Watch the Secret Service detail in the last 10 seconds. The President's joking? There's good humor? They don't care. They're single-focused on watching for a threat. Which will only get worse when Obama is re-elected over Rmoney or Sanctorum.
(h/t John Cole at Balloon Juice)
The bullshit continues, this time in Georgia, where an administrative judge believes he has the power to compel the President to appear and prove the birthers wrong. Even though he has done this over and over and over again.
It's time to start fucking these people up, by which I mean ruining their fucking lives, not injuring their bodies. The judge, the plaintiff, the plaintiff's attorney (Orly Taitz, the Fred Phelps of birtherism, rebuffed at every turn and even sanctioned for it but still insane enough to continue her abuse of the legal system), and anyone who funded this nullificationism. It's time to find out what they've done wrong and make it known - to their wives, to their creditors, to the press.
It's long past time to stop being nice, to start taking no prisoners. Figuratively.
Start with Orly Taitz. Find the lies in her naturalization record - maybe she's a planted late Soviet era sleeper - revoke her citizenship, and deport her worthless insane ass back to Russia.
Yeah, it's going on in Alabama too. Neo-confederate assholes.
Republicans can only win in the long run if they lie and cheat.
Sharia burial! Give it a few days... The birthers need a new so-called issue.
Never mind that the consensus seems to be that burial at sea accords with some Muslim customs and not with others. The wingnuts don't care about facts. They have an entire disinformation apparatus to make up any bullshit they need.
And they need to go through the day in a constant state of outrage and alienation from everyone who's not in their tribe.
Yesterday morning, they resented Osama bin Laden continuing to breathe. Today, they resent that President Obama directed the effort to find and capture or kill him. And they're thanking Duhbya, whose every major move and attitude gave punishment of al Qaeda the short shrift in his failed geopolitical game of Risk.
President Barack Obama (D-tepid centrism except in support of the imperial Presidency) has inspired incredibly frenzied outpourings of anger and hate. Bill Clinton (D-tepid centrism except about sex) inspired what for its time was similarly frenzied.
The frenzy of delegitimizing the 1992 election worked so well for Republicans that there was no way they'd abjure it this time around. Sure enough, given the sharp limits on the intelligence, memory, and discernment of bullshit from reality of the American electorate, it worked again in 2010 for the GOP. Now it will take many Republican electoral failures of much greater depth than 2006 and 2008 to convince them not to be petulant 2-year-olds again every time they lose.
Any Democrat who won the Presidency in 2008 would have faced the refusal of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of the election - no matter how comfortable the margin, and remember that Obama completely kicked John McCain's butt from sea to shining sea.
Hillary Clinton, whom many would now retrospectively elect, would have been trashed again. Doesn't anyone remember what the wingnuts said about conspiracies to murder, distribute drugs, and corruptly enrich herself? Wingnuts right in the middle of the GOP. How could anyone forget their politics of personal destruction?
In the alternate universe where she did get elected, people are wishing that fresh young Illinois Senator had gotten the nod instead. He has such a sweet personality and such a message of non-partisan comity that surely no one, not even a Republican Party built from the ground up on the model of Lee Atwater's scorched earth politics (with a secret handshake in honor of the failed potential of Joe McCarthy), not even that Republican Party could have put him through the vicious attacks they've put Hillary through. Yeah, don't call me Shirley.
There's one difference between the way Barack has been calumnied and the way Hillary would have been. That difference is the birther movement.
Sure, Republicans would have found sex-related ways to attack her, as they did when she was the wrong kind of wife to Bill - no cookie-baking, no juicy divorce suit from the woman scorned, no willing smiling silent deference to men. They would have attacked her for menses and hot flashes at the same time. It would have been ugly.
But the birther movement is about Obama being the wrong color. He's brown, and he has foreign heritage that's not European and not Christian. How could he possibly be American? He's not from the right tribe.
No, it's not only race that matters in the Republican platform of bigotry. They assert religious correctness too. Catholics (finally!) are o.k. now. All Irish may apply. But no Muslims. They might bring their religious values to the public square, and that means they'll try to enact scary-a, I mean, sharia.
The framers of the Constitution had this to say in Article VI of the Constitution:
[N]o religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.Republicans, even rabbit front-runner Mitt Romney, are happy to promise a religious test as long as it appeals to their bigoted party (as proven by its birtherism):
Republicans don't love religious liberty; they love religious liberty for people who think as they do.Again, one party in American politics is tepid, easily bullied, and often won't stand up for its own views. The other is actively evil and opposed to the founding ideas of our nation. So of course the Republicans project their own opposition to liberal democracy, as framed 225 years ago, onto the Democrats, and the Democrats fail to call them the scurrilous, opportunistic, authoritarian liars they are.
Under UCMJ, desertion carries the death penalty. But reduction in rank and 25 years in the stockade ought to be enough.
By the way, even though it's clear that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, I would assert that he is a natural born citizen no matter where he was born because his mother was a citizen at the time of his birth. And there's no explication of the phrase nor any case law to contradict me.
Alex Koppelman at Salon does the job.
The myth 8 rejoinder is the weakest, saved for last in the way of basic argument construction. The point of all these document releases is not to convince the unconvinceable crazies like Orly Taitz. It's to convince the persuadables who are still taking their meds.
