No Bebop

Back on May 5, I backhanded the birther movement into the cheap seats, thinking that the whole deal was long past its sell-by date. Imagine my surprise to discover that Lou Dobbs thinks this is still worth talking about two and a half months later. He actually started down this road a few weeks ago on his radio show, but has since migrated the lunacy to his CNN show, where he actually brought on Dr. Orly Taitz DDS Esq. to spout her mostly fraudulent case. (See link to my earlier piece.)

There was a news hook in all of this, in that a Maj. Stefan Cook, a reservist, volunteered for duty in Afghanistan several months ago, then filed a lawsuit claiming that he could not be lawfully deployed because Barack Obama is not lawfully president of the United States because he was not born here. And dentist/lawyer/real estate agent (thanks to Jon Stewart for flagging the latter occupation) Taitz is representing Cook. This was enough for Dobbs to justify airing out this batshit talking point one time, but he hasn’t stopped since then, treating this as though it was an actual story. And since he’s doing it on CNN, he’s got all the rest of the wingnutosphere chattering about it once more. (To be fair, not all the conservatives are on board, as this Media Matters story notes.)

And what does it say about CNN that half the news staff has debunked birtherism multiple times, has done so repeatedly ever since Dobbs started riding this broken-down hobbyhorse, and yet the president of the network won’t reel him in? Jonathan Kline initially issued a memo declaring the birther story “dead,” but then told a reporter he would let Dobbs go on issuing his unfounded and uninformed declarations that Obama needs to produce his birth certificate. He has.

Meanwhile, Kitty Pilgrim appeared as a substitute host on Lou Dobbs’ own CNN show and completely debunked the whole birther fairy tale, yet Dobbs came back to work and picked up where he left off. Shouldn’t one of the rules of a reputable news organization be that people can’t use the organization to promote opinions that are contradicted by the news organization’s own reporting?  That goes just as strongly for the Washington Post’s continual coddling of neoconservatives in general and George Will’s uninformed blather about global warming in particular. Not to mention the complete detachment of the Wall Street Journal’s wingnutty opinion page from its far more substantive general news desk.

Note to CNN: Your representatives have gleefully noted the existence of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC to impugn the quality of its news coverage, to suggest that MSNBC plays for one side and isn’t “authoritative” and “objective” like CNN is. Well folks, Olbermann and Maddow may bring a liberal viewpoint to the network, but there is no proof that they promote stories whose very premises are completely false.

Lou Dobbs does. On your network. Not just with the birthers, but with immigration and the “North American Union” as well. He’s repeatedly lied about illegals from Mexico causing a new epidemic of leprosy even after he was shown that his figures were exaggerated by a factor of 10. He’s constantly hyped the merger of the U.S. Mexico and Canada despite a complete lack of proof, and he’s blown up a toll road project in Texas into a “pan-American” highway connecting Mexico to Canada.

By the way, take a trip back to my original birther post and note the bits about how Dr. Lawyer, Realtor, DDS, and fellow nutjob Phil Berg are trading accusations about committing fraud,  stealing mailing lists and putting “rootkits” on computers visiting the Taitz website. On top of all his journalistic malpractice, Dobbs may be unwittingly helping these grifters commit fraud — and ironically enough, to commit it against the people stupid enough to believe these people, or at least watch Dobbs.

It’s no coincidence that Dobbs has added birtherism to his list of complaints. Anti-immigrant fervor has an undercurrent of racism, which you don’t have to look very hard to uncover. Birtherism is just another way to put a reasonable face on what is an unreasonable opposition to a duly elected African-American president.

One of our more prominent birthers, after all, is James W. von Brunn, the alleged shooter at the Holocaust Museum early in June, a noted white supremacist and anti-Semite. Just because the rest of the birthers aren’t in custody or spending all their time dancing around burning crosses doesn’t mean the crux of their opposition isn’t racist. They can claim their bitch with Obama is that he’s a “socialist” all they want, but he won the election fair and square. Obama’s not a socialist, he’s not a foreigner, yet despite the fact that these are easily provable propositions, the birthers still don’t think he’s a legitimate president. Remember, none of these people had to be convinced that George W. Bush was a legitimate president despite the fact that an official recount of Florida would have thrown the state, and the election, to Al Gore — and that such a recount was prevented by an ideologically biased Supreme Court.

At an election night party, Sandra Day O’Connor became upset when the media initially announced that Gore had won Florida, her husband explaining that they would have to wait another four years before retiring to Arizona.[52]

No such chicanery accompanied the election of Barack Obama, so the birthers are clinging to the petrified tit of the birth certificate “controversy” to support their assertion that Obama is not a legitimate president. Some might reasonably argue that this is just part and parcel of the wider Republican/wingnut modus operandi — look at the grade A political horseshit that was thrown at the last Democratic president and his wife to delegitimize his presidency. So one might simply say the stories about Obama are different, but the intent and purpose are the same as those deployed against the Clintons.

That, however, would be overlooking the kind of crap that actual Republicans have no compunction about forwarding to each other about Obama. Like this lovely item below. And don’t miss the Drudge Report treading similar ground.

There are plenty more examples than just the one above. But you know what? Rave on, birthers, and take the Republican opinion leaders with you. If this keeps you idiots occupied while the adults in the room fix our health care system, knock yourselves out.

UPDATE: A little more context on what I said earlier about Taitz and Berg.

FURTHER UPDATE: Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the noted global warming denier and reactionary nutbar, said this week the birthers “have a point.” Yes, and if they wear a hat nobody will notice it. And that goes double for the contemptable Inhofe.

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