The Birther Crew

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Apparently there is still a small but vigorous group of people who deny Barack Obama was born in the United States, and so Hawaii has had to pass legislation limiting the number of birth-certificate requests any one person can make in a year. I wish I were kidding, but apparently some people are sending hundreds of requests to Hawaii's Department of Health, swamping the agency's employees with busywork. The Birthers are usually mentioned as a radical component of the Tea Party movement and as a core constituency Republicans want to appeal to for the 2010 midterm elections.

• Their position sounds delusionally moronic, so it's hard for me to imagine they can exist in any large number.
• Do Republicans really want to enable these people?
• Are the Birthers pretty much just elderly cranks with nothing better to do?
• It's been almost two years since Barack Obama was elected. Obviously their concerns are moot.

You're purposely overstating them. It's not a "core constituency" of anything.

Well, I suspect that there are very few Obama supporters among them.

Was does Fox News have to say about them?

The debate would end overnight if Obama would just allow the release of a certified copy of his "long form" birth certificate.

That the DNC has spent over $2 million to prevent this from ever happening is why there is non-stop fuel for the fire.

There is nothing "private" about a birth certificate...certainly not where a "high profile" public figure is involved. Not a jot or tittle on Obama's original certificate has anything that could compromise his privacy...unless it documents something he doesn't want people to know about.

It would certainly be a conflict of interest in my opinion and I would not vote for somebody with dual citizenship. The constitution doesn't say anything about this but It's a problem I think that will have to be addressed sometime in the future especially since more and more people are holding dual citizenship. The point of having to be a natural born citizen was so the president who is also the commander-in-chief of the armed forces would have no foreign allegiance.

Don't forget, people on the right are "bigoted rednecks" / "patriotic"

People on the left are "enlightened" / "pinko radicals"

I think I have just perfectly demonstrated the American political mind. Neither left nor right has a monopoly on the lunatics. I suggest you good people on both sides of the spectrum keep that in mind when you (mis)characterize your political opponents.

Of course, Jacoby, keep telling yourself that. We all know reality has a liberal bias.

Seriously, how can I be misrepresenting raw data? You tried to claim that the "birther" loons are not the mainstream of the Tea Parties. I gave you numbers that demonstrate that birther beliefs are mainstream within the rank and file of the Republican Party, and the Tea Party movement is definitely farther to the right and more into conspiracy theories than the general GOP.

As far as the poll, Harris is a well-known, established polling agency. Their methodology was sound. They found that 45% of Republicans and 25% of Americans "agreed with the Birthers that Obama was not born in the United States." They didn't ask if people had doubts. You are almost right on one thing; that is, I would definitely prefer for the Teabaggers to be marginalized. Why? Because the people in the movement are almost all delusional and misinformed in varying degrees. I really don't want national policy to be directed on the basis of grossly off-base understandings of reality.

On a side note, that was a strange equivocation in how you changed the use of the word "core" in your last post. Was that deliberately misleading, or are you just incompetent in the use of your native language?

This might be relevant, as sympathetic outsiders have also criticized the right for being rather problematic.

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/04/07 ... -distance/

Basically, Mr. Sanchez believes that the right's problem is a rapid confrontation with a world that does not agree, and thus a self-isolation of information sources away from what is normal and considered acceptable. Sort of like a conspiracy theorist's perspective.

This article goes on about all of the debate about all of this stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/books/28conserv.html

(forgot to post the article)

So what scares the birthers more, The supposed fact that they believe Obama is an Illegal alien or the notion that in spite of that he won the election and is now our President? I do not understand the motivation behind the movement, nor do I see how it can be productive to conservative politics.

What would happen if it WAS proven Obama was not a citizen? Wouldn't we get a President Biden and Vice President Pelosi? Would that make you happy?

Instead of wasting all this time and money with these lawsuits and making people think you are kooky, just get someone else elected. I'm sure if Obama's numbers get low enough Hilary Clinton will be circling him like a vulture.