I often disagree with the religious pragmatist Michael Medved, but he is right when he says to the birthers, “Please shut up.”
World Net Daily leads the campaign to prove Obama is constitutionally ineligible to be president. Their latest post on the issue claims that the White House is in panic mode over Jerome Corsi’s book, Where’s the Birth Certificate?
The White House is not panicking at all. Quite the opposite: they want the birthers front and center in the 2012 presidential race. Not only do the conspiracy theorists distract from Obama’s record in the Oval Office, but they turn off moderates and independents. Without independents Obama has no chance of winning reelection.
Obama is the worst president in my lifetime. He is a far-left, anti-American ideologue. We have a radical in the White House. In his college days he was a serious, revolutionary communist. Since then he has learned from Alinsky to work within the system to “fundamentally change the United States of America.”
He has expanded the state at home and groveled before dictators abroad. His methods have been consistently authoritarian; what he can’t get Congress to pass, he threatens to force on America through his czars and bureaucratic agencies. His spending and regulating have brought us the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
On top of his fervent statism, he is inexperienced, incompetent and oddly detached. The only thing to improve during his time in office is Obama’s golf handicap.
Obama is a thorough altruist and egalitarian. He is motivated not to increase prosperity, but to “spread the wealth around.” As Rabbi Aryeh Spero puts it,
As with all references to “responsibility,” domestic or foreign, Obama sees responsibility as a type of sacrifice by the more powerful to those less powerful, be it redistribution of wealth or sacrificing one’s optimal protection when weighed against how it effects those he considers innocent.
Whenever an emotional event such as 9/11 comes along, Obama talks about community service. In his mind profound values and morality are all about sacrifice to the collective. Sacrifice is Obama’s moral ideal, and he is on a mission to improve every American’s soul by giving us all the opportunity to give until it hurts. Uncle Barry knows what is good for you — whether you like it or not.
On every issue and in every aspect, President Obama is the perfect nightmare. It has been said that the only issue of religion in 2012 is that if Obama is reelected, then God help us all.
Now, to the birthers all of this is of secondary importance. What’s really important is that Obama’s father had dual citizenship, and our Founding Fathers considered that enough to make one ineligible to serve as President.
Let me put it this way. Even if the birthers are 100% right, they are wrong to make an issue out of Obama’s birth. They are saying, in effect, that Obama’s statism at home, appeasement abroad and totalitarian tactics are not as important as a technicality. They are as futile as the John Birch Society in the 1960’s, who showed no understanding of abstract, philosophical principles and instead made everything in politics a conspiracy.
It is a crime to downplay Obama’s record for a second. The right needs to make a vigorous, principled argument showing the connection between Obama’s radical ideas and our miserable economy. We can’t waste time on some legal technicality of dubious worth — even if Obama is covering something up. We need to stop pursuing scandals and start attacking his statist record. It’s not the Democrats’ weaknesses and lies that are destroying America, but their proudly held morality.
The most disturbing thing about the birthers is that they adopt leftist methods. Instead of attacking ideas and policies, they make it all about the man. They ignore philosophic principles to focus on the concrete-bound circumstances of Obama’s birth. The dumbing down of America comes to right-wing politics.
This might sound a bit over the top, but I honestly worry that freedom in American will not survive another four years of Obama. We must kill this monster, even if it means electing some bonehead religious conservative. The birthers could help the country they love by just shutting up.
Well said.
The tactic of focusing on a legal technicality also strikes me as leftist in the sense that is using the established power of the state to get what you want. Such as using campaign finance laws at election time to use their opponents bureaucratic flub-ups to threaten and shut them up.
Also your link to “serious, revolutionary communist” is broken.
Amen to that. Thank you for the excellent post.
I was following the birth of birtherism, if you will, on a network of blogs run by Hillary supporters — i.e., by anti-Obama Democrats — during the run-up to the election of ’08. It was the Democrat opposition’s last, desperate attempt to take him down by having him declared ineligible before the election. If memory serves, the first lawsuit alleging his ineligibility was brought by a crackpot Democrat attorney, a personal friend of Hillary Clinton whose name I have mercifully forgotten.
This started as internal, dirty Democrat politics. How it ever shifted and became a crusade for crackpots on the religious right would be a fascinating study — fascinating epistemologically, in my opinion.
Your analysis hits the nail on the head. This issue is a refuge for people incapable of dealing with politics at the level of ideas, who obsess about an out-of-context “legal technicality of dubious worth” because whipping up a scandal is the only way they know to oppose a politician.
It was particularly striking that the Democrats who started this had no real ideological opposition to Obama. They were repulsed by his power-lusting personality (but not by Hillary’s power-lusting personality). They were frightened by his known alliances with radicals and terrorists (but not by Hillary’s past sanction of the same radicals, if not the terrorists). They sensed, at an emotional level, that he was anti-American in a way that no previous candidate has ever been. These were people who passionately wanted Obama to lose the election. But evidently, in the realm of ideas, they were in the same camp as he.
More fundamentally, this is how the left always approaches politics — in terms of out-of-context concretes that have the capacity to inspire outrage. In epistemological terms, leftism is a product of severe concrete-boundness and the primacy of emotions.
The glaring contradiction of birtherism is that, even if there is some element of truth to their claims and some technicality of the Constitution has been breached (which I believe is the case in one very specific respect), it is a microscopic infraction compared to the onslaught against our constitutional system that is taking place on a daily basis. We literally have a situation where the Federal government is nationalizing industry after industry, instituting socialized medicine, flirting with censorship of the Internet, etc., etc. — the country is being flushed down the socialist drain — and the response of these people is to scream that the Constitution’s citizenship requirements must not be breached.
What is truly fascinating is that this issue was quickly adopted by the religious right — so completely that today it is almost exclusively associated with the right. Why would such a line of attack even appeal to conservatives?
My own observation, for what it is worth, is that religious conservatives are psycho-epistemologically very similar to the left. They are incapable of arguing any issue in terms of ideas; they thump the Constitution as they thump the Bible, in both cases appealing to authority as a substitute for ideas, while in practical politics they seize on concrete scandals as excuses to foment moral outrage against their opponents. In epistemological terms, the religious right is a product of severe concrete-boundness and the primacy of faith.
In other words, the issue fit their mental template too perfectly. Normally the left and the right obsess about scandals at opposite poles — the left screams about the environmental impact of some company’s activities while the right moans about corruption at the EPA. But this was the rare case where leftists appealed to the Constitution, of all things — and their rightist brothers-in-epistemological-spirit immediately jumped in to join the fight.
It is a brotherhood of emotion and faith, subjectivism and intrinsicism, locked arm-in-arm against the realm of ideas. That is what is truly fascinating about this issue.
I tried posting a comment, but it just disappeared when I hit the “Submit” button. When I tried again, I got a message that I was posting a duplicate comment. Is your platform malfunctioning?
Link fixed.
North Bridge, I think it works. I’m sorry if you lost what you wrote. That is maddening. Sometimes I copy long comments before I submit, just so they don’t get lost in a glitch.
Always compose comments in a text editor, then copy and paste them into the comment form. It’s easier as well as safer, despite the extra step.
Heh. Thanks for the advice, both of you. I actually did exactly that; the problem is that the software wouldn’t let me post the same comment again.
Myrhaf,
Great post – I fully agree. We need to stake our opposition of Obama on the issues, where he is an anti-American monster. Not on a technicality which is probably not even real.
I’ve mentioned this before on various fora, but it gets lost in the shuffle.
The first birth certificate (what they are calling the “short form,” though that’s not entirely accurate), was valid. So was the second (“long form,” as it were.) It’s not a question of whether either was an original document or what have you. The certificate is under seal from the State of Hawaii — what that document really is, is not evidentiary proof of the birth as it is the state’s official position on whether a birth occurred and the specifics of that birth. The only difference between the “short form” and “long form” is when the document was generated. The moment the first birth certificate was released, the issue was dead. And the reason why is rooted in the chain of authority that generated the document.
See, the actual words on the document could be as factual as Lord of the Rings and it would still be valid — the recourse of those who dispute it would be to prove that, somehow, Hawaii’s vital records office, which answers to its director, which answers to the state Governor, generated and uttered a false document. And I wouldn’t put it past governments in general to do such a thing — anyone remember China’s 2008 gymnasts that were “born” on 1/1/94? — but it’s pretty far beyond the pale of an american State. In fact, this degree of shenaniganry would be unprecedented, though certainly possible. Too many careers would be in jeopardy if it were found out, and even the leftiest leftist is too much of an opportunist to fall on a grenade like that.
By way of credential of my correct understanding of how vital records laws work… I wrote them. For another state, not Hawaii, but there isn’t much substantive variance between the vital records laws of any of the fifty states. Most of the differences from state to state are procedural. This is a result of bureaucratic efficiency, of a sort, due to Article Six of the U.S. Constitution. Each state has to recognize as valid a vital record from the other states, so out of reciprocal convenience, they all make their records generally compatible with one another.
Obama is a U.S. citizen, period. That is, unless you can prove that there is fraud from the Hawaii executive on down to the lowliest clerk in the chain. And even then, you’ll have to prove that they got the local newspapers to play ball, adding in false birth announcements and such from half a century ago to their archived editions. Oh, and that nobody decided to cash in on the millions of dollars they would get by exposing the whole conspiracy and getting their book deal and touring the talk show circuit and so on. This hasn’t happened because THERE IS NO CONSPIRACY.
To Myrhaf you listen: Oppose the President’s policies, not the President’s passport.
“…We must kill this monster…”
The monster is us.
That is an awfully cynical comment, xqx.
Thanks for the comments, all. Mike, I’m satisfied by the birth certificates and the birth announcements in two Hawaiian newspapers. Even if Obama had not been born on US land, I think his American mother is enough to make him eligible.
I should have added in my post that our bad economy is not entirely Obama’s fault. The Republicans, Bush especially, bear some blame. As Yaron Brook has explained at length, the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, signed by Bush, has devastated the economy. Corporations are moving overseas to avoid the costs of complying to that law.
In epistemological terms, leftism is a product of severe concrete-boundness and the primacy of emotions.
This is true and it has to be that way. The Left is the product of epistemological nominalism – the belief that conceptual classifications are not connected to the real world. This leads to subjectivism and subjectivists have to be emotionalists at root. Leftism is another version of the primacy of consciousness only the consciousness they worship is a collective one; ie society. The Right’s version is the Judeo-Christian mythology.
Madmax: Exactly right.
Mike wrote:
To Myrhaf you listen: Oppose the President’s policies, not the President’s passport.
Hi Mike,
Is it my imagination or do I detect a Yoda Grammar Construct here?
Do or do not. There is no try.
We won the election and now these sore losers will continue to spew your hate with lies (They hate and can’t debate). The way our court system works is that you get a competent lawyer (Strike One), verifiable facts (Strike Two) and present them to a judge, if the facts are real and not half baked internet lies, then, and only then, you proceed to trial (Strike three). The Birthers seem to be having a problem with their so call facts (internet lies) that they present. Let’s face it no reasonable man or woman will go along with you until you guys win a case, but until then, you will continue to appear dumb, crazy or racist, or maybe all three. You guys are a bunch of sore losers and feeding on your own is still foolish.
The majority of voters elected this man. Freedom requires responsibility. And had the people cared enough about their individual rights as spelled out in the Constitution, to at least acquaint themselves with this most important document, Obama would never even have been on the ballot. He is just offering the people what they want;
Santa Claus and free lunch.