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.
I will tell you where he was born when I see the vault bc. I will also tell you the hospital where he was born and the name of the doctor who delivered him. Until then, I don’t know. But what I really want to know, and the main reason for all this hoopla is.....WHY IS OBAMA SPENDING SO MUCH, RESCINDING ORDERS, WASTING TIME, FIGHTING THIS WHEN MAC SHOWED HIS VAULT BC WITHIN DAYS OF BEING ASKED?
“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.”
Nothing has been omitted that related to eligibility, as the COLB has the listed place of birth. They have answered one question:
Where was Obama born?
“but he is definitely hiding something.”
So what? On what basis can you assert he was born anywhere else?
“Besides why should we know what hospital he was born so we can erect a statue in his honor right.”
His birth hospital in Honolulu is already a tour guide destination. Do some googling.
so you would contend that the sole reason for obama’s falling poll numbers is is his problems with health care?
A curious phenomenon, that this harping grows shriller. Like a walk in the jungle at night — just before the rays of dawn, the incessant dull buzz of insects turns into a brilliant crescendo of a cacophony as if a swarm is upon you, and yet the sound is without any substance and dies into a silence just as the light breaks.
US code !401 I’ve seen it posted about 2 dozen times over the last year.
It addresses ‘US Nationals and Citizens’. Nowhere will you find the phrase “Natural Born Citizen” written in the statute.
Raced? Why did she have to race? If the data provided to the State of Hawaii was from Ann Dunham or Grandma Whitey anything could have happened. Obama could have been born as early as March,1961. And he might have been born anywhere. That's the way the CnOLB could have worked in those days. *
If you were a Luo Kenyan tribesman and your new bride was about to give birth to your son, you might want to return to the homeland for the birth. Did he?
* if my understanding of these facts is incorrect I will retract and apologize for them
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Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
Gates-gate was a factor as well. Very stupid to call cops “stupid”.
Great parallel.
No case not closed, he has not shown his vault bc”
So what? The person who saw this vault BC records says it says he was born in Hawaii. Case closed.
So far so good. Perhaps instead he was born in Kenya but his father was really Frank Davis, a citizen. Barak Sr. left soon after birth as if he thought he wasn't the father.
What amazes me is all the Republicans acting like beaten dogs in this matter, not willing even to be agnostic about Obama's Natural Born status in the face of a lack of evideance.
It’s very easy to conclude the earth is flat by merely rejecting all contrary evidence. The official who has seen his records says he was born in Hawaii.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/07/27/AR2009072703114.html
“I ... have seen the original vital records maintained on file by the Hawaii State Department of Health verifying Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii and is a natural-born American citizen,” Health Director Dr. Chiyome Fukino
Here’s the bet, are you willing to take it up:
“I bet any birther 10 to 1 odds any amount of money that his BC will say birthplace “Honolulu” when revealed.”
If not, then Obama’s official birthplace *IS* Hawaii and even birthers are admitting it.
I want to see total transparency. I won’t bet you on Hawaii being listed because I think Obama’s parents committed fraud which they took advantage of questionable and the easy ways to obtain a Hawaiian birth certificate.
The health director is a bureaucrat/politician in a very Democrat state and that is proof to you? Of course she would not lie.
You really are buying that? LOL!
You are easily duped.
These are all untrue.
Wrong on this one.
Charlie Rose interviewed Tom Brokaw a week before the election...
ROSE: I don't know what Barack Obama's worldview is.
BROKAW: No, I don't, either.
ROSE: I don't know how he really sees where China is.
BROKAW: We don't know a lot about Barack Obama and the universe of his thinking about foreign policy.
ROSE: I don't really know. And do we know anything about the people who are advising him?
BROKAW:Yeah, it's an interesting question.
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Send treats to the troops...
Great because you did it!
www.AnySoldier.com
The first black president in America’s history, and the man himself is obfuscating where exactly he was born. An history monument or marker would be placed where it occurred, but Obama doesn’t seem to be able to categorically state in which hospital, or in what home, he was born. The case is hardly closed. The case, in fact, is screaming: something is wrong here!
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