‘Birthers’: A movement that won’t go away

“I’ve stopped laughing,” said Errol Louis in the New York Daily News. Before Barack Obama was sworn in, various wing nuts from the far Right had filed at least a dozen lawsuits to prevent his taking office “on the theory that he was actually born in Kenya and/or had failed to prove that he was a ‘natural born’ American,” and was therefore ineligible for the presidency. For a while, these “birthers,” as they came to be called, were just a joke. But in the face of all evidence, the birther conspiracy theorists only seem to be gaining strength and support. CNN’s Lou Dobbs signed on last week, and at a recent town hall meeting in Delaware, moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle was confronted by a birther waiving her birth certificate and demanding action against the usurper Obama; the crowd booed Castle when he tried to reason with her. Yet the facts are indisputable. Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate “was posted online, its authenticity vouched for by Hawaii officials up to and including Republican Gov. Linda Lingle.” What’s more, two Honolulu newspapers “printed Obama’s birth announcement in 1961.” Why doesn’t this matter to the birthers?

It’s really not hard to explain, said Joe Klein in Time.com. Barack Obama “is the first chief executive of this grand and good nation not to be melanin-deprived.” This badly upsets “a fair number of frightened, ignorant, idiot white folks,” and they just refuse to believe that an African-American man “named Barack Hussein Obama could actually have been elected president.”

So forget trying to persuade birthers with birth certificates, birth announcements, or other pieces of tangible evidence, said David Weigel in The Washington Independent. To them, all contrary evidence is the product of a grand conspiracy. So adamant are the birthers that they now pose a real political problem for the Republican Party. Many officeholders fear alienating them, since birthers constitute a very motivated portion of the Republican base. Anxiously, the politicians are either staying silent or playing along. But for the sake of the conservative movement, Republican leaders have to end this foolishness, said National Review in an editorial. We understand “the hunt for a magic bullet that will make all the unpleasant complications of Obama’s election and presidency disappear.” But even though Obama wants to usher in European-style health care and primarily views himself as a citizen of the world, he is, like his fellow leftist Bruce Springsteen, “born in the USA.”

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