Obama’s Birth Certificate Through The Eyes Of A Birther

Marvelous mockery!

Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit (via The Onion)

Arizona continues to legally enshrine itself as the most ridiculous and assholic state in the Union thanks to the birthers.

‘I don’t know what’s more pathetic - the number of kids who can’t find Africa on the a map, or the number of adults who believe the president was born there.’ by Clay Bennett

What’s more pathetic than Birthers?

[via:technipol]

Writer Will Wilkinson deconstructs the notion of a cohesive American identity and American-ness that is consistently used by conservatives to brow beat and divide for socio-political gain:

…Americans certainly aren’t “a people” in the sense that the Japanese, the Kurds, or the Jews are a people. There is no American ethnicity; the U.S. is a resolutely multicultural (and multilingual) country. The usual idea is that American identity is creedal, or organized around a distinctively American set of ideas and values.

[…]

Take the belief in individual freedom. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as freedom from all non-defensive physical force and fraud. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as implying roughly equal voice in the democratic process, which straightforwardly requires the redistribution of resources and state regulation of spending on political speech. Some Americans have understood individual freedom as a condition of robust autonomy or self-governance that requires universal government-financed education and a minimum of material resources necessary to ensure that individuals are able actually to exercise their liberty and are not caged-in by necessity. And none of these are the conception of individual liberty that prevailed among the Founders. Anyway, there was heated disagreement among the Founders, too. Some them took the ideal of individual freedom to be consistent with chattel slavery while others correctly found human bondage obviously at odds with liberty. Some defended a robust conception of freedom of conscience while others wished to ban the practice of certain religions for freedom’s sake. And so on.

Not only do appeals to the values of the Founders fail to settle anything, many such appeals are simply ignorant of what this or that Founder actually believed.

[…]

[I]ts [sic] misguided to appeal to the American creed as the basis of the American identity of the American people. There are multiple conceptions of American creed equally consistent with American history. That’s why movements to glorify, elevate, and honor a particular conception of American identity based on a particular conception of the American creed necessarily marginalize equally or more historically plausible conceptions and therefore tend to suggest that citizens who favor those conceptions are less or even un-American. It seems pretty clear to me that this is exactly how the conservative politics of American identity works.

…I guess I don’t think it’s entirely preposterous for Americans to see themselves as a people. But any conception of the American creed sufficiently general to encompass most widespread American conceptions of individual freedom, equality, tolerance and so on is going to be so general that it will do very little to distinguish American identity from, say, Canadian identity. And that’s clearly not what Glenn Beck or the staff of National Review have in mind when they talk about American values, promote a conception of American identity, or encourage Americans to see themselves as a people…

The conservative conception of American identity is so selective and so specific that it tends to suggest to its adherents that many (maybe even most!) Americans aren’t real Americans, or are Americans who betray real American ideals. Birther and Muslim Obama memes crudely reify the logical upshot of the right’s fixation on its favored version of American identity. Most conservatives don’t need to believe that Obama is literally an un-American non-Christian. They’re just content to nod along with Glenn Beck when he implies, or outright asserts, that a guy who adheres to a mundane version of liberal politics slightly to the right of the typical “This American Life” fan is hell-bent on destroying the special Americaness of America.

(source)

How pathetic that legislation needed to be passed in order to address the racist “birthers” and their continued, idiotic requests for the President’s birth certificate. As the AP reports:

A few of those requesters file repeated inquiries seeking the same information, even after they’re told state law bars release of a certified birth certificate to anyone who does not have a tangible interest.

These uppity white people, we swear…

Anderson Cooper “interviews” on AC 360 the now infamous birther, Army Lt. Colonel Terry Lakin, who is facing court-martial because of his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan. Lakin is the poster boy for the birthers as he refuses to follow the Commander-in-Chief, President Obama, because he isn’t convinced that Obama was in fact born in Hawaii.

We don’t know how Cooper keeps his cool when its obvious that Lt. Colonel Lakin is indeed “hiding behind” his lawyer as Anderson accuses him of doing. As an Army doctor, Lakin isn’t exactly a physiologically mentally challenged man, so how can he stick with all the birther nonsense with all the evidence that the President was born in Hawaii? Cooper didn’t ask it (and not like Lakin would have answered in this interview), but what needs to be asked to any birther is, “Are you racist?” If President Obama had a different name or even looked more white as his mother, would there even be this sustained questioning of his natural-born U.S. citizenship? We think not.

The Tea Party movement hasn’t exactly been denying its blatantly bigoted blather, but for any one who tries to say otherwise, watch this video and tell them exactly what you’ve seen.