(Hey Libs, knock it off, we need to get on to more serious issues!)
Liberals' birther obsession: It's the left-wing, not the GOP, that's pumping up the story
By James Kirchick
NY Daily News
Wednesday, August 5th 2009, 4:00 AM
Kirchick is an assistant editor of The New Republic.
You could be forgiven for thinking that a serious campaign is afoot - aided and abetted by the national Republican Party - to question Barack Obama's citizenship. Over the past two weeks, an inordinate amount of news coverage has been afforded to "birthers," conspiracy theorists who claim that the President was not born in Hawaii, as his birth records indicate, but in Kenya.
It is not Obama's right-wing opponents, however, who are devoting the most attention to this obscure, Internet-driven "movement," if one can even use that label to describe such a paranoid groupuscule. Rather, it's liberals, bent on portraying their conservative opponents as extremists - and changing the subject to help a President under increasing scrutiny for the substance of his policies - who are driving this story.
Making the rounds in the propagation of this meme is a deceptively edited video produced by far-left Web site FireDogLake, in which an interviewer chases Republican congressmen around the Capitol asking if they believe Obama is a natural-born citizen. Some respond in the affirmative while others ignore the questioner, and it is this latter handful that liberals have proffered as evidence that the GOP is "fearful" of disparaging its "birther base."
But the refusal of Republican congressmen to answer questions from a Michael Moore wanna-be is understandable; public figures are frequently accosted on the street by crazy people and amateur propagandists wielding cameras. In fact, it was later revealed that one of the supposedly fearful Republicans running from the camera's glare was a Democrat late for a vote.
Don't tell that to the birther-obsessed left. "The video makes clear that the Republican Party is captive to their conspiracy theory-mongering base all the way up to the top," wrote left-wing blogger Jane Hamsher. It shows no such thing of course, and Hamsher's wildly irresponsible claim about "conspiracy theory-mongering" rising to the pinnacles of GOP power was flatly contradicted by House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, who said "No" when asked by a reporter if he had any questions about the circumstances of Obama's birth.
Nor does the fact that 10 Republican congressmen are sponsoring a bill requiring candidates for President to supply their birth certificates to the Federal Election Commission prove anything about the depths of "birtherism." The test wouldn't apply until 2012, and even then, Obama would pass with flying colors.
Hysteria over the concocted magnitude of birtherism reached an almost comical fever pitch last week when Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) requested that a vote on a resolution honoring the 50th anniversary of Hawaiian statehood be delayed. The decree cited Hawaii as Obama's birthplace, causing liberals to jump on the episode as evidence of the GOP's embrace of birthers. Yet the reason for Bachmann's motion, as anyone remotely familiar with congressional procedure would know, was nothing more scandalous than the absence of a quorum. The resolution passed unanimously several days later.
Far from seeing these charges as any sort of real threat to Obama's legitimacy, liberals report every outburst of the birther brigades with glee - because they derive maximum political benefit from stirring up the story as long as possible. Why debate the intricacies of a massive overhaul of the nation's health care system when you can conflate principled conservative critics of the program with a bunch of nutty conspiracy theorists?
"An artificial controversy is getting far too much attention lately," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) intoned on Monday - on the Senate floor, no less - before giving "attention" to said "artificial controversy."
Yes, it's true. A new poll shows high numbers of Republicans doubting whether Obama was, in fact, born in the U.S. But a 2007 poll found a third of Democrats convinced that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, occurred with the foreknowledge of the Bush administration. The pervasiveness of such conspiracies about the government's complicity in the deadliest assault on American soil is far more worrying than groundless doubts about the legitimacy of the President's birth certificate.