Posted on 07/28/2009 10:20:47 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
The GOP, reduced to hosting loonies who obsess over Obama’s birthplace, is slipping into the ash heap. The Daily Beast’s John Batchelor on why Republican incoherence may doom the party to the fate of the Whigs.
The romantic yarn that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, not in the United States, and is therefore an illegitimate POTUS is the core of a still-evolving conspiracy theory that now explodes like a neutron stink bomb splashing on the right wing while leaving the center and left idly smiling and curious.
What is going on with the despondent Republican Party that it hosts loonies called the birthers in its ranks?
The answer may be that the birther phenomenon is a mutation of a political virus called incoherence. Incoherence is fatal. It killed the Whigs (and led to the creation of the Republicans); it killed the Klan and the American communists. The birther mutation looks to erase what remains of the GOP’s credibility with the electorate, already at an all-time low and still sinking to third- and fourth-party numbers, if there were a third or a fourth party.
In sudden alarm Monday night, 158 House Republicans voted with the Democrats to endorse the self-evident fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. No whipping by the GOP leadership was necessary. The House Republicans understood that birtherism has jumped to a pandemic Phase 6, multiple infections in all states, much too late to stop with a quarantine on the Hill.
Already, a handful of House Republican members show signs of succumbing to the symptoms of brain fever—wagging fingers, dry-mouth stammering—by co-sponsoring a bill to require presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate. The primary patient is California Republican John Campbell, who showed tertiary impatience with his triteness on TV when he proposed, “It doesn’t matter if I have doubts or not, OK?”
August recess means that the Hill Republicans must go home to their districts to face the birtherite pod people, and there will be additional farcical confrontations similar to what the chump moderate Republican Rep. Mike Castle faced recently at a town-hall meeting in Delaware, when birthers flourished their birth certificates at him.
The pandemic is out of control, and those who argue cynically that birtherism is being stoked by the media, or fed by the cunning White House political operation to gain sympathy for a panicky presidency, are not examining the peculiar details of the potency of the illness.
This is not a pandemic that spreads only by the airplane, the Internet, or even by word of mouth, because a single exposure to the central whopper is not usually sufficient. Daily reinfection is needed or the disease goes dormant like algebra. Birtherism has found a durable vector, ubiquitous like insects and slippery like long-tailed mammals, in the institution of talk radio and its cable-TV compadre. The boss vectors just now are the burlesque artist Rush Limbaugh—“Barack Obama has yet to prove he’s a citizen”—and Limbaugh’s parasitic rival of bloviation, faux rueful Lou Dobbs: “I don’t know what the reality is. No one does.”
What is also striking about this mutation is that, as a talking vector, you do not need to endorse the birther template that the president was born of an 18-year-old girl who raced to Mombasa in time to deliver in an unnamed setting. You are just as effective a vector if you deny the birtherite creativity, if you produce the Hawaii documents, if you say the magic words “smear” or “tin-foil.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs is a fertile source when he uses the briefing room to evince exasperation: “…this question in many ways continues to astound me.” Cable-TV stars such as the giddy Chris Matthews—“The birthers don’t let the facts get in the way”—and the stern Bill O’Reilly—“The Factor investigated it and found out that it’s bogus …”—become like Typhoid Marys, spreading an illness to which they claim immunity. Ratings, anyone?
Grimly, the birther episode is not a media story, or even a story about Barack Obama’s unique youth, but rather it is another illustration of the slow-motion decomposition of the GOP. The party, having lost its principles, its confidence, its courage, and then having lost an election, now experiences what it is to lose its mind, too, while it slips into the ash heap with other novelties.
The conduct of the Republicans in Congress since January has been astonishingly frail, as if the party had lost immunities to race-baiters like Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, to liars like John Ensign and Mark Sanford, to yammerers like Eric Cantor and Michele Bachmann, to the goofily vain like Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, and Mike Huckabee.
The party has wasted away to the point where opportunistic eruptions like the birthers and much worse are natural sorrows. Republican incoherence didn’t begin with Mombasa. There is logic to the closing down of a great political party that has abandoned its own greatness to cheer on churls. Perhaps what appears terminal cowardice is only venality; perhaps what sounds like a death rattle is only the wrinkled ranting of crones in the Senate; perhaps the polls showing the Republican brand not as well regarded as Drano are just outliers. Perhaps, too, like miscreant HAL 9000, the GOP is warming up to sing, “Daisy, Daisy.”
*******
John Batchelor is radio host of the John Batchelor Show in New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
“Yes, Jonathon Batchelor was a FreeRepublic favorite here for years when he had his show on ABC Radio.”
I’ve been here for 11 years and never heard of the jerk.
“Demonize your opponents like Alinsky said.”
That’s what birther do to anti-birthers on FR.
Realize that birthers are trying on BDS-style tactics and it all makes sense.
Sensible conservatives dont think we need to get looney and push false theories to beat Obama.
Our problem is this is a Catch 22 to get proof. “
You dont want proof. Once Obama gives proof you close up shop.
for the open-minded, the case is already closed -he was born in Honolulu:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072703114.html
He did have to have a U.S. citizen dad to be an NBC at the time he was born.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2302859/posts
Snoooooooore!
“His birthplace is only part of the issue”
Well, let’s clear one issue up at a time?
Where was Obama born? State of Hawaii says it is Hawaii and they have the records to prove it. COLB that Obama released aligns with that.
Case closed, right?
Crazy ideas like The Constitution, the law and eligibily. Falling for Alinsky tactics again. The Framers also had some “crazy” ideas that pissed off King George.
Praeger is another second to fourth tier talker. Guessing what he is thinking does adds little to this discussion.
Lou Dobbs is playing a clever game. He is boxing Obama in. “I believe you were borns here now show us the proof.”
Ok the case is this: Obama released a COLB that says he was born in Hawaii. The COLB is based on his original long form birth certificate which he refuses to release. Instead he had Fukino come out and confirm that the COLB matched the info in the original document. But the sin is one of omission. There were multiple ways to obtain that original birth certificate. It could be based on hospital records or testimony from the parents/grandparents, or even the person himself. This testimony could be supplied well after his actual birth and even through the mail. I strongly suspect that Obama’s original cert was obtain my some form of testimony rather than the actual records and he knows that releasing would open up more questions about the actual, not the legal, circumstances of his birth. That explains why he is protecting this otherwise helpful document and why so much fuzzyness surrounds the issue despite his supposed rock solid standing (no hospital pics, birth stories, confirmation from family friends etc.). Perhaps he really was born in Hawaii and his parents still went about certifying it in a odd way for some reason — but he is definitely hiding something. Besides why should we know what hospital he was born so we can erect a statue in his honor right.
You can only reach that conclusion by ignoring SCOTUS rulings like Wong Kim Ark and undoing modern understanding of birthright citizenship. But leave aside that boutique theory which has nothing to do with his birth cert.
Where was Obama born?
I see you need absolution.
He took over for Drudge, but could anyone refute this for me:
Title 8, Sec. 1401 of the US Code defines “Natural Born Citizen” to include those born outside the US, as long as one parent is a citizen who lived in the US for more than five years. (For those who don’t know, the US Code fills in many of the gaps in the law left by the US Constitution.)
That is what some reality based commenter are trying to say to defend Obama’s standing as president.
The problem is that the mainstream media and the Republicrat elites have cried “wolf” too many times.
They told us we were all nutcases and conspiracy theorists for thinking there was anything to:
Travelgate
Whitewater
Gennifer Flowers
Clinton’s cocaine and marijuana use while governor
Vince Foster death
Paula Jones
Lewinsky
John Huang and Chinagate
Web Hubbell
Purloined FBI files
Kathleen Willey
Sandy Burglar’s socks
Marc Rich and other presidential pardons
and on and on and on.
And they told us we were nutcases for NOT believing absurd conspiracies and baseless claims about
Dick Cheney and Halliburton
George W Bush and Saudi or Iraqi oil
George W Bush and the National Guard
George W Bush “stole” election
Panties on heads at Abu Ghraib
Scooter Libby and Valerie Plame
George W Bush and Hurricane Katrina
and on and on and on.
Why should we believe anything the MSM or the elites have to say on the subject of conspiracy theories?
Why should we be demeaned and stigmatized for merely demanding transparency and the release of all birth, school, college, law school, state senate and other records that pertain to the highest public servant and the most powerful person in the land?
And when he continues to conceal these records, why are we not entitled to draw the most adverse inferences against him from his refusal to release the information?
Hey Republicans! Let’s make a deal! You give us AIPers all those crazy folks who think the Constitution matters, and you can keep the unprincipled hacks who wouldn’t know a founding principle if it smacked ‘em upside the head like a baseball bat.
Frankly if I have to be considered a kook for being a skeptic on Obama's supposed history, then I am happy to be numbered among the kooks.
Obama will never release his birth certificate. He's hiding something and the law and the MSM will allow him to continue to hide it by attacking those who have questions about it and accusing them of being the functional equivalent of Klan Members. The more outrageous the accusations against the Obama skeptics become, the more skeptical I become.
Huh?
Sure it is loony tunes out there. It is loony tunes between this writer's ears, too...
No case not closed, he has not shown his vault bc with the name of the hospital and the doctor who delivered him, All that has been shown is a form with SOME of the birth info on it. Mac showed his vault bc, Obama needs to do same. And it is not nutty to ask that he provide this info. Its nutty NOT to ask for it.
I bet it will show he wasn't born in a hospital but needed a witness that claimed Obama was "born in Hawaii".
Lets see the supporting statements and other documentation that underlies his birth certificate.
LOL! Oh thanks - the Washington Post. This is proof. What a joke.
You are not very good at this are you? You keep posting the same stuff - show me the long form BC.
this explains why obama’s poll numbers are sinking so fast
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