, or has balls of solid granite. Given that he also managed to make a casino go bankrupt, I’m leaning toward the former.
…also, just as the GOP gives Reagan credit for the fall of the Soviet Union, The Donald is claiming that it was his questions about Obama’s birth certificate that led to the release.
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Pismire with a stiffie, lying on his back on a toothpick, floating down the river and yelling “Open the drawbridge!”
Well, Mr. Hairpiece is an attention-whørë, but he’s also more than welcome to take a 100 mph trip into a brick wall with Mr. Winning.
Jonathan, just remember, the two options you’ve given are not mutually exclusive.
I think it was a “shut them up so we can focus on important things” move… but i disagree with his decision. He’s got a right to privacy just like the rest of us.
Grey
“He’s got a right to privacy just like the rest of us.”
Actually, he doesn’t. If he wants to be president, he has to show he is a natural-born citizen. I can not think of anything else in American life that requires that — everything else that requires citizenship doesn’t care about the natural-born part. But the presidency requires it, so he lost that little bit of privacy rights when he chose to run.
But the original birth certificate he provided was good enough for that.
No, he doesn’t.
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There is no requirement that he “prove” it, just that be be it – if anyone doubts it, then they have to prove otherwise.
Well, think of it this way. Obama is the only presidential candidate in history who has been asked to prove his citizenship. The only one. Why is that, do you think? Let’s see…he’s the only president so far who’s been something else, too…hmm…
I agree with Mike. The president IS an american citizen, and is thus afforded the same right to privacy as the rest of us.
It’s not a murder trial or a charge of libel/slander, etc. Yes, it could very easily be asked of the President-Elect that he provide his birth certificate; hëll, I’ve been asked by employers to provide it.
That said, I’m betting none of the other Elects were, so yeah, this is transparent.
Hmmm… I just assumed that all presidential candidates would be asked for their birth certificate by the Electoral Commission or someone like that. Not only to prove that they were “natural born”, but also to show they were over 35…
And he doubtless provided one – that infamous “short form”, which is (at least supposed to be) all that’s legally required for everything from a job to a driver’s license to a passport to running for public office.
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And let’s be honest – if his name had been Barry O’Bama, from Boston, and his skin tone had matched that of the previous presidents, nobody would have ever had an issue with it.
It seems unlikely that any intelligent person would actually believe Obama would have made it through the primaries– much less gotten elected president– if he was actually born in another country. What? Hillary Clinton would have kept mum about the issue during their heated primary battle if there’s been any truth to it? I think not.
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You’re right, PAD, that the “birthers” will never be convinced. So why would Obama bother with this nonsense? What’s the point? Isn’t releasing the long form birth certificate (when the previously released certificate of live birth was just as valid) akin to feeding the trolls on the Internet? Yes, it is. But I suspect Obama felt that he had to do it, because the “birthers” might have some undue influence in the 2012 election.
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In short, he caved. I’d like to think it was unnecessary, that the majority of the voters know that the “birther” nonsense is nonsense; and that those who choose to vote for the other candidate in 2012 will do so for reasons that have nothing to do with the president’s birth certificate. But you never know. So the president was covering his bases.
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He shouldn’t have “fed the trolls” though. He really should be focusing on more important things, as he prepares for his re-election campaign.
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Rick
One theory I like is that by releasing the birth certificate, the Birther movement either collapses, or is forced to go even crazier and implicitly racist in their attempts to discredit Obama.
I love that the Birthers believe in the idea that “Obama gets discredited, and then the Republicans take over!” rather than what is more likely given established protocol for impeachment: President Biden.
The prospect of the birthers going even crazier is a terrifying one considering they’re already nuckin’ futz.
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PAD
I knew that there would be a certain segment of the American populace that would go absolutely bûgfûçk when Obama won. In that respect, I considered his election to be a good thing, akin to lancing a festering boil and allowing it to suppurate.
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That said, I never imagined that it the infection was this bad and that it would take so long for the pus to drain.
Yeah; the same Republican base that was sure that Bill and Hillary were Eevial Criminul Masterminds who did all that stuff and managed to cover it up apprently seems to think that she and Bill wouldn’t have found it out and used it.
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(And i have a lot more faith in the Clintons chance of finding the smoking gun pointing to where the bodies were buried under the skeleton closets than Mr Combover on his best day…)
I think the main issue is that a State should have the right to decide what constitutes an official state document.
The State of Hawaii decided that when someone born in Hawaii asked for a copy of their birth certificate, they would get the Certificate of Live Birth. The COLB was legitimate for obtaining a passport, drivers license, etc.
The Birthers (many/most of them Conservatives who usually shout loudly about States Rights) shouted that Hawaii’s COLB wasn’t enough. Obama for the past two years (in my opinion) did the right thing and refrained from producing the Long Form. Producing the Long Form sets a precedent. Hawaii’s COLB is now officially insufficient.
The next logical step would be for the Federal Government to declare all birth certificates in the US invalid. Issue Federal Government approved birth certificates containing all the information the Federal Govt decides is required for all US citizens. It would cost money, but if one state’s document isn’t enough, why would any other state’s? We obviously need something uniform.
There is recent precedent for the invalidation of all current birth certificates and issuing new ones. Puerto Rico. 2010.
I think revealing the birth certificate was Obama taking the high road. Politically, the whole Birther issue was a blessing for Obama: It made independents think that the Republicans were a bunch of conspiracy-theory loons, and its only appeal was to those people who never would have voted for Obama anyway. (I doubt you’ll hear a lot of “Now that Obama has released his birth certificate, I’ll be voting for him next year” commentaries.) Heck, Karl Rove tried to gets Repubs off the issue by claiming that the Democrats were the ones keeping it alive. (These would be such “Democrats” as Gingrich and Huckabee.)
I think Obama released it for three reasons: 1) He took most of the wind out of the sails of the Birthers’ argument that he wasn’t born here. (Of course, there’ll still be those claiming it’s not real.) 2) It gives everyone a chance to focus on the issues that matter to people (remember “jobs, jobs, jobs”?) instead of a partisan sideshow. And 3) It lets Obama look like the adult in the room, as he’s the one putting an end to these questions.
Looking over my regular political forums, the response seems to be what you’ve predicted along with, “I’ll believe it when at least four or five TRUE conservatives get to look over the ACTUAL copy not the jpeg, and declare it real!” and “He’s still not a TRUE American. His actions show that!” and “So now we know that it takes two years to make a believable forgery.”
What’s the expression? Don’t argue with an idiot, he will drag you down to his level and beat you with experience.
“…but the pig enjoys it.”
He’s capitalising on the birther movement. He knows this will just stoke it. A useful distraction strategy. http://www.spectator.co.uk/alexmassie/6898950/obama-fuels-birtherism.thtml
No, no, “Obama”‘s much trickier than that. While the birth certificate is legit, who says it’s actually the birth certificate of the man now calling himself Barack Obama? I bet further investigation will show the real Barack Obama died at age 3 or so, and this foreign-born impostor took over his identity.
(Note: Of course I don’t believe this. But I bet it’ll become the next iteration of the birther meme)
That makes sense, given that he’s a Muslim terrorist. Maybe he’s been a sleeper agent since childhood. He probably killed Kennedy when he was two.
Hold on. He’s a Radical Christian Muslim Terrorist… let’s be clear here.
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TAC
My guess he’s a Skrull who was put into place for the Secret Invasion and who decided to remain in deep cover when he realized the invasion was going to fail.
He WAS a deep cover Skrull posing as a Radical Christian Muslim Terrorist, until he died suddenly under, shall we say, indelicate circumstances.
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About two months ago he was replaced with a heavily made up Kevin Kline.
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Yeah… The idiot train is dumping coal into the engine like mad right now.
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http://rense.com/general93/ob1.htm
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This is already being circulated via email and social networking sites. It’s the complete package. They’re trotting out they “if it’s real” line from just about word one and referencing “facts” sourced to such honest people as Jerome Corsi and frequently easy to debunk “news” sites like World Net Daily.
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It’s a wonder that some of these people have the brains to successfully breath in and out without constant reminders from their friends.
As far as the hardcore birthers are concerned, this changes nothing. They’re not going to believe it no matter what proof he provides.
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Why?
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Because Obama is still black.
Yeah, Kevin. You got it. People are daring to question the rather blank slate of a background of our current president not because he’s given them reason to be curious. No, the only reason people are asking these questions is because of the color of his skin.
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You know, it’s the same people who believed Obama would never get elected because, you know, we’re such a racist nation are now pinning any questions of him, legitimate or not, on the “fact” that this is a “racist” country.
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We’re not supposed to question this president because he’s black? THAT is racist.
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And for those who still don’t believe the media is racist, look, they put the spotlight on the “birthers”, make the out to be crazies and part of then mainstream of the GOP.
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Meanwhile, I don’t recall them trying to discredit “authors” like Andrew Sullivan, who remain convinced that Sarah palin’s uterus did not provide a home for her son Trig for 9 months OR that a poll showed a MAJORITY OF ALL DEMOCRATS belived Bush was comnplicit in 9/11. http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0411/More_than_half_of_Democrats_believed_Bush_knew.html
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Some things never change.
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“OR that a poll showed a MAJORITY OF ALL DEMOCRATS belived Bush was comnplicit in 9/11. “
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That’s not what the poll says. The question does not mention Bush by name.
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– – – “How likely is it that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks because they wanted the United States to go to war in the Middle East?” – – –
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We’ve had a few diehard Truthers pass through my workplace. Some of them were also diehard Republicans. They didn’t think Bush knew. We’ve had several raving idiot Truthers pop up here. Some of them despised Bush. They didn’t think Bush knew. A big part of the Truther movement is the belief in the Shadow Government. They believe that the real power brokers behind the scenes were the ones who knew and not the President.
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Oh, and the poll itself? It’s five years old.
When someone refuses to accept a legal document from the Government of any state, and insists on the provision of an additional document not required by any law – that person must have some reason that goes beyond curiosity.
Yes, the COLB is the legal document the government of Hawaii issues when its citizens ask for a copy of their birth certificate. So to reject that as proof violates to some extent Hawaii’s rights as a state.
And I don’t think it a stretch to wonder if the COLB would have been rejected by these same people if Obama had been from England, Germany, or France, instead of Africa. (Well, scratch France.)
What “blank slate?” We know where he was born, where he went to school, what all of his jobs were before he was President; it’s all public information. What more are you looking for?
I know it’s five years old. The point is that the spotlight was not put on Truthers the same way it has been put on Birthers.
I meant Obama, Sr. Naturally. 🙂
I don’t recall your position, Jerome. Remind me: Do you believe that this is a non-issue, or do you believe Obama’s citizenship is questionable?
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PAD
It is a non-issue to me. It is far more important that Bernanke had a press conference today. yet that will get a miniscule percentage of the water cooler talk, media attention and bandwidth devoted to it as this topic. I mean bernanke’s only talking about the future of the U.S. and possibly global economy. But let’s talk some more about Donald Trump:)
No, the only reason people are asking these questions is because of the color of his skin.
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I don’t recall any other candidate being questioned on these kinds of issues in the past.
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Obama. That negro Communist Muslim foreign terrorist.
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Nope, nothing racist in there whatsoever. No questions about his skin color, no questions about where he was born, no questions about his religious affiliation.
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All that stuff is just another conspiracy to be debunked, I guess.
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“I know it’s five years old. The point is that the spotlight was not put on Truthers the same way it has been put on Birthers.”
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Jerome, the spotlight was put on the Truthers for a few years after 9/11. And they, like the Birthers, were called idiots.
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But I honestly don’t see how the two groups compare for this conversation.
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That poll doesn’t say they think Bush did it. It doesn’t say that they think the Republicans did it. With the Birthers you have, in poll after poll, numbers showing that significant numbers of Republicans and conservatives (from a high minority of those polled to a majority depending on the region of the country) who flat believe or will give the “somewhat likely” view that Obama is not a natural born American citizen.
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The majority of the Truthers out there aren’t targeting a specific politician or political party. They target the government. There was (and probably still is) a contingent of Truthers who said that Bush and crew knew about it or were even behind it, but they were never the majority. You have Republicans and Conservatives, Democrats and Liberals, and Libertarians and Independents out there who are hardcore Truthers.
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Being a Truther is not a specific partisan political agenda cause.
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And the Truthers themselves got their moment in the sun and got denounced as conspiracy nuts. They’re still out there and they’re still talking, but, yeah, they don’t get the play they got in 2002 and 2003. Why? Because you have no real major figures championing the cause and you don’t have anyone of any standing or note whatsoever getting their “campaign” PR kick started by adamantly declaring that there’s some “there” there on the Truther issue.
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You don’t have cable news hosts asking guests who are talking about maybe running whether or not the Truther claims have any legitimacy. You have Fox News hosts asking guests who are discussing possible runs at the Presidency whether or not there’s any legitimacy to the Birther nonsense (whether the guest brings it up or not.) You have prominent conservative talk show hosts such as Hannity, Rush, Savage, Beck and others who either bring up the birth certificate issue regularly (but are “only joking” when they do so) or outright promote it.
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And every single bit of it is focused at attacking a Democratic President.
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You can’t say anything like that about the Truther issue. It has not been brought up and promoted regularly by host of news personalities and pundits of prominence and, when it has been brought up for reason beyond ridiculing it, it is not a partisan attack weapon aimed at a particular political party or politician. A few fringe idiots used it to accuse Bush of being an evil murderer who was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, but even in the movement, those guys aren’t close to being in the majority.
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And, again, you don’t have Democrats and Democratic voters embracing the partisan attack end of the Truther movement like you can see Republicans and Republican voters either embracing the Birther movement or playing the “I guess we can take is word for it” games. Even the source you listed above does not show that. It shows that 22.6% of Democrats said it was “very likely” and 28.2% called it “somewhat likely” that people in the federal government either assisted in the 9/11 attacks or took no action to stop the attacks (And “somewhat likely” is kind of a wide range statement.) I’ve seen polls showing close to the numbers when polling the general public at large.
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These two things do not equate at all. One is standard “the government did it” conspiracy talk that’s been around in one shape or form for decades upon decades. It’s garbage, it’s treated as garbage and the people squawking on about it are pat on their heads and sent on their way. The Birther thing is very specific charge leveled at a specific POTUS and trotted out and used by partisans on the Right as a wedge and a weapon against a Democratic POTUS. So, yeah, the Birther issue gets more play these days.
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You can thank the conservative radio hosts like Hannity, Rush, Savage, etc. and their callers for that one.
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You can thank the Tea Party for bringing their cutesy signs to their events declaring Obama an illegal and an undocumented worker.
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You can thank various Fox News hosts who think it’s clever to ask prospective Republican Presidential candidates if there’s anything to the Birther issue.
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You can thank the Republican Party who went and let their members in various states ride Birther mania and put bills up to be passed demanding that the thing be seen.
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You can thank elected Republicans who won’t look into the camera and say point blank that the Birther issue is nonsense at that the people who believe it are deluding themselves.
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But you cannot seriously compare the two things and then use the treatment the Truthers get these days in the media to the treatment the Birthers get as some sort of point on bias or media being against the Republicans. The two groups have not acted anywhere near the same insofar as the faithful making public displays of themselves and the Truthers never had the champions in any political party and it’s supporters that the Republicans and their supporters have given the Birthers.
Speaking of the term ‘negro’…
Yahoo! News: Birtherist response highlights racial undertones of ‘debate’
http://tinyurl.com/3mjfebm
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“Even after the White House released the long-form certificate of Obama’s birth, birther leader Orly Taitz—who has filed unsuccessful lawsuits seeking to obtain access to Obama’s birth certificate—sought to cast doubt on the document’s authenticity, suggesting that in 1961, Hawaiian officials would have classified Obama as “Negro” rather than using designation “African,” which suggests, in her view, a more contemporary concern for “political correctness.””
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But then, the article goes on to point out some of the very things I have said time and again on the issue, including: “a level of scrutiny that neither McCain nor Obama’s 43 predecessors in the Oval Office were expected to face.”
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Oh, and we’ll try and distract from the birther issue by still claiming that Obama must be a secret Muslim. Nope, still no bigotry or racism there, huh?
Birthers are paranoid nutjobs, but I’m still unconvinced that racism is a large factor in anti-Obama sentiment.
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Religion and culture, yes. Race? Not really. If the GOP produced a black guy with Sarah Palin’s general background (fanatical Christian, small town, jingoistic, anti-intellectual, rugged individualist, gun owner), Conservatives would eat it up with a spoon.
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Rene: “Birthers are paranoid nutjobs, but I’m still unconvinced that racism is a large factor in anti-Obama sentiment.
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Religion and culture, yes. Race? Not really. If the GOP produced a black guy with Sarah Palin’s general background (fanatical Christian, small town, jingoistic, anti-intellectual, rugged individualist, gun owner), Conservatives would eat it up with a spoon.”
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I doubt that it’s the majority of it, but recently I’ve been looking at a few things that would lend some support to the idea of racism (conscious or unconscious) backing it in some areas. An interesting thing that’s been popping up is that statistically the strongest support for both the Obama as Secret Muslim stupidity and the Birther nonsense is found in older white southerners and in southern states. So the strong contender for a reason based on the data is that there’s a racial factor to it or that there’s an ignorance factor to it. Either way, not flattering for southern whites.
Not a big surprise that old white Southerners are big on Birtherism and this stuff. They clearly are xenophobes. But I think ultra-conservative xenophobia has become slightly more nuanced. Physical appeareance is much less of a factor. Acting like their stereotypical view of a real American is what matters.
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But I agree that a few of them are racist. We’ll always have those. I’m just not sure it’s big enough in the GOP to merit inclusion in the discussion. Feels a little like a cheap shot.
Herman god-help-us Cain.
And to think i helped make that jerk rich by eating at Godfather’s Pizza so often.
“I don’t recall any other candidate being questioned on these kinds of issues in the past.”
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Well you’d have to be pretty old. Chester A. Arthur was accused of being Canadian. Charles Hughes, who almost beat Woodrow Wilson for the nomination, had his eligibility questioned due to dual nationality and his father not being a naturalized citizen, John McCain had questions raised about being born in the Panama Canal zone, George Romney and lowell Weicker both had their eligibility questioned due to out of country births, and Barry Goldwater weathered some questions about his eligibility since he was born in a state that was not yet a state.
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All those gentlemen were white but I don;t expect that to matter to those who see race as a useful cudgel. It can be an effective weapon since nobody can prove they are not racists. Of course, in a time when everyone from Harlan Ellison to our esteemed host can claim membership in the club of people who have been accused of racism by internet nitwits the accusation may be in serious danger of not having the impact it once did.
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“Discussing national security wouldn’t have gotten the networks to break in; the birth certificate, thanks to idiots like Trump and Fox, is news.’
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interesting analysis here: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/top-stories/129708/factchecking-obama-birther-controversy-was-3-4-of-newshole-economy-was-39/
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it shows that not only did this story NOT dominate the news as much as the president claimed but that it was MSNBC that was really pimping it. 92% of their Obama stories were about birther and religion stuff, compared to only 8% of Fox’s Obama stories.
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“but that it was MSNBC that was really pimping it. 92% of their Obama stories were about birther and religion stuff, compared to only 8% of Fox’s Obama stories.”
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Now here’s the fun question. They broke it down by airtime and not content. MSNBC’s hosts were reacting to Trump and the conservative blogs and denouncing the Birthers and their conspiracies. Most of the time I saw the coverage it was given on Fox News, it was more often than not the nudge, nudge, wink, wink treatment. Even the article you site says that MSNBC’s coverage “may have been” devoted to questioning or debunking the president’s citizenship issues.
All those gentlemen were white but I don;t expect that to matter to those who see race as a useful cudgel.
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And we’ve come full circle: you’re a conservative, therefore, you see no racism in this. I’m liberal, and I see it because it’s ridiculous to simply chalk this up as anything else.
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Kennedy didn’t take this much bûllšhìŧ over being a Catholic, and then the accusation was the Pope would be Kennedy’s puppet master.
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So why is it that Obama can take crap not only on the color of his skin (is he black enough?), but also on his religious background (his father was a Muslim? he must be a secret terrorist!), and of course, the patently absurd notion that he isn’t an American citizen to begin with.
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So, I’m not going to bother going round and round with you on this yet again. Birthers are a bunch of effing racists. End of story.
No, you’re allowed to question anyone you want, but inherent in your questioning must also be the possibilty that your questioning can be satisfied, else you’re just the annoying little kid who asks “why” in response to every answer. The problem with the birthers, really, is the same problem with all conspiracy theorists: the only proof they’ll accept is the proof that they’re right. Anything else must be a lie.
“So, I’m not going to bother going round and round with you on this yet again. Birthers are a bunch of effing racists. End of story.”
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My facts are no match for your feelings. Got it.
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My suspicion, and I know of no way to test this, is that a lot of the stuff we see in polls need not be taken with absolute seriousness. I really don’t think most democrats think the USA government was complicit in 9/11. hey just said that to express displeasure with the current government. Look at a recent poll that showed that only 43% said they were sure that TRUMP was born in the USA! There is exactly 0.0 reason to doubt that fact but 7% think he wasn’t and 37% said they weren’t sure.
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That’s not based on anything but dislike for the guy and a desire to express it. Has nothing to do with any innate prejudice against balding douchebags.
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Jerry, absolutely, the survey says nothing about what’s said in those stories but we have been told that even MENTIONING the birther quackery is a distraction that keeps the story alive so, by that measure, MSNBC is the worst of the bunch. But note that even thye have not flogged the story to the degree that some have claimed–in no way was this the dominant story of the week (though I expect it will be hot for a few days now).
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Personally, I’m puzzled that Obama would take this action now. At best he takes out Trump. Whoop. trump is not and was never gonna be the nominee. I would have kept my powder dry for someone more substantial.
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At worst he’s providing a glimpse to the actual future nominee (whoever they are) at how easy it is to get under his skin.
My facts are no match for your feelings. Got it.
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Get this: Your opinions and my opinions will have to agree to disagree.
I find your recitation of people whose citizenship was challenged to be quite interesting, Bill. I didn’t know that.
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The thing is, from your description, it makes it sound like a lot of such questioning was part of the election campaigns. The thing is, it seems to me that during elections dámņëd near anything is fair game.
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What I wonder is how much did the harassment and challenges continue AFTER these men were elected?
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Because I was like you at first. I didn’t buy into the notion that the crap Obama had to deal with was racially motivated because everybody deals with relentless crap during elections. But he’s been president for two years now and there are still people shouting that he has no right to be, and when that happens, I think a reasonable person has to wonder what more is at play here than just the usual conspiracy theorists.
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PAD
After 8 years of both GW Bush and the GW Bush haters it’s my position that we are clearly living in times where people can keep a deep dislike of a politician going for as long as it takes. There were people who spent 4 years screaming that Bush stole the election in 2000. Ok, give them some credi,t that it was a contentious election. When Bush won in 2004 they quieted down, right? Nope, they insisted he had stolen it yet again, this time with evil diabold voting machines, which steal every election that does not go the way the partisans think they should. (One may well wonder why the evil republicans don’t win EVERY election with those machines…plausible deniability, my friends!)
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Welcome to the new world. Small wonder the only people who would expose themselves to this level of scrutiny and criticism tend to be ambitious, egotistical and power hungry. Smart and competent can make you a lot more money with a lot less grief in an endless variety of professions; it takes a certain person to risk it all on a high profile run for high office. People are surprised trump is doing this? I’d be surprised if he didn’t.
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And if by some combination of bad luck, mass insanity, accidental dumping of LSD into the nation’s water supply and an ancient Mayan prophecy turned true, we get president Trump, I expect 4 long years of pretty much the same-lots of people devoting every waking hour to bringing him down, raising questions about every facet of his life, assigning the worst possible motives to his actions (even if they agree with them), etc etc.. Even from people now pouting about people disrespecting the president. I’m looking at you Whoopie!.
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None of the previous fellows had to deal with the internet culture and 24/7 news cycles. I wonder what would have happened if Watergate happened today? 2 possibilities–either Nixon would have been a goner in just a few months or (and I think this might be the more likely scenario) people would have moved on to the next big issue and Watergate would just have been a low level conspiracy thing that only the die-hards took as seriously as it merited.
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Get this: Your opinions and my opinions will have to agree to disagree.
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Craig, you said that you did not know of any “candidate being questioned on these kinds of issues in the past.” I provided examples of just such a thing. Facts are not opinions. If my facts are wrong they are wrong, whatever my opinions are to the contrary.
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“So, I’m not going to bother going round and round with you on this yet again. Birthers are a bunch of effing racists. End of story.”
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My facts are no match for your feelings. Got it.”
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Bill, you know that I hate the race card and anyone here can easily look back to older threads about Obama and see me busting people’s chops for jumping to the “it’s racisms” over every little thing. But at this point, even I’m looking at a lot of this stuff and the level at which it is carried out and finding it hard not attribute at least a substantial amount to racism.
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Just a few months after Obama is sworn in, before he’s even really done anything legislatively, we saw video of elderly whites at town halls bawling their eyes out and telling whoever was running that particular town hall that they wanted their country back. You know what, I don’t remember conservatives breaking down like that when Clinton was elected. I’ve never seen archived news stories about people weeping like that when Carter took office. The closest I’ve ever seen was the anger in the wake of the Bush V Gore decision and that was directed at the decision and not so much the man who that decision elected.
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We’ve had two years of discussions about President Obama where the things thrown around about him have been garbage like how he’s not really “black” because his mother was white, he’s a Halfrican American, he’s “Barack the Magic Negro,” he has a hatred for whites, his presidency is the affirmative action presidency, he’s going to enact policies to favor blacks, his tax policies and healthcare policy, despite the fact that they cover everybody of every race, are actually “reparations” in disguise, etc., etc., etc…
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Now, if all of that and more were relegated to fringe bloggers… Well, it might not mean as much. But all of at that and more like it has been thrown out there by the biggest rated talkers in talk radio, high rated Fox News hosts and various Fox News contributors, high traffic blogs written by major Conservative authors and figures and then happily and eagerly lapped up and regurgitated by their mindless faithful.
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There have been streams of constant chain emails with side by side “comparison” pictures of Michele Obama and monkeys and orangutans (some with detailed descriptions of why she and the monkeys look alike) and derogatory images or comments of and about Obama based only on his race/skin color. We had the early Tea Party protests where Tea Party members were showing up with signs mocking Obama in ways that only worked by being based only on his race.
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You take all of that, all of that ongoing and still going constant drumbeat of garbage targeted at Obama and then look at the “Secret Muslim” garbage and the Birther Garbage and the fact that there is a statistically sizeable chunk of people out there desperately clinging to this garbage and who just will not give up on the idea that Obama is a Muslim, that Obama is not an American or that he is not legally allowed to hold the office he currently holds…
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And now the new drumbeat, for those not still clinging to the Birther crap and/or trying to mutate it into something they can keep pushing, is that Obama needs to show us his school records. See, he wasn’t good enough to get into the college he got into, so it must have been affirmative action.
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And the simple fact is that I’ve seen it without the mask on. I knew people, older family, coworkers and acquaintances who fell into the “older white” demographic, who for years seemed to have no issues with blacks. They worked with blacks and they had friends who were black. Within the first few weeks of Obama getting elected, I got to hear comments from them about how if America was dumb enough to elect a “ņìggër” into office then we’re all screwed. Apparently, blacks were okay with some of these people only so long as they knew their place.
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It’s out there. It’s not all of the Republican/Conservative supporters and it’s not all of the Birther and Secret Muslim nonsense, but at this point I find it hard to not see the stupidity of all of the above listed garbage (and more) from the last two years and not see it as a strong part of at least some of this. I can’t at this point not see it as a reason for at least some of the almost visceral need that some have to declare Obama as the “Other” and the wild mental gymnastics that some will go through to embrace the most mindlessly stupid conspiracy theories so that they can convince themselves that Obama isn’t legally allowed to hold office and that we’ll see the “proof” any day now that will finally get him yanked from office and sent to jail.
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Judson Phillips on April 27, 2011 Tea Party Nation Forum
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“Barack Obama finally released his long form birth certificate today. Hallelujah. If Obama’s goals were to quiet things down with the release of his birth certificate, it isn’t going to happen.
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Already, there are stories out in the Internet that the birth certificate released is a fake. Could it be fake? Anything is possible and certainly there are a lot of people with the skills to create a faked document, such as a birth certificate. But in a case like this, I am reminded of the words of Benjamin Franklin, who once said; “three people can keep a secret… if two of them are dead.”
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If the birth certificate the White House offered today is a fake, then we are watching the greatest political conspiracy since Watergate and if that is the case, forget impeachment. Joe Biden and the cabinet just need to invoke the 25th Amendment and send Obama off to a nice quiet place where they have long white jackets, nice men and women and the birds are chirping.
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The release of this seemingly innocuous document today strikes at the heart of a deeper question. If this is all there is to it, why didn’t Obama release this two and a half years ago. How much money has Obama spent on lawyers to keep this under wraps? I spoke with a liberal reporter today who told me it was a myth that Obama had spent two million dollars on lawyers to keep the birth certificate secret. How much did he spend? Who knows but I can tell you from personal experience, lawyers do not work for free. Big law firms like Perkins and Cole charge a lot. FEC disclosures show that Obama for America paid Perkins and Cole almost $1.67 million between 2007 and 2009. Perkins and Cole represented Obama on many of the eligibility cases.
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This does not necessarily close the door on the litigation as to whether Obama is a natural born citizen. There remain two theories. First that his father, Barack Obama, Sr. being a British subject could not make Obama a natural born citizen, as both parents must be citizens in order to confer that status on someone. Second is the theory that Obama lost his citizenship when he was adopted by an Indonesian and moved to Indonesia as a child.”
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That’s the Tea Party Nation Founder shoveling more crap onto the happy faithful and having many thanking him for doing so.
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Liberals had an immense dislike of W. Bush and they even had Bush V Gore to point to as reason to claim that Bush was an illegitimate President. It got brought up a fair bit. Hëll, it got brought up more than a fair bit. But I saw nothing like the widespread rabid, crazy, ranting and desperate desire to embrace that as a reason for Bush’s illegitimacy as President by anyone outside of the extreme fringe Left that I have seen on the Right with the Birther conspiracy nonsense from people or groups who are not just the extreme fringe Right.
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There’s got to be a reason for it and, unfortunately, a very real reason for at least a chunk of it is very likely racism. It might not even be “racism” in the way that most people think of it. It might not be the racism that has people spewing vile garbage about blacks in general and talking down about blacks as a race under normal circumstances. It may very well be something buried deep in some people, primarily older white southerners, where they can deal with blacks just fine every day, but a black man as POTUS, a black man as their “leader” is something that they just can’t swallow. Like some of the people I knew, like some of the older, more southern family member I have, they grew over the years to be “fine” with blacks – so long apparently as the blacks knew their place. And for them, POTUS is not Obama knowing his place.
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It’s not everyone out there in the Tea Party. It’s not everyone out there in the Republican Party. It’s not everyone out there who are spouting this garbage and the above listed garbage on TV and radio for ratings. It’s not even the majority of the mouth breathers who are lapping this garbage up and embracing it like a life preserver thrown to them from the deck of a sinking ship. But it’s out there and at this point I find it harder and harder to not think that it’s at least a significant factor in the motivations for many of these people.
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Okay, so I missed this one while typing.
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http://www.peterdavid.net/index.php/2011/04/27/so-the-president-released-his-birth-certificate/comment-page-1/#comment-353566
In that blog Jerry quoted is a statement I’ve been seeing crop up more and more, especially in the comments on political stories at the local newspaper’s website. That statement is the claim that both parents have to be citizens of the US in order for a child to be considered a “natural born citizen”.
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At first, I considered it to be merely the typical level of ignorance of the actual wording of the Constitution that a certain group of commenters typically displays. Now, though, it’s sounding like another one of those “talking points.” Does anyone here know where that came from? Because the Constitution itself, so far as I’ve read, never actually gets around to defining the term. The closest is in the very first clause of the 14th Amendment:
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“All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
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This would seem to imply that “natural born” is merely in opposition to “naturalized” – that is, in order to be considered a “natural born citizen”, and thus eligible for the Presidency, a person would need to have been born in the United States, or overseas to at least one parent who is a US citizen. What is the legal precedent for this extraordinary claim that both parents need to be citizens first? (And why was it never applied until this president?)
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“What is the legal precedent for this extraordinary claim that both parents need to be citizens first? (And why was it never applied until this president?)”
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The really isn’t any. And, as a pointed out somewhere way above, this claim flies in the face of our history. Obama is the seventh man sworn in as POTUS where one or both parents were not born in America or citizens when he was born. The others were –
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Thomas Jefferson (English mother)
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Andrew Jackson (Scots-Irish parents emigrated from Northern Ireland)
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James Buchanan (Irish father)
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Chester Arthur (Irish father)
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Woodrow Wilson (Scottish mother)
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Herbert Hoover (English-Irish mother)
You dodged the question, Bill. I asked how many of the people whose nationality was questioned then had people harassing them over that same question for the entirety of their presidency. How many of them had to deal, on an ongoing basis, with people refusing to accept proof handed to them.
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In short, how many of them had to deal with constant accusations of being foreign operatives devoted to bringing down the country? How many were constantly accused of not having the right to be president?
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Your response was to bring up the legal maneuvering that put Bush into office. Not the same thing. At all. And I think you know that.
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“There were people who spent 4 years screaming that Bush stole the election in 2000. Ok, give them some credi,t that it was a contentious election. When Bush won in 2004 they quieted down, right? Nope, they insisted he had stolen it yet again, this time with evil diabold voting machines, which steal every election that does not go the way the partisans think they should.”
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I believe that it would have quieted down in 2004 if the guy who owns the company who runs the machines hadn’t “guaranteed” Bush a victory in certain states. Yes, he used that word, at political fundraiser dinners, one time in the city in which I live. Such a statement does make one wonder about the legitimacy of the vote count.
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And, to be fair to the Truther comparison, Jessie Ventura’s show, “Conspiracy Theory” accused 9/11 of being an inside job. Although, watching it one could tell that Jessie didn’t believe what he was saying. And, some of the interview cuts were worse than Michael Moore’s in “Roger and Me.”
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But, in general, the complaints and accusations against Bush and Clinton are comparable to each other, but not comparable to what Obama has had to endure.
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Theno
You dodged the question, Bill. I asked how many of the people whose nationality was questioned then had people harassing them over that same question for the entirety of their presidency. How many of them had to deal, on an ongoing basis, with people refusing to accept proof handed to them.
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In short, how many of them had to deal with constant accusations of being foreign operatives devoted to bringing down the country? How many were constantly accused of not having the right to be president?
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Your response was to bring up the legal maneuvering that put Bush into office. Not the same thing. At all. And I think you know that.
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I did not mean to ignore this–did not see it. I see the advantages to the new comments system but on fast moving threads like this one it tends to fall apart, unless I’m missing some easy way to keep abreast of replies and such.
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My thoughts are these: none of the men who previously had these sort of questions asked about them had to endure this nonstop never ending foolishness for the simple reason that the means by which to keep this going simply did not exist. I used the Bush example (and expanded on it below with some of the other craziness that Bush and Clinton endured) to show how easy it has become to keep the fires of paranoia and conspiracy going. If there had been any serious questions about Bush’s birthplace (or Clinton’s for that matter) I have no doubt that they would have had pretty much the same treatment. I think that some of the people pooh poohing this waste of neuron use would have been some of the very same people leading the charge, but that is mere speculation on my part.
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So no, no previous president has had to endure this level of questioning about birthplaces but for the reasons I have stated I find this a very tenuous rack to hang charges of racism on. Every president must now endure a gauntlet of criticism that will not be quieted. It does not matter if it is earned or simply a matter of being the “wrong” person from the “wrong” party and anything he or she does will be interpreted by their critics in the worst way possible.
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Similarly, those who support the president will try to make any criticism, however legitimate, as being motivated by hate, racism, treason, whatever.
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It’s a new world, though I would argue it started with Clinton, continued with Bush and Obama is just the one who gets it now. The next person will be no different, wait and see. Anyone who thinks the next white person to occupy the White House will not suffer nonstop 24/7 attacks is living in a dream world.
I agree with Bill.
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There is racism involved. But racism isn’t the main issue, even in those more virulent attacks. The Bush guys managed, in 8 years, to augment political and cultural division in the US by super-charging their radical base.
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What we see now is the result. They hate Obama so passionately that they use whatever they can to attack him, including his race. But his race isn’t the reason they attack. If Dubya or Palin got melanin treatments and became black, I doubt the Tea Partiers would turn on them.
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In the same manner, if a white Democrat had won, they’d find other reasons to keeping the flames of virulent hatred alive.
If the next person who occupies the White House is a Republican, I can almost assure you that the conventional wisdom (pushed hard by the GOP) will become that the tone of debate has become too harsh during Obama’s tenure and that both sides need to be more civil and respectful — followed by vituperate condemnation of anyone who breaks the truce by criticizing the new GOP president, no matter how innocuous or valid.
Of that there can be no doubt.
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people don’t even wait a dignified length of time any more before pivoting 180 degrees. It only took a few weeks for calls for a “more civil tone” after the Giffords shooting before people on the left began falling back on the same old violent imagery they had just condemned. Everything from “This is war!” to “You are f****ing dead!” to urging supporters to “get a little bloody”, etc.
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yep, the people slamming Obama will call for respect for the office and the people currently shocked, shocked, at the way people are disrespecting the president wil rediscover dissent as the highest form of patriotism.
I don’t completely agree with you here. The left did not use the kind of eliminationist rhetoric that the right routinely engaged in (“Second Amendment solutions”, etc.) and was condemned for. They never fell back into such imagery because they weren’t into it to begin with.
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That said, yes, it’s amazing how often people quickly about-face when it’s politically convenient. However, when it’s especially galling (such as the current sudden GOP demand to fix the deficit after their presiding over one of the most profligate and fiscally irresponsible eras in US history), it does wear.
Sasha, we’ve already seen the flip side of what you’re posing. We had the eight-year temper tantrum that started five seconds after Clinton won the 1992 election and lasted until Bush was sworn in, followed by eight years of “How DARE you criticize Dear Leader President George W. Bush? Why do you hate America? You oughta be shipped off to Gitmo for treason!”
And two seconds after McCain conceded, suddenly criticizing the President became OK again and a new tantrum began.
Just watch, the second another Republican wins the White House, “Shut up and get in line” will be the order of the day again.
Anyway. I don’t think all criticism of Obama is racist, just the criticism that comes from people who use the N-word to refer to him. Or people who said, prior to the 2008 election, that they “weren’t ready for a black President.” Or people who make up and/or pass along posters depicting him as a headhunter or a pimp. Or people who circulate jokes on the Internet where the punchline is that Cheetah now lives in the White House.
I keep remembering the tagline from George Carlin’s final HBO special, recorded in 2008:
“It’s bûllšhìŧ, and it’s bad for ya.”
Exactly my thought. I remember Clinton not getting a very long honeymoon before the Repubs starting going into him. When Bush entered office, the watchword suddenly became “civility” (and a new belief that impeachment should not ever be considered since, like Clinton’s, it would merely be “political”).
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Obama’s honeymoon could be measured in hours.
Really? I remember 8 years of trashing Bush, and people saying it’s patriotic to criticize the president. Hëll, look at this sites history to see people posting that during bush years. So I can play the flip game. It was ok on here to trash the president when it was bush, but now it’s racism?
See… unamaerican and racisim are two sides of the same coin. It’s easy to paint your opponent rather than actually discuss the issue.
As we see from both sides, it’s only ok to critisize the president when he’s the other parties president.
See… unamaerican and racisim are two sides of the same coin.
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Well, they are, but not the way you’re using them.
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As we see from both sides, it’s only ok to critisize the president when he’s the other parties president.
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No, that’s totally a misrepresentation of what’s gone on.
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Go ahead and criticize Obama. There are plenty of grounds to do so. But not on birther grounds. Unless you’re saying >I’m< not American. Because I have the same type of birth certificate….
Every time I hear about the Birther nonsense, all I can think about is “Boy, it’s a good thing King Arthur ran for President when he did, they’d never accept Merlin’s shenanigans with getting Arthur made an American in 1776 now!”
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“Meanwhile, I don’t recall them trying to discredit “authors” like Andrew Sullivan, who remain convinced that Sarah palin’s uterus did not provide a home for her son Trig for 9 months”
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This ground was covered here and elsewhere before. Garbage about Trig’s parentage was treated like the garbage it was by the media at large. It was called garbage, denounced as mindless drivel and left in the dustbin by even the semi-series journalists. Even the MSNBC stated that it was sick and hateful nonsense and not open for discussion on their programs. Even your least favorite MSNBC host, that would be Olbermann as I’m sure you know, dismissed it as such. The only place that it got any play was fringe blogs and in the comment sections of more mainstream blogs where there were a handful of fringe cranks mixed in with the sane people. And even in the more mainstream blogs, the posters were treated as idiots by most of the other posters.
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I would post some examples, but the topic of Trig’s parentage has apparently been resurrected by the Right in the last two weeks to defend the treatment of the Birthers and claim some sort of bias by the media. I Googled “”Andrew Sullivan” denounced trig” and got tons of hits. three pages in I quit looking. Every hit was less than a week old and tracked back to conservative blogs complaining that Birthers are getting treated badly by the media while people like Sullivan got a free pass on Trig (which isn’t actually true.)
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Besides, I’m not sure how the two topics even remotely compare. Andrew Sullivan and a few other fringe šhìŧbágš started speculating about whether or not Trig was Palin’s kid or grandkid. Now, how did that play out?
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Well, for one thing you had every major network news broadcast and cable news channel either declare that it was garbage, vile and/or nonsense or simply ignore the issue and focus on more relevant issues. Even, as I mentioned above, MSNBC hosts said that it was garbage that was beneath discussion or speculation.
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I also don’t recall any evidence that a majority of those on the Left believed that the stupid garbage was true or might have been true. I also, and this is purely based on my experiences, haven’t come across very many people who discussed the matter then or now.
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And, big one here, I don’t know of any court cases around the issue or Democratic hopefuls who have run on/constantly brought up the issue.
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In the meantime, as I pointed out to Darin the other week with links once they got kicked free of the filters, Fox News hosts have actually been asking their guests about the birth certificate and the possibility of Obama’s presidential illegitimacy for years and right up to last week. Hëll, you have Fox News hosts who bring it up with guests who aren’t even there to discuss it.
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You have fringe candidates bringing it up all the time, Trump (who is at best a joke candidate with no intention of running) not only got publicity for bringing it up, but he made himself one of the most popular (if not the most popular) possible GOP candidates amongst GOP voters and Tea Partiers.
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The Tea Party… The Tea Party had, from day one, a huge chunk of people showing up at events with signs about Obama being Kenyan or being an “undocumented worker” in the White House.
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Like it or not, the Left, the vast majority of the Left from the blogosphere to the press pundits to the halls of power, have looked at the Trig issue and declared it low class, vile garbage that’s not worthy of discussion and moved on. You can’t say the same about the Right and the Birther issue.
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The two issues don’t even compare to begin with, but idea that the áššhølëš who brought up the Trig thing when Palin first hit the national stage weren’t denounced as idiots and fools by the Left (when their stupidity was acknowledged at all) is flat wrong.
I remember the Trig thing. It was there, it was gone, and I seem to recall thinking at the time that either it was false, in which case it wasn’t worth discussing, or it was true, and it wasn’t any of my business. It never gained any serious traction that I remember.
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I also seem to recall thinking that when Palin’s daughter was having a child out of wedlock that Palin told the media that was also none of their business and the media pretty much backed off as the GOP stridently commended her attitude. Whereas, I suspect, if Obama had a teenage daughter and she’d been pregnant, it would have turned into a national referendum on absentee black fathers (assuming the father was black) and the Fox through line (not to mention the advertising) would have been, “How can he safeguard the country when he can’t even keep his own daughter from getting pregnant?” Does anyone think it wouldn’t have played out that way?
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But hey, I just never get tired of listening to the right declaring that it’s not about racism and how mean the media is to Palin.
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There are at least two books that apparently take the whole Trig thing at least semi-seriously coming out soon.
Depends on what you mean by serious traction. It never went away. the Wonkette website was able to do a story where they brought it up and managed to also insult the poor kid for having Downs Syndrome AND accuse Palin’s husband of incest and none of its readers seemed to be confused about what they were talking about. They DID wonder what the hëll they were thinking (which, I’m guessing, is probably something along the lines of “Gee, I wish we had those advertisers back.”)
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And of course the widely read Andrew Sullivan has been beating this story like a rented mule for years now.
mike, there are also books based on the premise that every stone monolith of the ancient world was raised by alien visitors (who inexplicably left no other sign of their presence – not so much as an otherworldly Kleenex or Coke bottle). There are at least three television series based on the idea of hunting ghosts.
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This doesn’t mean that any sizable fraction of the electorate believes in Ancient Astronauts, or calls the Ghostbusters every time their house creaks.
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I’m sure someone has already formulated this as a basic law, but no matter how stupid an idea is, you’ll find someone who wholeheartedly believes in its truth. Heck, there are still Flat Earthers out there! The mere fact that somebody is publishing a book based on the silly premise that Trig Palin’s parentage is other than that declared by legal documents doesn’t mean that this is driving any significant portion of any political party.
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OTOH, the “issue” of Obama’s citizenship has been red meat to the Tea Party since its inception – they were supposed to be all about taxation and government spending, but since the 2008 elections, I’ve been seeing signs at their rallies questioning the matter.
In fairness to the Trig-ers, the entire Trig brouhaha came about because Palin provided an utterly incredible story surrounding her pregnancy and birth of Trig.
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The question Andrew Sullivan and other Trig-ers should be asking isn’t “Where is the proof that Sarah Palin is Trig’s mother?”, but rather “Why did Sarah Palin bûllšhìŧ about Trig’s birth?”
Even if Trig’s birth is somehow suspect, the question is “Why should we care?” This is a Clinton bløwjøb kind of issue.
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I agree that family value policitians should have their personal lives examined more throughly than other politicians. It’s only fair.
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But here, in the worst-case scenario, we have a mother lying to protect her kid’s reputation. And hurting no one in the process. Why is that a bad thing?
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Yeah, I know that lots of Republicans would go for the throat if there were anything suspect about Obama’s family life. But it’s sad if Liberals start to emulate this.
For me, it’s a potential concern because if Palin wasn’t bûllšhìŧìņg about the circumstances surrounding Trig’s birth and things went as she said they did, then she demonstrated a shocking lack of judgement by endangering her already high-risk pregnancy.
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Aaaaannnnnddddd….
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The nutcases continue the drumbeat. One of the latest World Net Daily headlines up right now?
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“BORN IN THE USA?
Authors: Even Hawaii birth won’t make Obama eligible”
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http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=292205
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So what if he was born in America (“if the document is even authentic”) after all? He’s still not eligible to legally be POTUS because, I don’t know, the moon wasn’t visible through the cloud coverage last night.
ROFL. According to that ‘story’, Obama still isn’t eligible because his father wasn’t a US citizen.
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Shall we count the US presidents that this would also apply to? Nobody should be shocked if there’s another 1st Generation US citizen President after the batch that came from the Founding Fathers.
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Now, I know some (mostly on the Right) want to throw out the whole born in the US = automatic US citizen, but this stuff in that link is truly breaking new absurdity ground here.
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“Now, I know some (mostly on the Right) want to throw out the whole born in the US = automatic US citizen, but this stuff in that link is truly breaking new absurdity ground here.”
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They’re still idiots. His mother was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth. He was born in the U.S. to a mother who was a U.S. citizen. End of story.
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And they’re doubling down.
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“Yesterday, Barack Obama blinked – releasing birth records he has hired lawyers to prevent the public from seeing, even at the expense of allowing U.S. Army Lt. Col. Terrence Lakin to be court-martialed and sent to prison for having dared ask questions the White House until now has resolutely dismissed with ridicule and distain.
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A key problem for Obama is that birth certificates issued to twin girls born one day later at Kapi’olani hospital, the Nordykes, are the Rosetta Stone of deciphering both Obama’s previously released short-form Certification of Live Birth and the newly released purported copy of his long-form birth certificate.
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Before yesterday, Obama may have attempted to explain away problems with the short-form Certification of Live Birth as the work of his supporters.
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Before yesterday, the president largely remained above the fray. Now, he has fully engaged in the presentation and defense of his birth records and his status as a “natural born citizen” under Article 2, Section 1 of the Constitution.
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Obama’s presidency now depends upon the White House being able to support the veracity of all the information contained in the birth document released yesterday morning.
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In the final analysis, proof that the document is an authentic Obama birth record will await forensic examination.”
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http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=292457
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They just cannot let it go. It’s their life and their scam at this point and they’re just too deeply invested in it.
Jerry, I’m not a doctor (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express over the weekend), but for your mental well being I suggest that you STOP visiting that website.
“Shall we count the US presidents that this would also apply to? Nobody should be shocked if there’s another 1st Generation US citizen President after the batch that came from the Founding Fathers.”
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Actually, Obama will be the seventh man sworn in as POTUS who is a first gen American child with one or both parents not being born or/citizens when he was born. The others were –
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Thomas Jefferson (English mother)
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Andrew Jackson (Scots-Irish parents emigrated from Northern Ireland);
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James Buchanan (Irish father)
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Chester Arthur (Irish father)
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Woodrow Wilson (Scottish mother)
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Herbert Hoover (English-Irish mother).
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Take a close look at Jackson. Neither of his parents were born here. This BS that they’re already trying to push now that the certificate issue just reared back and kicked them in the nads is almost dumber than the garbage that they’ve been peddling for the last two years.
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“Jerry, I’m not a doctor (but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express over the weekend), but for your mental well being I suggest that you STOP visiting that website.”
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But… but… but… Craig… It’s comedy gold week there. They are literally flying apart at the seems and desperately trying to give mouth to mouth resuscitation to a dead horse that’s already turning necrotic. And what’s even funnier than their attempts to save their favorite boogeyman (and cash cow) is their websites comments section!
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Yes, the pipers are still playing and the mouth breathers are still dancing like mad.
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And, Craig, the Tea Party is a laugh a minute right now…
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http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/04/tea-party-nation-hold-your-horses—-weve-got-some-other-questions-about-obamas-eligibility.php
It’s comedy gold week there.
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I guess I stopped laughing long ago. At least all this stuff has gone and disproved ‘intelligent design’ once and for all.
Actually, there’s a chance that he would not have been eligible to inherit citizenship through his mother, was she a citizen or was she not – you don’t get to be a citizen through your parents if they’ve continuously been abroad more than a certain numbers of years (ten?) before your birth.
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OTOH, being born in the US trumps anything like that.
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I think the real reason that the right is so up in arms about “anchor babies” is the thought that one of those “anchor babies” might someday be elected President…
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You’ve gotta love it.
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If Obama treats the stupidity as something beneath him and not worthy of response, the cry from parts of the Republican Party is that he’s hiding something or that he needs to respond to his critics. Obama doesn’t respond to the mouth breathers and focuses on other things all of this time now while the Republicans in various states have been wasting the tax payers time by drafting legislation related to Birther conspiracies.
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So, Obama spends less than a single morning’s time saying here it is and shut up now and it’s Obama that’s distracting us from the real political issues.
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[Emphasis in the last sentence is mine.]
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http://www.gop.com/index.php/news/comments/rnc_chairman_priebus_statement_on_president_obamas_remarks
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WASHINGTON – Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Reince Priebus released the following statement today regarding President Obama’s remarks this morning:
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“As I’ve repeatedly stated, this issue is a distraction. Our economy is strained from out of control deficits, debt, and unsustainable entitlements. The President ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy, working with Republicans and focusing on the long term sustainability of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority – our economy.”
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Wow. Who needs comedy shows on TV when you have real life comedy like this?
Cantor is also doubling down on the chutzpah:
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Eric Cantor is from my state. I’ve met the man. I wouldn’t depend on him being honest even if there was only 5 cents riding on it.
My deepest sympathies.
You know, Our Presidents mother was only 1 year away from being allowed to have a child out of the country and the child would be a United States citizen. I dont have the exact wording in front of me but a citizen of the United states, who has been a citizen for at least 10 years with at least 5 of those years after the age of 14 can give birth out of the country but still have the child retain citizenship. The presidents mother was 18 at the time of his birth. I think the limit is now 5 years with at least 2 of those after the age of 14.
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Could you imagine what this would be like if that had happened. Explain that to a birther and watch their heads explode.
But, even if he was a citizen through his mother, but not born in the US, under the accepted meaning of the term “native born” he wouldn’t be eligible.
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That’s why whether he was born in Hawaii or not is more important than whether he is really a citizen or not.
Obama rarely blinks and remains cool blooded under pressure. Until he submits to a skin tearing, we can only assume he’s a Visitor.
I heard he was a giant chicken!
Boo-rack Obama.
“Obama-boo, what’s the matter with you?
You don’t look like the other Presidents do,
You wear a disguise to look like American guys,
But you’re not a Yank, you’re Obama-boo!”
Talk about your obscure, dated geek references, right?
I have a response for any of the birthers, if I should have the misfortune to come face to face with one. Explain in the simplest terms how the evidence presented shows Obama to be anything but an American. Next, show me how, even if by some chance they COULD disprove his citizenship, how does that mean that they, the birther, would suddenly get his job. That seems to be where the birthers want to be. “He’s not an American, I am, so I GET TO BE PRESIDENT!” I’d then ask them some other questions. Is this going to suddenly turn my apartment into the house I’ve wanted for ten years? Is it going to solve any of my problems? No? Then shut the hëll up.
I dunno…if I came face to face with a birther, I think I’d just smile, nod, and walk the other way. The last couple of years have really been a test of the notion that all problems can be solved through mature discourse; I mean, what do you do when a lot of your opponents are immune to reason and logic? When they actually seem to celebrate ignorance and closeed-minded bigotry?
From a comment posted on TalkingPointsMemo.com:
Mad as hëll and not gonna take it any more, eh?
Now now, Mike and TPM commenter: Bill says race isn’t a factor and according to him that’s a fact.
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So apparently we can dispel that kind of nonsense… even though there’s nothing else to explain why Obama being the half-black son of a Kenyan Muslim who spent some time growing up in Indonesia has anything to do with anything.
Wha wah wah. Never said that race is not a factor, though that WOULD be an easy argument to argue against, so I can see the appeal in saying so. Of course there are people who will never vote for a black man. There are also people who will vote for Obama no matter what he does for the same reason. Does anyone expect his approval among African Americans to ever fall to the lows we see among whites, Hispanics, etc?
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What IS a fact, as far as I can see, and you have not attempted to refute, is that your claim that no candidate has ever been “questioned on these kinds of issues in the past.” is inaccurate. I didn’t call it a lie. I didn’t accuse you of spreading false information because of some base motive. See how that works?
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I gave examples, facts. Luigi did the same. Neither of us has taken race off the table. But if you are going to accuse people of racism–a pretty poisonous charge in our society–you ought to have more than feelings, hunches and opinions to back it up, lest you find yourself lumped in with those tiresome people who use the word so carelessly. Hard to take the charge seriously when Hillary went from being a racist making racist charges and racist code words to suddenly being ok for secretary of state. What, she reformed overnight? Or was it just a useful charge at the time, no harm intended?
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Bill, you have dismissed race as a factor behind the birthers in the past. And yes, you have tried to argue against in the past, and I don’t know why you bother. While I don’t think Voter X is out and out racist toward Obama by thinking there is some validity to the birther crap, the people who truly push this kind of nonsense and created the conspiracy in the first place certainly are.
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My point about those questioned in the past is that the scrutiny was minor at best. Like I pointed out with Kennedy: it was brought up, it was put to rest. It certainly wasn’t dragged on and on for years on end as some grand conspiracy, nor was it for any of these other presidents.
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The scrutiny against Obama is entirely unprecedented. There is nothing off-limits; indeed, for many of these zealots, it’s all tied together: race, religion, education, birthplace. As we’re seeing, now Obama’s ‘real’ birth certificate isn’t good enough, now they need MORE information that will just in turn cause them to see out other nonsense.
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Fact: there is no real comparison to the stupidity that Obama has had to put up with.
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“My point about those questioned in the past is that the scrutiny was minor at best. Like I pointed out with Kennedy: it was brought up, it was put to rest. It certainly wasn’t dragged on and on for years on end as some grand conspiracy, nor was it for any of these other presidents.”
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Yeah, well… Kennedy didn’t make it through two full years as POTUS either, so what may or may not have come from some of his critics running up to re-election is kinda hard to call.
That is true, Jerry, but I’m not sure it’s relevant: Kennedy was still in office longer – about 2 years, 11 months – than Obama has been so far. Granted, Kennedy was assassinated, and thus most if not all conspiracies surround his death.
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But, for example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it suggested that the Pope had something to do with the assassination (and Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on the various theories). After all, Kennedy was supposed to be a puppet to the Vatican. Hëll, it has a bit more logic to it than many of the other Kennedy assassination theories. 😉
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“That is true, Jerry, but I’m not sure it’s relevant: Kennedy was still in office longer – about 2 years, 11 months – than Obama has been so far. Granted, Kennedy was assassinated, and thus most if not all conspiracies surround his death.”
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Uhm… Craig…
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JFK was sworn in on January 20, 1961.
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JFK was assassinated on November 22, 1963.
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Check your math.
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Chopped a bit off…
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Check your math. It’s closer to two years and ten months. The holes in your plot theories are hard to keep up with. Falling apart in the details already.
Bill, you have dismissed race as a factor behind the birthers in the past.
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Please show me where i did so. I’ll apologize. I try to be careful not to make such broad statements about things I can not possibly be certain of but perhaps I slipped up. I’d like a little confirmation though. I still think most of the opposition to Obama is that he is a liberal democrat. I’m not even sure I would say is more hated than Clinton was. But I certainly can’t say that there is no racial animosity toward him at all.
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My point about those questioned in the past is that the scrutiny was minor at best. Like I pointed out with Kennedy: it was brought up, it was put to rest. It certainly wasn’t dragged on and on for years on end as some grand conspiracy, nor was it for any of these other presidents.
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I took your point as it was stated–““I don’t recall any other candidate being questioned on these kinds of issues in the past.”. Having now moved the goalposts i can now unreservedly agree with you– Chester A Arthur never had to answer an endless stream of charges from the Huffington Post and Rush Limbaugh was suspiciously silent over Barry Goldwater’s candidacy.
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Sorry but I find the tendency we modern Americans have to see everything we experience as unprecedented just at odds with the facts. When someone claims that Obama has faced unprecedented crisis’ like no other man…c’mon. If FDR had experienced the worst day Obama’s had in office he probably would have gotten off his wheelchair and done a dance. There’s a man who had talk radio opponents that make Rush Limbaugh look like Mr Rogers.
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Any president from either party is going to face lots of nasty emails, crude cartoons, rude flash animation, loony tunes conspiracy buffs, etc etc. They will also have rabid fans who will paint any criticism, no matter what the motivations, as being inspired by the worst motives imaginable. I’m surprised nobody is accusing DC of racism–Superman’s been an American citizen for over 50 years now and suddenly he renounces it in the middle of the presidency of a Black man??? Hey, you don’t need to paint me a picture!
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Argue against stupid arguments with intelligence. Counter invalid feelings with concrete facts. When someone says “Obama is a white hating secret Muslim.” and you counter with “You are a black hating racist.” as far as I’m concerned you are both arguing from total grounds of weakness. You are almost certainly correct in your assessment but that just makes you the best poo-flinger in the zoo.
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And in some ways it’s worse than that because, despite my apparent long history of denying racism, I have personal reasons for not wanting to see that particular perversion of thought swept away as just another cheap political insult. Travis Smiley was on TV claiming that he knows the 2012 election will be “The Most Racist” election “in the history of this Republic”.
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he has no idea who the republican nominee will be. He can’t be sure what the dominant issues will be, or where the economy will be or how many wars we will be in and whether we will be winning any of them. But by golly he knows that. And he’s known it for a year!
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So suppose Trump wins and engages in snarly race baiting crap–when he’s called on it he will be able to correctly point out that hey, this is just the pro Obama pundits making up stuff to fit their predictions. And I guarantee that Mr Smiley WILL claim to be proven right, even if the republican handles Obama with kid gloves (an unrealistic expectation). They will find internet comments. or a face in the corwd, or something to justify the claim. All of which won’t matter since it will be hard to ever have the most racist campaign ever when we have a history that includes people like Woodrow Wilson. and when he says this election will be the “the most divisive”…does he really think we are heading toward a civil war? Is that a fear or a threat?
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This country has enough crazy to go around. Don’t be a part of it. (the crazy,I mean, not the country.)
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“This country has enough crazy to go around. Don’t be a part of it. “
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Oh, so now you’re claiming that Craig wasn’t born here?!? Will the madness never end?
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Then again, who cares? They really only had one hit in this country anyhow.
Ðámņ, Jerry, if not for that follow up post I would think I was going insane myself. And with work being so bloody stressful the instant I come back from a vacation, it probably wouldn’t take much. 😉
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And Bill, I’ll have to dig through the archives, but I’ll honestly say I can’t guarantee that I’ll find the posts in question. I know for certain though that we’ve gone rounds on this before, which is why I didn’t want to do it again. Pretty much everything has already been said time and again.
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When someone claims that Obama has faced unprecedented crisis’ like no other man…c’mon.
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Are you really going to argue that this in dispute, that what Obama has faced regarding his citizenship (and everything surrounding it) has been seen at this level before?
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It doesn’t matter to me whether the internet or tv or radio existed in the past. On the flip side, I’m sure there are things that were given far more attention in times past than were deserved, yet would quickly be dismissed today. Somebody above mentioned Watergate, which is a great example of how, if it happened again, would probably turn out differently (considering some of what Bush II did, some would say we’ve already seen it).
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Travis Smiley was on TV claiming that he knows the 2012 election will be “The Most Racist” election “in the history of this Republic”.
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And considering how much effort was put into trying to make Obama out to be some Muslim terrorist sympathizer – another aspect of this that is rooted in bigotry and hatred – I fear he may turn out right. The birthers aren’t going away, and it was pretty bad the last election. I think it’s fair to say that it may get worse next year.
Not only has Obama not been treated worse than any president, he hasn’t been treated worse than the last two presidents.
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I mean, look at this birther nonsense. Even if it were true (which is isn’t) it would hardly be a real slur against him. HE had no control over his birth. Worse case scenario it tuns out his parents kept a truth from him. Big flippin deal. The courts would almost certainly determine that this was not grounds for making Joe Biden the president. If there is a God in heaven.
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or he’s secretly a Muslim…not illegal and understandable given the prejudice. Not even close to an impeachable offense. Meanwhile, lots of liberal pundits claim he is actually an atheist but is too gutless to admit it. Wow. With friends like that…
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meanwhile Clinton and Bush were accused of drug abuse, complicit in murder, fathering out of wedlock kids, war crimes, etc etc. Some off the top of my head:
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Clinton ran drugs out of some Arkansas airport and had Vince Foster murdered. Or covered up the murder. Also, Foster was Chelsea’s dad. He raped a woman and assaulted another. You know, I’d gladly trade “My birth certificate was forged” for any of those.
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Bush had hidden ear pieces for debates. he passed out drunk or coked out or both and blamed it on a pretzel! he made a girl pregnant and made her get an abortion but it got hushed up so there’s no evidence. A legitimate news organization rushed a story based on apparently faked papers to discredit him. Fake Nostradamus predictions and bogus Shakespearean quotes were solemnly passed to us from such minds as Barbara Streisand, all of which earily predicted the coming of Bush! There was a secret plan to start the draft up! We’d already captured Osama Bin Laden and were waiting to announce it for maximum impact on the 2002…I mean 2004…no, it was 2006…I mean for the 2008 elections…ok, I guess we still have him.
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Every election brought predictions that some bogus terrorist attack would be done to ensure victory. To finish the “coup” tat began on 9/11. But that should come naturally to a guy who claims that the constitution was just a piece of paper, a quote widely reported but with no evidence. All part of the shadow government. Oh, and Cheney was the actual puppetmaster.
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Bush was going to suspend election in 2004…um, 2008. (Clinton got accused of this as well–no WAY he was going to leave in 2000! No way!)
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When gas prices went up it was because Bush was making them go up–to help his oil buddies get rich! (Apparently he was an underachiever compared to how well Obama is helping them out now…though, oddly, I haven’t heard that. Apparently exposure to gold kryptonite has robbed the oval office of it’s ability and responsibility for high prices at the pump.)
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Also, Bush’s family helped Hitler get to power.
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Every time some stupid news bit gripped the nation–Scott Peterson, American Idol, whatever–it was said to be manufactured by the administration to distract us from the loss of our civil liberties (said loss being those policies that Obama has largely kept intact or even expanded.)
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And of course, he was in on the controlled demolition of the twin towers. I mean, duh.
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And OBAMA thinks he’s had it rough??? Boo freaking hoo. If he’s going to let a reality show host get under his skin he should step aside and let Hillary run in 2012.
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Take your pick, Bill: are we discussing why these idiots don’t think Obama is a citizen, or are we talking about all the bad things that can happen to a president during their time in charge?
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Since I was talking about the former, and now you’re only interested in dragging out the latter, I’d say you’ve sufficiently moved the goal posts yourself that I’m not going to bother any longer.
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“And OBAMA thinks he’s had it rough??? Boo freaking hoo. If he’s going to let a reality show host get under his skin he should step aside and let Hillary run in 2012.”
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I’m not sure this was a matter of letting it “get under his skin” this time. He raised the valid point that this was becoming a huge distraction and that’s backed somewhat by the fact that it has been getting more media attention than usual due to Trump and further that recent polls showed that since the start of the Trump inflamed Birtherism you have more people believing it or at least claiming that they do.
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It may have been based on exactly what the White House says it was based on. They ignored the stupid before and it started going away. This time it came back even bigger and they acted to neutralize it.
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Or, yeah, it may have just been irritating him.
“When gas prices went up it was because Bush was making them go up–to help his oil buddies get rich! (Apparently he was an underachiever compared to how well Obama is helping them out now…though, oddly, I haven’t heard that. Apparently exposure to gold kryptonite has robbed the oval office of it’s ability and responsibility for high prices at the pump.)
“
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I can’t count how many websites I’ve been on that hasn’t included an accusation that Obama is directly responsible for the prices at the pump. Usually “quoting” his comment that prices on fossil fuels need to rise so that it becomes economic to invest in renewable fuels. Of course, they usually cut off that last bit and just claim he wants oil prices to go up.
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I can, however, count how many websites I’ve been on in the last month that hasn’t made that claim. This one, Comics Should Be Good, my banking and bill pay site, and most but not all of the webcomics I read.
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Every news site, every social networking site, every media site has someone or many someones making that claim.
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Theno
You’re correct Theno. I’ve seen plenty of places claiming that Obama is to blame for high gas prices but not that he is doing so to line the pockets of his friends and supporters. So I guess he’s being accused of incompetence as opposed to corruption. Hmmm. That’s actually a tough choice, would not particularly want to be accused of either…call it a wash.
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Take your pick, Bill: are we discussing why these idiots don’t think Obama is a citizen, or are we talking about all the bad things that can happen to a president during their time in charge?
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Since I was talking about the former, and now you’re only interested in dragging out the latter, I’d say you’ve sufficiently moved the goal posts yourself that I’m not going to bother any longer.
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How is responding to your statements “The scrutiny against Obama is entirely unprecedented. There is nothing off-limits;” and “Fact: there is no real comparison to the stupidity that Obama has had to put up with.” and “Are you really going to argue that this in dispute, that what Obama has faced regarding his citizenship (and everything surrounding it) has been seen at this level before?” moving the goalposts? I didn’t put those words in your mouth…er, keyboard. I don;t expect anything I write here to be off limits to disagreement, neither should you. Once you put it out there it’s fair game.
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“You’re correct Theno. I’ve seen plenty of places claiming that Obama is to blame for high gas prices but not that he is doing so to line the pockets of his friends and supporters. So I guess he’s being accused of incompetence as opposed to corruption.”
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No, he’s being accused of doing it to break the system, destroy capitalism and fundamentally change America into a socialist/communist dictatorship.
Once you put it out there it’s fair game.
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The Bill Mulligan Disclaimer, which I apparently need to include with further posts:
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“At no point in my posts have my comments moved beyond the realm of discussing Obama’s citizenship, Obama’s citizenship, or Obama’s citizenship.
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Any attempt by responders to drag the discussion off into matters such as wars, bj’s, taxes, arms deals, hostages or anything else any other president has had to deal with – beyond the realm of said president’s citizenship – is done so in an attempt to drive the discussion in who-gives-a-crap tangents.”
“Stay on target!”
Unlike the other two presidents, Obama actually proved that the claim against him was false and had it debunked multiple times by independent sources. Yet not only didn’t the bûllšhìŧ not let up, it increased in volume, aided by wink-and-nudge agreement of high profile rightwingers. Clinton and Bush didn’t have ideological opponents of real stature give tacit credence to the Vince Foster or Truther theories the same way Obama had in pretty much the entire right wing hierarchy suggest that birtherism had legitmacy.
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What is more, in no small part to the Obama is a foreigner/un-American/radical/communist/et al. bûllšhìŧ that the birther idiocy helped feed and fan, Obama is facing an unprecedented level of opposition for even the most perfunctory of things. Bush might have had a few crank theories thrown his way, but they never fed into a hysteria that stymied his legislative initiatives.
So let me get this straight: You’re mocking Obama because the GOP couldn’t stand up to the kooks that make up their base and denounce birtherism as lunacy, allowing Trump to become the Republican frontrunner by embracing the stupid? If the GOP can’t talk sense into their party, don’t blame Obama for trying to do it their job for them. Frankly, I’m in awe of the superhuman level of calm and tolerance he’s shown these idiots.
I figured it out. I know what the problem is.
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It’s not about his birth certificate (gøddámņ bigots that the Birthers are…)
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Obama is always so cool and calm, and unemotional. And his posture is tall and upright… and a touch stiff…
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And no one has ever seen him eat a hot dog or a hamburger…
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Because Barack Obama is a ZOMBIE! That’s right! The Living Dead are running this country!!!
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(Which some people contend started with Reagan and Bush 41, but never mind that now…)
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Luckily for the president, zombies are very popular right now. The only way he could be more popular is if he were a vampire. Has anyone seen Obama in the sunlight lately…?
He waved at cameras as he and his wife were boarding AF1 yesterday, or the day before. And, so far as I could tell, he didn’t sparkle. So, it is all OK.
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Theno
Peter David: I’m sure you can clock with an egg-timer how long you’ll see the following two talking points…
Luigi Novi: Not that I disagree, but up until now, they’ve been exploiting the notion that there was something further he could’ve done to quell their “concerns”, and at least now, I think he can argue that there no longer is.
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Peter David: There are people on the fence? Wow.
Luigi Novi: Pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical ideas always attract both hardcore adherents and fence sitters.
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Mike Weber: The Donald [says] he “just heard” that Obama only got into Ivy League schools because there was a quota for under-privileged (and -performing, apparently) foreign students.
Luigi Novi: Perhaps Obama should tell Trump that he got in because he a relative on the school’s admissions board. Seems to be an acceptable criterion for Trump’s three kids…
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Jonathan: Guy’s either an idiot, or has balls of solid granite.
Luigi Novi: He’s just devoid of taste, class or character. Putting aside any of the numerous bits of evidence of this that he has provided over the decades, consider this:
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When Miss USA Tara Conner was discovered to have a cocaine problem, Trump, who owns that pageant, publicly announced that rather than remove her crown, she would be given another chance by entering a rehab center. This of course, is perfectly reasonable.
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Rosie O’Donnell, however, seized on the event to question for “acting as a moral compass for 20-year-olds”. Now while O’Donnell could’ve legitimately criticized Trump for any number of things he had said or done up until that point, this was an odd choice of hers, because to me, it would seem that giving someone a second chance is the right thing to do. What precisely did O’Donnell think Trump should’ve done instead? Can her by taking her crown? If anything, would’ve that have carried with it a greater sense of judgment on Trump’s part, for which the “moral compass” remark would’ve been more apt? He could’ve shown class and dignity by merely pointing this out, and making O’Donnell look bad. Instead, what did he say?
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O’Donnell is fat and unattractive.
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I’m going to steal her wife away from her.
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She’s a “loser” because her talk show and magazine failed.
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When you consider that he had the high ground, and lost it because he decided to respond with personal comments evocative of a grade school put-down contest, I think this is fairly emblematic of his personality.
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Gary64: Well, think of it this way. Obama is the only presidential candidate in history who has been asked to prove his citizenship. The only one.
Luigi Novi: Actually, Chester A. Arthur, Christopher Schürmann, Barry Goldwater, George Romney, Lowell Weicker and John McCain were all questioned about their citizenship.
Oh, and Charles Evans Hughes.
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Btw, when I referenced Trump’s kids above, I was referring to the Trump organization, and not schools.
That’s the main reason why trump will never be elected anything. He is a snarling bully. Now, there may be a certain pleasure some see in watching a bully torment someone you don’t like but few would want to see him elevated to a position where he would have power over everyone.
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Saw an interview where he was asked aboyt Romney and the gist of his reply was that Romney was inferior to him because he (Trump) had more money. Everybody who disagrees with him is “a loser”. Can you imagine this guy in an actual campaign? Obama is thin skinned but he’s an armor plated rhinoceros/triceratops hybrid compared to trump.
Yeah, I remember seeing that news story. I’m a better candidate because my net worth is greater than his. I couldn’t believe he actually said that. He actually thinks that his wealth makes him better than other people. I used to think that people only believed such things unconsciously. He actually comes out and says it.
How many Birthers are also creationist and 9-11 conspiracy nuts?
It’s a given they are mostly Tea Baggers.
Last night on “Last Word”, O’Donnell brought Orly Tates on to see if she would apologize to the President for all the nonsense it seems she started. Once on camera, she tried to get the cameraguy to focus on Obama’s selective service document, claiming he was a liar. She wouldn’t comment on the birth certificate, and O’Donnell wouldn’t let her continue, and ended the segment.
And the song just plays on…..
I’m left wondering why such a document would have layers in the first place…
When you scan a file and make a pdf this is likely to occur. Check out this article at the national review:http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/265767/pdf-layers-obamas-birth-certificate-nathan-goulding.
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These are not like photoshop layers. Nothing to see here.
Unfortunately, this just means that programmers were in on the conspiracy as well.
Ðámņ!
I can make a pdf file of a single document right now and it won’t have layers if I take it into Adobe Illustrator. The anomalies on this White House document just don’t make sense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3g30VCl_cgk
Ahh, looks like our temporary resident birther is back.
I honestly think this pdf file is a game changer on this subject. If it was intended to end the birther issue, it’s failed to do so by being such an obviously suspicious file. Knowledgeable people who are actually looking at the file are left wondering why it is the way it is. It’s upsetting to me because I really did want this subject out of the way so that Obama’s leadership flaws could be discussed in the blogosphere instead.
Yup. He bypassed ten non-political threads and jumped on this one. What were the odds?
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PAD
Well, you ARE the Michael Moore of comics, Peter…
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Darin
April 28, 2011 at 11:46 am
Well, you ARE the Michael Moore of comics, Peter…
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And you are the same clown that whined this statement in another thread –
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Darin
April 15, 2011 at 9:04 am
“Right, because God forbid you should swing by because you’re a fan of my work.”
Maybe if more of your threads here pertained to your work, I’d be talking more about that. I’m not going to start talking about the Hulk and Star Trek right in the middle of a discussion about Kyl, Planned Parenthood and abortion.
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And then followed that up in the same thread with this lie.
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Darin
April 15, 2011 at 10:32 am
Every time I do visit, which is more often than when I actually contribute, the top thread is one of a political nature. I can only calls them as I sees them, folks.
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Yet you bypass most every chance to discuss Peter’s work at every opportunity and jump into threads discussing politics to add your own special brand of stupidity.
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So, are you a liar, a troll or a just drooling idiot?
So, are you a liar, a troll or a just drooling idiot?
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I’m a liberal, so I’m voting for each of the above. 😉
I see the complaint that I don’t do enough posting in Peter’s non-political threads as a non-issue, sometimes brought up merely to come up with some sort of reply to my posts.
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“”
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Whereas most everyone else sees your prior statements/complaints about the ratio of political threads to nonpolitical threads found here and your comments that you would post about Peter’s work if only etc., etc., etc. VS your actual actions and posting habits as a sign that you’re either a liar, a troll or an idiot.
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Add in the three posts you made before you went on your last retarded posting frenzy –
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Darin
March 30, 2011 at 2:49 pm
It doesn’t matter if the Left thinks it’s worn out and cliché. These facts are not subject to their judgement.
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Darin
March 30, 2011 at 2:51 pm
I think you guys need to hear/read more of this, in fact.
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Darin
March 30, 2011 at 3:10 pm
Oh, that cinches it. You guys NEED me here. You need my guidance. How can I turn my back on you now?
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– pretty much clenches the troll and idiot options as a lock in most people’s books. Liar is still open for debate, but that’s only if people want to be charitable and give you the benefit of the doubt that you simply didn’t care if you had your facts straight when you went made your claims that there somehow wasn’t very many threads here related to Peter’s works and that every time you came to the blog the thread at the top of the page was always a political one (a claim that was a blatant lie when you posted it as the top thread was not a political thread that morning.) But then, if we give you that benefit of the doubt, it pretty much backs the idea of you being such a massively drooling idiot that you’ll post as “facts” things that can be disputed simply by opening one’s eyes.
Right. National Review is part of the big conspiracy.
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Let’s be rational. Think about how nuts this scenario is. Why would his parents fake the date or place of his birth? The only thing it MIGHT effect is his eligibility for the presidency. So what, they knew even then that this poor biracial kid was going to become president? And they got all these people to go along with the scam?
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All for nothing–if it turned out tomorrow that Obama was born in another country he would still be the president of the United States. “Naturalized Citizen” is vague enough for wiggle room. So this whole thing is nuts AND pointless–truly a merging of content and form.
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I blame Dan Rather. His dopey faked papers were easily debunked by amateur bloggers and now EVERYBODY thinks they can be part of The Story Of The Year
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http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/265767/pdf-layers-obamas-birth-certificate-nathan-goulding
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…
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UPDATE: “I’ve confirmed that scanning an image, converting it to a PDF, optimizing that PDF, and then opening it up in Illustrator, does in fact create layers similar to what is seen in the birth certificate PDF. You can try it yourself at home.”
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UPDATE II: “For those of you who still aren’t convinced, here’s a one-page PDF that I just scanned and optimized, so you can see for yourself that an optimized PDF shows up in Illustrator as layers. (I didn’t spend hours getting the settings right.)”
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…
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So, seriously, at what point to you finally realize that embracing the stupidity just makes you look like a clown and finally embrace reality?
Well I’m impressed. It took Darin around a day to reply to this.
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I had my bets on the first five hours, but hey, I was never good at odds.
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TAC
Darin: I see the complaint that I don’t do enough posting in Peter’s non-political threads as a non-issue, sometimes brought up merely to come up with some sort of reply to my posts.
Luigi Novi: It was a not complaint. It a response to your statement that every time you come here, the top thread is a political one. The point being made is that plenty of threads lately were non-political in content, yet you didn’t post on any of those. The point, therefore, serves to refute your statement, and not to make a “complaint”.
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The fact that you attempt to dismiss this point ad hominem does not serve to falsify it.
A man at in a psychiatric ward claims he is actually a ghost.
The therapist cannot get through to him and finally asks;
“Do ghosts bleed?”
The man says “No, they don’t”
The therapist picks up a needle and stabs the man, drawing blood.
The therapist says “Do you see now?”
The man says “Yes, I guess ghosts do bleed.”
Cognitive dissonance. It’s such a useful concept.
Also, there’s a pretty scary precedent here as well. Back when John Kerry was running, the Swift Boat folks began a smear campaign that he hadn’t really earned his medals, he wasn’t *really* a military man despite, well, serving in combat, his anti-war protests meant he hated America, etc. Kerry thought these attacks were ridiculous and beneath him, and after a brief statement he took the high road and basically ignored them. But the charges were repeated and not refuted so many times, they gained a lot of traction. As PAD observed many times, if you repeat a lie often enough folks start to believe it’s true.
BTW, one of the Swift Boat folks has a book coming out on the illegitimacy of Obama and his “foreign” birth. No word yet if the subtitle “Show Us The Birth Certificate” will be changed in light of, well, Obama showing us the birth certificate.
I think the scary precedent here is instead the fact that a president can flaunt a Constitutional requirement so flagrantly with so many people (in and out of the media) willing to look the other way and not actually verify anything.
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Darin : “I think the scary precedent here is instead the fact that a president can flaunt a Constitutional requirement so flagrantly with so many people (in and out of the media) willing to look the other way and not actually verify anything.”
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And if he had done such a thing you might have a point other than the one on the top of your head. However, when the issue was raised he provided all the required materials to the federal elections officials and he had the office of the Governor of Hawaii vouching for the legitimacy of his birth record. That was a Governor by the way who was a Republican governor and the head of the McCain campaign in Hawaii.
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The only people making statements like yours are people using the claims to make money or get ratings or political support, media or blog trolls or drooling idiots.
The only people making statements like yours are people using the claims to make money or get ratings or political support, media or blog trolls or drooling idiots.
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I see no reason to treat such foolishness with respect.
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It’s akin to treating creationism with respect.
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Sorry. No.
Indeed. How dare Obama (whose American citizenship bonifides were established for *decades*) not suddenly jump through hoops to reconfirm his citizenship status when a bunch of loud idiots demand it? Shameful.
I can go down to my local courthouse and obtain a copy of my long form birth certificate with relative ease. Obama, for some inexplicable reason, was not able to do so for over 2 years. When his short form was produced during the campaign, the liberal group-think was that the short form was in fact the birth certificate and the only birth certificate and if you didn’t believe that, you were a conspiracy nut. Then, yesterday, they miraculously produced the long form birth certificate. We’re apparently supposed to forget that there wasn’t, according to the hive mind, supposed to be a long form in the first place. Now there are clear and obvious flaws in the pdf file that the White House produced and we’re being told by the same folks that if you find any problem at all with the file, you’re a kook. I think I’ll wait and see what is revealed next.
I think I’ll wait and see what is revealed next.
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It really wouldn’t matter, which is kind of the point. He could produce time-stamped video tape of the live birth with the doctor saying, “Congratulations, Mrs. Obama,” and the family of the doctor (deceased in 2003) could verify that, yes, that’s the doctor, and show pictures of him standing outside the hospital that same day in a time-stamped photo, and guys like you would be giving it the sort of scrutiny typically reserved for the Zapruder film and launching entire websites about how the doctor was actually killed as part of a cover up (in anticipation of Obama eventually running for office), the doctor’s family was bribed for their silence, that there’s no proof the baby in the video is actually the guy in the White House, and the time stamps were all faked.
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PAD
I reject the notion that the birthers would reject any evidence that Obama would put fourth. That’s an intellectually vacant response to legitimate concerns. Obama’s birth certificate issue has been entirely of his own making. I honestly don’t think he’s capable of this level of incompetence. If he didn’t want the issue exacerbated, he would have satisfied the birthers a while ago and it wouldn’t have been hard. Instead, he releases a highly questionable pdf file online, knowing that Adobe experts far and wide exist who can easily find the anomalies.
Intellectually Vacancy, thy name is Darin.
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Your response clearly shows that there’s no chance in Hëll that you’ll be convinced that the long form document is legit, no matter how many independent researchers (that’s INDEPENDENT, not right wing moonbats) declare that it’s not a forgery after examination. Honestly, do the voices in your head ever let up long enough for you to really see hate-filled agenda that’s truly driving this issue, or have you really convinced yourself that you’re just an “objective” questioner without any political bent? Man, I feel sorry for you.
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“I reject the notion that the birthers would reject any evidence that Obama would put fourth.”
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They’re doing it now. If you reject that, then you reject reality and fact.
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Par for the course it seems.
[Sigh] Darin, how long does it take you to weld the scales back onto your eyes?
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That’s because you weren’t born in Hawaii. Obama specifically had to request for a waiver of that state’s rules to acquire a copy of the long-form certificate.
He didn’t request it for over two years because *he didn’t need to*. In fact, he still doesn’t need to — it’s long been established he’s an American citizen.
The Certificate of Live Birth is what the state of Hawaii issues as the official birth certificate. For legal purposes, it *is* the only birth certificate and if you couldn’t accept that, then yes, you were a conspiracy nut. No one denied that a long form existed, they only argued that it was irrelevant with since the COLB was legal proof that Obama was born American.
Obama has gone well beyond what is necessary and had absolutely nothing more to prove. His American citizenship (and thus his eligibility for the presidency) was established *decades* ago via the usual legal protocols. The press scrutinized the issue and rebutted the ludicrous claim of Obama’s noncitizenship multiple times — only for the president to continue to be hounded by what can most charitably be described as vocal purveyors of utter nonsense.
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Yet even now, ridiculous people are blaming *Obama* and asking, “Why did Obama wait so long?” That’s the wrong question.
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The question should be, “Why did/does a large swath of the American populace — virtually all of it conservative and white — believe that Obama was not an American citizen, contrary to all evidence? And why would the GOP and the media humor such people by giving it the veneer of legitimacy, especially since such a ridiculous and easily disproven claim was already debunked over and over again?”
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I find myself identifying with the Onion article “Open-Minded Man Grimly Realizes How Much Life He’s Wasted Listening To Bûllšhìŧ” and I am getting tired of treating idiocy with equanimity. If you *still* insist on subscribing to some stripe of birtherism, Darin, I can only assume you are ye veriest fool, and I will no longer suffer your inanities gladly .
The Republican party accepted the short form birth certificate when Obama was running for office. The Republican Governor of Hawaii confirmed it as legitimate. President Obama was born in Hawaii. He is an American citizen. The idea that this is all a giant lie and conspiracy that much of the GOP is in on as well as the Democrats to get a foreign born man (but not foreign raised!) into the office of the President of the United States is ridiculous.
Occam’s Razor. When given two possible solutions to a problem, the simplest one is usually right. Either President Obama is who he says he is, or there’s a giant conspiracy to undermine the United States by electing to office someone who was born in another country.
The amount of people who would have to be in on this conspiracy is too large to be practical, and there’s nothing to be gained for any one by doing so.
Darin, who benefits from this? The Democratic party would have had an easier time just supporting Hillary than engaging in an elaborate scheme to help cover up the ineligibility of an untested (yet charismatic) Senator. The risks of being caught in this scenario far out weigh the potential benefits, if any.
There isn’t any logic to this. But we can’t use logic to get you out of this belief because you didn’t use logic to get into it. At the core, this boils down to “I don’t want Obama as President (because he’s socialist/black/liberal/SUPERSECRETMUSLIM!) and want to find a way to invalidate the fact that the majority of Americans voted for someone I disagree with.” This is more or less the same tactic that got used against Bush Jr. Save without the very sinister racist tones.
Heck, if it turns out Obama was technically illegible? The odds are high that Biden would just become President instead.
Darin, you seem like an intelligent man, but the idea that there’s a massive conspiracy to hide Obama’s secret birth makes far less sense than him being from Hawaii, and getting increasingly frustrated at people claiming otherwise.
BTW, Darin – the word you want is “flout”, not “flaunt”.
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And he in no way did so – there is no Constitutional requirement of proof of any sort.
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But, of course, from other discussions, i know you are incapable of (or unwilling to) understanding of such matters.
Really? Am I the only person here who’s already shrouded this jáçkášš? He has thoroughly proven in the past that he has absolutely nothing of substance to offer to any debate; his standard debating tactic is ad hominem. Why are you wasting valuable seconds of your life dealing with this person?
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“UPDATED Thursday, 1:23 PM: After seeing some of the nutbar reactions that the birth certificate has launched, I’ve come to believe that if Obama had been delivered via C-section, there are people who would declare that that makes him ineligible to be president because the Constitution says “natural born” and anything except a vaginal birth is not natural.”
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🙂 LOL
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He shoots, he scores!
[like]
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Speaking of nonpolitical threads…
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I was wondering what South Park fan Cowboy Pete thought of the season premier the other night. Since Cowboy Pete is likely not the type of sick freak who would have watched The Human Centipede (First Sequence,) it must have been a very weird viewing experience (even by South Park standards.)
Well, I’d never seen the movie that was being skewered (though I was certainly aware of it) but, upon thinking about it, while the episode was funny enough as you watch it, it really doesn’t hold up to scrutiny if you start thinking about it. The point really starts breaking down when you wonder *WHY* anyone would want such a horribly NON-portable object, regardless of who makes it. A lot of the other points the show made were very valid–the tendency to NOT read the agreements and simply “Accept” the terms because the things are soooooo long; the compulsion to “need” the latest gadgets; the “need” for a specific brand; Apple’s taking hits over privacy issues, even as other companies have been as guilty of “tracking” their customers. (I have to admit I *really* wanted to see Eric’s mother beat the bleep out of him for once. She’s usually been shown to be such a pushover for Eric’s whines that watching her finally tell him “no” was refreshing. The only other time she’s been as strong was the Dog Whisperer episode, but even then, she eventually relented at being so firm.)
She was also assertive in “Go, God, Go”, the Buck Rogers parody in which they skewered Richard Dawkins and (whom they perceive to be) atheists.
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There was also the first season episode (or was it the feature film?) in which she told him to get out of the house because she was having sex.
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She also punished him for longer than the other boys got punished by their mothers for getting Kenny killed by playing with fire in the feature film.
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And wasn’t there also another recent episode in which she chided him for his profanity?
I wrote a quick line on Hudnall’s blog, as I find the birther stuff to be very much a crackpot issue. He went onto tell me he “doesn’t care” about the issue (and then goes on to post a “certificate is a forgery” link).
Personally, I’m pretty libertarian, with a mixture of left and right views (mainly left, but still a small businessman), but I’m pretty sure it’s my duty, whenever someone actually starts taking up the birther argument, to tell them, as simply and plainly as possible, that they are morons and that they can go f*** themselves.
Time to take a principled stand.
Not trying to tell you how to run your business, but being a “small businessman” does NOT fall into being on the right or the left. HOW you act as a “small businessman” and where your concerns lie would put you on one side or the other. Obviously, you want to make as much money as possible, but bear in mind that the following quotes appear in “The Wealth of Nations” by Adam Smith:
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“The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”
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“The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”
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“Every tax, however, is, to the person who pays it, a badge, not of slavery, but of liberty.”
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Those hardly sound like the words from someone on today’s political right, do they? (I can only imagine the apoplectic fits the Tea Party would have over that last quote.)
Um…yeah.
That was a half-joking line. Point was, I’m quite liberal, but not in the sense that the Right views some liberals as anti-business, that’s all.
To the right of Bernie Sanders, but to the left of Obama, for sure.
Main point still remains, birthers should be openly mocked – not for their political opinions, but for their BS conspiracy theories.
“Yeah, well… Kennedy didn’t make it through two full years as POTUS either, so what may or may not have come from some of his critics running up to re-election is kinda hard to call.”
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JFK was inaugurated in January 1961. Two years from that is january 1963. he was not assassinated intil November 1963.
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I know. That’s why I posted the joking bit to Craig under that exchange. For whatever reason I remembered the start of his term as a year later than it really was. When he mentioned that it was 2 years and 11 months, I went and looked the dates up and actually posted them.
Darin,
“I think the scary precedent here is instead the fact that a president can flaunt a Constitutional requirement so flagrantly”
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Um, darin. If Obama really was violating this requirement so “flagrantly”, don’t you think the Clintons would have brought him down because of it way before now.
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If there was any chance the Clintons – with all their resources, connections, organization, power and favors owed to them and ruthlessness to win – wouldn’t have taken Obama out of the game long before iowa? Or at least before Denver?
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I find that far less plausible than the possibility the birth certificate is a fake.
I’m betting there are lawyers who would have tried to make just that case (the C-section thing) and some judges who would have found in favour of the motion. Moral of the story: let’s not give them ideas, shall we? It may not have applied to Obama, but I could see them trying against another president who had come into the world thus.
Btw, if anybody wants to know what Bill’s talking about in reference to Superman (I admit I glossed over that earlier, but it’s hyperbole anyways):
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Superman Renounces US Citizenship in ACTION COMICS #900
http://www.newsarama.com/comics/superman-renounces-us-citizenship-110428.html
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The Fox News quote is hilarious considering that Superman is an illegal alien to begin with.
I’m pretty sure Supes was given an official American citizenship at one time. Wish Rich Morrisey was still around, he’d know the exact issue and page number.
No. what’s hilarious is that you take a shot without knowing the facts, as you seem to do on a continual basis. Superman was granted his citizenship a long time ago – or else he WOULDN”T BE ABLE TO RENOUNCE IT IF HE DIDN”T ALREADY HAVE IT! D’oh!
FFS, Jerome, take your medication. What shot was taken? This is a COMIC BOOK, you know, where retcons rule and death is meaningless.
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Actually, I thought about asking whether Superman was given his citizenship at some point; but instead, I simply assumed that it had been. Next time I’ll just assume that you’re dumber than I thought possible, and make sure there’s no wiggle room for your nonsense.
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The fact remains: Superman was an illegal alien… the very type that right-wingers rail against. Go figure.
Superman is the very type of illegal alien that right winger rail against. Yeah, um, no. he did not come here by choice. he was an infant, just like the many foreign adopted infants I’ve seen people you would probably classify as right wingers adopt.
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And he’s a fictional alien who came in a spaceship. Which never happen. So there’s that.
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Actually around here at least it’s my observation that the most anti-illegal immigrant attitudes seem to be from the group that support Obama more than any other. They are, by and large, not typically thought of as right wingers.
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At any rate, just to pound this nonsense into the sand some more (seriously, Rich old pal, if you are looking down at this it’s times like this I really miss ya) it’s highly debatable that Superman was EVER an illegal alien, any more than a baby who washed up on shore from a boat wreck and was adopted by an American could be considered an illegal alien. And even in the highly unlikely event that he was one, that has been wiped clean, unless one is of the opinion that once an illegal always an illegal.
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(of course, as a non-human he MIGHT be considered an invasive species. But also an endangered one so I think that evens out.)
And to REALLY hammer more nonsense into this (man, how silly is this?), Clark Kent was the baby who was adopted. As far as the DC Earth in general knows, Superman just showed up from his destroyed planet, and not claimed by anyone legally.
I loved the Armageddon 2000 story where Superman ran for president. The Supreme Court ruled that since he emerged from a birthing matrix on earth, in Kansas, he was “Born” in the USA. The logic works for me.
Yeah, um, no. he did not come here by choice.
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As do many of the children of illegal immigrants. But that doesn’t stop people from punishing them just the same.
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Actually around here at least it’s my observation that the most anti-illegal immigrant attitudes seem to be from the group that support Obama more than any other.
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Well, for the sake of argument, a bill here that would have given illegals immigrant students in-state tuition (but without the additional state stipend that legal residents receive) just died in committee.
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“It is very important that we allot the limited amount of money that the state has to our constituents, and a person who is not a citizen of this country cannot be a constituent,” Rep. Chris Holbert (R-Parker) said.
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Ouch.
I should add: I am of a mixed mind on the illegal immigration situation, mostly because of what children are put in through no fault of their own.
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And Jerry, be thankful that story wasn’t written now. If anybody thinks people being upset that Superman would renounce his citizenship is silly, imagine how some would react to such a SCOTUS ruling! No birth certificate! Activist judges! 😉
“Yeah, um, no. he did not come here by choice. he was an infant …”
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Superman is an Anchor Baby?
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Theno
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“Superman is an Anchor Baby?”
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Well, yeah… I mean, he got his foot in the door and later paved the way for his dog, his cat, his cousin, a super chimp, a bottle full of miniature refugees, his clones, Red Superman, Blue Superman, a sentient computer…
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And I know I’m forgetting a super something or twenty in that list.
Curiously, that was how he was able to defeat John M(a)cCain, who had been told that he could not lose an election to anyone “of woman born.”
Not realizing, of course, that Obama was from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.
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PAD
That always bugged me about Macbeth.
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So Macbeth hears the prophecy that “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth” and thinks to himself “OK, I’m safe because that rules out *everyone*.”
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Shouldn’t his reaction have been: “Hmmmmm… I need to start checking around to see was born via Caesarean section.” ?
Perhaps it was a case of hearing what one wants to hear. He wanted reassurance that he would be successful, and at first blush “of woman born” sounds like it covers everybody.
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Now the Witch-king of Angmar, who lived in a world full of sentient, non-human creatures – he should have realized that the “hand of man” left a lot of territory uncovered.
I always considered the whole thing odd; if one is delvered by C-section, isn’t one still “born of woman?”
This always reminds me of the wonderful play THE COMPLEAT WORKS OF WLLM SHKSPR (ABRIDGED), where the actors are performing MACBETH (with mandatory completely over-the-top Scottish accents) after Macbeth hears the witch’s prophecy:
MACBETH: Oh that’s great, ay, so macwhat macneed macI macfearfear of Macduff?
MACDUFF: Not so fast, Jimmy! Know ye that I was from my mother’s womb untimely ripped! What do ye make of that?
MACBETH: It’s bloody disgustin’! Lay on, you great haggis face!
Incidentally, I saw this in NYC many years ago, and one of the three actors was Peter Jacobson, currently best known as Dr. Taub on HOUSE.
Which really implies that MacDuff was a clone. That Billy… a playwright ahead of his time, I tells ya!
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“I did not mean to ignore this–did not see it. I see the advantages to the new comments system but on fast moving threads like this one it tends to fall apart, unless I’m missing some easy way to keep abreast of replies and such.”
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Yeah, that’s the only thing about the new format that still bugs the crap out of me. When I left a thread before I could come back to it by going to my last post and picking it up from there. Now you have look all over the thread for the various discussions and if there have been more comments made than the sidebar can list, the sidebar is basically useless.
Funny how the things we talk about here show up in the new–some truthers just wasted the time of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the court is none too happy about it: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/fantastical_9-11_lawsuit_could_lead_to_sanctions_for_lawyer_2nd_circuit_say/
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Yeah, they’re moving into Orly Taitz territory. The smackdown various courts have laid down on her and her cohorts should have been a clue for these guys that courts don’t take kindly to fantastical bs masquerading the usual bs they deal with in courts.
With people like that the more you smack them down the more convinced they are that they are right about the Really Big Conspiracy.
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One thing that always puzzles me is that the kook alway believe that the shadowy CIA/FBI/Illuminati super secret cabal is able to kill presidents, control all media and fake everything from the moon landing to the election…but somehow they are unable to shut up Harvey Dinglefritz, Blogger at Large. Killing Kennedy was easy but Harvey is somehow untouchable.
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Unless they know that Harv is so crazy that letting him live keep sane people from asking questions. It’s like that time during the big UFO flap of the 1970s when a couple of guys reported seeing a UFO that had the letters “UFO” on the bottom. Everybody laughed but I thought “Hey, that’s genius–if you wanted to make sure nobody would believe an eyewitness that’ EXACTLY what you would do.” Those alien are pretty clever, as one would expect anybody who could beat that whole speed of light thing.
My reaction to this is not so much that they are doing it it’as what the message means. As Bill pointed out it’s happened before. i don’t think Bill can disagree that what’s been happening to Obama on this issue is far greater than any other president has faced to similar challenges as to eligibility.
My issues the point of this message is to create and maintain fear. He’s not like you my fellow Americans his name is weird, he’s not from here. He may be secret allies with muslims or whatever.
That’s the subtext, and that subtext is racial. Maybe only a few of the people out there pushing the Birth Certificate issue in the media are bigots maybe none. But i guarantee you that they are aware that the message appeals to those who are racist and prejudiced. To say that the birther movement is not racially based is just bûllšhìŧ.
The concept of Obama as a secret foreigner is the subtext that he doesn’t have America’s best interests at heart, he’s beholden to foreign nations.
Well I believe that most corporations can be considered the same way. Many of them are multinational, their profits exceeding the GNP of many other countries.
If Trump was President and he could solve the financial crisis, but it would completely and permanently bankrupt Trump industries or whatever he calls it. Do you even think for a second he could do it?
I don’t. Same way i don’t think Cheney put the needs of the country over the needs of Haliburton.
The birther movement is xenophobic as hëll, and a natural evolution of the Bush administration propaganda strategy that anyone who doesn’t conform to their view of America isn’t a “real American.”
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But race is one of the smallest factors of it, IMO. Obama’s religion, culture, former occupation, name, intellectualty, the cities he lived in, all are under attack as not sufficiently American. I don’t think his skin tone is a big deal to most. It’s one more in a long list of reasons for their hatred.
See I was done when a Republican administration in Hawaii said, yes he was born in Hawaii, here are the papers we consider are official in these areas. (Cert of Live Birth). We don’t give out Long-Form Copies of Birth Certificates, us Republicans in Charge in Hawaii.
Then it went to the Bush Administration run Dept Of Elections (or whatever their official title is) and they said “Yep, Hawaii’s papers look good to us. Just like the papers from the Naval Base in Panama look good to us. Barack Obama and John McCain can run for President.”
Why did anyone need anything else again?
“Obama is the only presidential candidate in history who has been asked to prove his citizenship. The only one.”
Back in 2008 some where trying to make the claim that presidential candidate John McCain wasn’t a natural born citizen and thus should be disqualified.
Maybe they should just change the dámņëd rule. This isn’t the 19th Century. The world’s gotten a lot smaller, and the bottom line is that people can’t control the circumstances of their birth or who their parents are. The fact is that there are plenty of naturalized citizens who are more familiar with American history and even more patriotic and devoted to this country than people born here because they fought for their citizenship instead of having it handed to them.
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PAD
^^This…
I agree whole heartedly. The standards of citizenship qualifications for president need to evolve. We’d be, as far as I know, very forward thinking in that respect compared to most countries.
Heck, there were some grumblings from the GOP about revising the rules so that Schwarzenegger could be a viable presidential candidate!
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“I invited a crazy person on this show…
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And no one could tell the which one was which.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB3W5NTAAAo
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In the meantime, Fox Business host and Fox News contributor Eric Bolling spent most of his time after the release pushing the idea that the thing was a bad photoshop job.
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So MSNBC invites the crazies on their network while Fox News simply cuts out the middle man and employs the crazies.
And in the end, creating the news (along with propagating and insinuating conspiracies) is far more profitable than simply reporting the news. 🙁
Geez, think they’d hire a half-crazy videographer/editor?
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Who knows? Can you flunk an IQ test?
How could you ask that after we’ve been friends so long? I thought I could make a living in video production; of course I could flunk an IQ test.
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Great! That means you can soon take over either the 5PM slot on Fox News or the 10PM slot on MSNBC very, very shortly.
Jerry,
Lawrence is on at 8PM/5PM on MSNBC and isn’t going anywhere for that. He has attacked Trump and NBC Entertainment for over a week now. ON MSNBC
Lawrence is often a blowhard idiot. Ed at 10PM is likewise often a blowhard clown. Lawrence usually gets anywhere from 2/3 to 1/2 of the ratings that Olbermann got in that timeslot while Ed gets only about 3/4 the ratings numbers that Lawrence gets. Since both shows are underperforming (even by MSNBC standards) I wouldn’t be surprised to see one of them go before the year is out. If it’s Ed, then the 10PM slot gets opened. If it’s Lawrence, then I could see MSNBC moving MAddow down to 8PM and Ed to 9PM (or even to 8PM for a while since the excuse for the lower ratings of his show these days is that his audience is midday to early evening.) Either way, the 10PM slot opens up.
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The 5PM Fox reference should be obvious as well. Between alienating both viewers and advertisers by acting like an insane jáçkášš with evangelical delusions to the point that he’s lost over half of his audience, Beck’s show is commercially unviable and he’s heading out the door. Not really sure that Sean would be able to fit into that slot though. I’m not really sure he can pull off completely batshit insane conspiracy theorist with occasional drifting into insane religious prophet territory.
US software expert validates authenticity of Obama’s birth certificate:
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http://www.newstrackindia.com/newsdetails/217391
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But… L…. That just means that they’re part of it along with the others!