Obama '08?

Posted at 10:57 AM ET, 04/27/2011
An embarrassment to the country
By Adam Serwer

This Tuesday morning become one of the most surreal and ridiculous moments in the history of American politics when the White House decided to release copies of President Barack Obama’s “long form birth certificate,” in an attempt to quiet conspiracy theorists who believe the president was born elsewhere. The president had already released a version of certified by the state of Hawaii, but because of the “volume of requests” for the birth certificate, the president asked the state to make an exception and release the original document.

It’s tempting to make this simply about reality television personality Donald Trump, who rocketed to the top of the Republican presidential field by promoting the slander that the president wasn’t born in the United States. But there are a number of other factors that created the current situation. Chief among them is that Trump’s lunacy emboldened conservative media sources to fully embrace birtherism. According to Media Matters, Fox News has spent over two hours promoting false claims about Obama’s birthplace across 54 segments, and only ten did Fox News hosts challenge the falsehood that the president wasn’t born in America. This isn’t just about Trump. All he did was encourage the communications wing of the conservative movement to go into overdrive in an attempt to make birtherism mainstream.

Aside from being one of the most idiotic moments in American political history, this marks a level of personal humiliation no previous president has ever been asked to endure. Other presidents have been the target of crazy conspiracy theories, sure, but few have been as self-evidently absurd as birtherism. None has been so clearly rooted in anxieties about the president’s racial identity, because no previous American president has been black.

This whole situation is an embarrassment to the country. Yesterday Jesse Jackson described birtherism as racial “code,” but there’s nothing “coded” about it. It’s just racism. I don’t mean that everyone who has doubts about the president’s birthplace is racist. Rather, the vast majority have been deliberately misled by an unscrupulous conservative media and by conservative elites who have failed or refused to challenge these doubts.

And birtherism is only one of a number of racially charged conspiracy theories that have bubbled out of the right-wing swamp and have been allowed to fester by conservative elites. Those who have spent the last two years clinging to the notion that the president wasn’t born in the United States, who have alleged that the president wasn’t intelligent enough to write his own autobiography or somehow coasted to magna cum laude at Harvard law, are carrying on new varieties of an old, dying tradition of American racism. Similar accusations dogged early black writers like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley, whose brilliance provoked an existential crisis among people incapable of abandoning myths of black intellectual inferiority.

Whether this farce ends or continues is entirely dependent on those who nurtured the rumors in the first place. This is an opportunity for conservative elites, who have finally come around to the possibility that the outsize hatred of the president they’ve cultivated as an asset for the past two years might actually hurt them politically, to purge birtherism from mainstream conservative discourse.

Sadly, those who fostered doubts about the president’s citizenship are unlikely to relent in the face of factual proof, because birtherism was never about the facts. For its most ardent proponents, it was and is about the inability to accept the legitimacy of a black man in the White House. Nothing about the decision to release the president’s birth certificate can change that.

By Adam Serwer | 10:57 AM ET, 04/27/2011 | Permalink | Comments ( 1)

The devil is in the details, rjb. I think unfortunately that the term "subsidy" is highly misunderstood and mis-identified much of the time. For example, if I have heard many refer to something called the depletion allowance as a huge subsidy and undeserved, but in my opinion it is deserved. It is a logical part of doing business, just as depreciation or reduction of inventories are in countless other businesses. Here is the situation. An oil company spends big bucks on exploration and development to find and prove new oil and gas reserves in the ground, which perhaps can be likened to Walmart spending big bucks to stock up their warehouse with merchandise. That inventory, whether it be oil and gas in the ground or merchandise in the warehouse, it cost a bundle of money to put there. Just as Walmart can figure their taxes based upon what investment of merchandise is left in their warehouse after it has been drawn down, the oil company should be able to do the same. If I understand it right, the oil company gets a depletion allowance for drawing down their reserves in the ground. In my view, this is not a subsidy, but a fully deserved factor as part of doing the business that they are doing.

The above is but one example of many that probably exist within this subject of subsidies.

I really don't care about his birth certificate, but I would
like the White House to release Obama's college transcripts.

I want the world to see Obama's college transcripts

Barack Obama, Harvard Law Review editor, March 19, 1990

September 4, 2008 | 3:01 pm

Harvard Law Review's first black president plans a life of public service. His multicultural background gives him unique perspective.

By Tammerlin Drummond
Times Staff Writer

Yeap, our side has to put up with the idiot birthers, your side has the idiot truthers. Just goes to show there are idiots of all political persuasions. Of course, I think most of us here have always known that.

By 'truthers', I guess you mean those that don't agree with some/many of the positions that the government has advanced and been unable to prove, or in cases where a government advanced story is flatly contradicted by the facts.

Is this what you are referring to Coastal Rat, Snood?