I can’t imagine anyone not knowing who the “birthers” are. But, for the record, these are the people who choose to believe in the face of evidence to the contrary that Pres. Barack Obama is not a natural-born U.S. citizen.
Although I’ve had a brief post floating around in my head for a couple days on the subject, John Deeth has brilliantly saved me the trouble and the time of writing it out. Not to mention that my meager offerings would have paled in comparison to Deeth’s spot-on analysis of what all this brouhaha is really about.
…The 1920′s version of the Ku Klux Klan, starting to fade but still powerful, were equal opportunity bigots, hating Catholics nearly as much as blacks. The most popular attack showed a picture of Smith opening the Holland Tunnel linking New York and New Jersey, and “explaining” that it was Smith’s “secret tunnel to the Vatican,” so he could get his orders from the Pope who would rule America from Rome.
Debunking this story didn’t do any good, just like producing Obama’s birth certificate didn’t help. So that’s NOT a secret tunnel to the Vatican? Don’t matter. Smith’s still a Catholic and therefore un-American. “Take our country back,” cry the Birthers.
And that’s all this is really about. The Birthers, like their anti-immigrant allies, and like their precursors the 1920s Klan and the 1850s Know-Nothings, are defining Obama as un-American. Doesn’t matter if we can see the birth certificates and the announcements in the Honolulu papers. Doesn’t matter that his middle name is Hussein and not the briefly rumored Mohammed. Proving where and when he was born don’t matter here because the conspiracy has its own truthiness in that it emphasizes Obama’s other-ness…
However, I do take unique pleasure in the newfound knowledge that if I tote my birth certificate around in a zip-lock baggie adorned with a tiny American flag and yell loud enough about my birth and my family’s military service, that I can somehow compel an entire political assembly to stand and say the Pledge of Allegiance.
