Posted on 04/28/2011 9:59:40 AM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The big winner of the Obama birth certificate follies (and I do mean follies) is, of course, Donald Trump. Whether or not he even runs for President, let alone gets the nomination, he managed to make this “issue” so huge that the President of the United States felt he had to respond to it.
Trump played on one of the oldest vulnerabilities of media, the “some say” rule. If a prominent public figure is saying something, it is treated with respect. So if one Serious Person is saying something true, and the other is saying something false, many outlets – particularly cable news – will treat both statements as equally valid. (No, I don’t know who decides who and who isn’t a Serious Person, let alone why Trump counts. But he does, apparently, given the tone of much of the coverage on TV.) As ABC’s Jake Tapper just put it, “too many in the media have treated this crap as if it’s subject for debate and not just a a falsehood.” CNN provided the ultimate reducto ad absurdum of this principle recently with the announcement: “Trump says Obama wasn’t born here. We’ll show you the evidence and let you decide.”
Obviously, this announcement won’t change much. Those who are committed to believing that Obama was not born in the U.S. will continue to believe it, and point to today’s event as further evidence of the theory: Obama must be hiding something if he was worried enough to produce an elaborately faked birth certificate. The first rule of a conspiracy theory is that once you believe in it, everything is evidence for the theory – the fact that it can never be disproven is one of the things that separates conspiracy theories from regular theories anyway.
The real question is whether this is a tactical mistake by Obama when it comes to dealing with what we might call the birther-curious. These are people who don’t accept the theory that Obama was part of some 40-odd year conspiracy to install him in the White House, but just think that he’s “hiding something.” No real reason for it, just the old idea that where there’s smoke there’s fire, or that it wouldn’t be in the news all the time if there weren’t something to it. Another frequent tack is to argue that birtherism may or may not be true, but Obama was the one making it an issue for his own nefarious purposes.
My own cynical instincts are to think that today’s events make the issue worse in that sense, even if most birther-curious people believe that the certificate exists. Because the point of birtherism doesn’t have much to do with certificates; it has to do with defining Obama as a cultural alien and un-American – something that is believed and seriously argued by people who reject the literal theory of birtherism. So today just gives extra fuel to the idea that Obama is hiding his past, that he’s not One Of Us, and so on. Andrew Sullivan showed us how it’s done today by blaming Obama for “waiting so long,” and blaming the media for “piling on the Birthers.” You see? It wasn’t the Birthers who were really at fault here. Obama and the “MSM” were the ones keeping this issue alive. And when it continues to be alive, presumably it’ll still be their fault.
In other words, those email forwards you’ve been getting? Expect to get more of them. Not only that, expect them to be more elaborate than ever. Or as the headline on Fox News’s website put it today:
So yeah. Expect more of that.
How did Trump accomplish this? He took the fight to Obama, fearlessly and relentlessly, for one thing. Secondly, Obama and his Chicago thug handlers tremble at the thought of Trump's potential challenge to Obama, and didn't want this battle against their faker Obama from the real deal, Donald Trump. Of course they fear Trump, he'll tear Obama to shreds in debate regarding the economy, and all things financial. Trump has single handedly created more jobs in his life than Obama could do as President of the U.S. with endless financial resources and a host of economic advisors at his disposal.
I hope and pray that Trump is the "real thing" regardinghis Presidential challenge, and that he either is, or is willing to become, a conservative for the betterment of our country. If Trump is willing and able to bend his will to conservative principles, I believe he will decimate the hollow suit Obama in the general election and become a successful President.
If, however, Trump goes 'independent', forget him, he'd have revealed himself to be a spoiler. If he gets the Republcian nomination and wins the general election I believe he would bend to the will of the American people if they rose up against any liberal policy he tried to employ; just as Bush dropped the U.A.E. taking over our ports, dropped his amnesty push, and dropped his buddy Harriet Miers' SCOTUS nomination.
I don't know if Trump is in the Ronald Reagan mold, but then again, nobody knew if even Reagan himself would turn out to be a "Reagan". As I recall, Reagan was once himself a Democrat, a union guy, and a Democrat supporter. So I say give Trump a fair chance until we know him much better down the road. If nothing else, the man has the testosterone that no other Republican has; not even Sarah Palin who said recently: "I think we need a Republican candidate who can fight like a girl". We already have too many girly men and spineless moderates in the Republican party, I don't see any of them as aggressive, confident, fearless and capable to lead as is Trump. And not only that, the others are all career politicians who have been trained down to the DNA in their bones to 'people please', deceive and talk out both sides of their mouths. Just look at the teary eyed Beohner, who caved in to Obama on the government shutdown, for one example.
The "some say" rule is a way to break out of the chains of false or incorrect libtard preconceived ideas.
Trump is an embarrassment. He is an elitist blowhard who is using us for his own personal advantage. He panders to the media—the same media, that puts our cause down. And he does solely because he is a media hog. I don’t see one ounce of conservative values in what he says or what he does.
Trump is an embarrassment. He is an elitist blowhard who is using us for his own personal advantage. He panders to the media—the same media, that puts our cause down. And he does solely because he is a media hog. I don’t see one ounce of conservative values in what he says or what he does.
If trump continues to reveal the kind of political savvy that got him this far, he will become president. But I think he’s just a flash in the pan.
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