News The birther movement: racist? total crap?

[Vanadium 50]

I was referring to the issue being settled by the Senate hearing for McCain, not settled back then in that lawsuit.

This was a "Sense of the Senate" vote. To be a law, the House must pass and the President must sign.

You mean all those kids I fathered overseas in my Navy days are natural born citizens of hhe U.S.?

They are citizens, provided you were a US citizen when serving with the US Navy, that you spent 5 years in the US before the birth of the child and at least 2 of those years were when you were over 14.

 

[Newai]

It didn't have the same level of hostility, IMO.

Besides, it's widely accepted that being born on an overseas military base is the same as being born in the US. The thousands of US citizens born on foreign bases have *exactly* the same rights as everyone else - no one would ever think to deny them their rights.

I think the issue around McCain's birth was largely a media-manufactured "story du jour" - they come and go all through election season. This one didn't stick - it was a non-issue from the get-go.

Yeah. I don't know if there's any way to qualify/quantify/prove any scale of racism in the birthers, but I'd gamble that the racist mix appreciate the conspiracy more than what McCain had to put up with.

 

[Office_Shredder]

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...ases-obama-birth-certificate/?hpt=T1&iref=BN1

They must have been sitting on this for 3 years just to turn it into political capital at the right time

 

[DevilsAvocado]

Has anybody of the discussers here any idea what a [strike]fight[/strike] discussion like this does to the image of the USA?

We don’t know if we should laugh or cry, and when you see a PF Mentor backing up this kind of conspiracy crap – I think it’s the later...

Anyhow, all crackpots should be ashamed and stop rambling – today http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/apr/27/barack-obama-birth-certificate-statement#":

This is all utterly stupid. Now we are waiting for the "< IQ65" to declare this a "Photoshop fraud"...

I guess this is a "New World Order Conspiracy", including passports and everything...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvqgyV_2pHg


EDIT - More info:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/04/27/president-obamas-long-form-birth-certificate

 

[russ_watters]

Yay! You hit it on the head, they're crackpots! Whereas *actual, serious candidates* on the right believe this stuff.

Big, big difference!

If someone is a crackpot for believing something that isn't true then they are a crackpot for believing something that isn't true. Saying that some are and some aren't is a contradiction.

You're talking about politicians here lisa - just because one has a lot of support that doesn't mean they aren't still a crackpot. You're falling into the fallacy that crackpot is crackpot because it isn't the mainstream view. That's not what the word means. Crackpottery is about the truth and the way it is investigated. The truth is not a popularity contest. Heck by suggesting that you're falling into exactly the fallacy that's causing the problem in the first place! Popularity =/ legitimacy

 

[thorium1010]

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.co...ases-obama-birth-certificate/?hpt=T1&iref=BN1

They must have been sitting on this for 3 years just to turn it into political capital at the right time

The nuts will be silenced (hopefully) once and for all.

 

[BobG]

Yay! You hit it on the head, they're crackpots! Whereas *actual, serious candidates* on the right believe this stuff.

Big, big difference!

Calling Sarah Palin and Donald Trump serious candidates might be a little bit of an exaggeration. However, at least a few members of Congress from more conservative districts have no problem exploiting this myth:

Roy Blunt, R-MO (however, he later backtracked, saying his comments were taken out of context)
Jean Schmidt, R-OH (however, she later backtracked, saying her comments were taken out of context)
David Vitter, R-LA (he wound up having enough problems of his own that his birther comments faded into the noise)

While I didn't support tea party candidate Ken Buck for US Senate in CO, I did like one of the comments he made that was inadvertantly recorded, and later released just to embarrass him:

... tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I'm on the camera.

Ironically, the birther movement was started by Clinton supporters during the primaries, which is why it lasted much longer than any McCain controversy (in fact, I think it was questions about Obama's citizenship that got people wondering about McCain's citizenship status).

If it does have racial overtones, they pale compared to the conspiracy theories tossed around about McCain during the 2000 South Carolina primaries.

And its political effect certainly pales compared to the http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=aASYBT9Pwt4E&refer=us in the 2004 election. Those ads had such a huge impact that the term 'swiftboating' replaced the term 'borking' in the dictionary of political lingo. Half of Republicans believed Kerry lied about his war record during that campaign - even more than believe the "birther conspiracies".

In my opinion, the "birther conspiracy" is part of the usual BS that always lays out at the edges of political campaigning. Racial issues may play a part in how many people believe it, but it would be hard to nail down the racial issues as being the reason more people believe this particular conspiracy. Marketing (and the Swift Boat ads were marketed very effectively) plays a bigger part than the race issues.

 

[russ_watters]

I've attacked the idea that this is about racism, but I haven't really explained the alternative. So here's how these things happen:

1. A handful of crackpots invent and spread a crackpot idea.
2. The media, not wanting to miss out on a juicy story, picks it up regardless of if it is legitimate or not - they cover it while not necessarily promoting the crackpot idea. The existence of Fox and MSNBC tends to serve as a bridge because they are more likely to pick up these crackpot bits and if they pick it up, other media outlets are forced to also so they don't lose any more viewers to the sensationalists than they already have.
3. The public sees the story in the mainstream media and regardless of the characterization it is given, judges that popularity = legitimacy. Having a "legitimate" politician pushing it adds to the perception of legitimacy.
4. Now believing there is a legitimate controversy because of #3, the public is forced to pick a side. So people pick sides based on their political persuasion/bias.

Remember, most people in the public haven't even looked at a photo of Obama's birth certificate and probably barely even skimmed the articles, so they decide based on their biases, not based on a thorough understanding of the issue. But the bias here isn't (predominantly) racism, it's politics.

A year or so ago, a lot of effort was put into proving that conservatives are more likely to believe false things than liberals and we discussed a heavily biased study in here that "proved" that. The study "proved" it by primarily asking about falshoods that conservatives might buy while not asking about ones that liberals might buy, so it was badly flawed in that sense, but it did show that a very significant fraction of the population is ignorant/lazy/gullible/extreme enough in their pursuit of truth that they'll buy anything that fits with their beliefs. And that's all the birther "movement" is about.

This phenomena is far too widespread and common for it to be reasonable to focus it on Obama and a racism motivation.

And a semi-related other side of the coin: Remember, Obama is not black by birth, he's black by choice. By birth, he's half black, half white, but he chose to label himself and promote himself as being black. So who'se really playing the race card here?

 

[Evo]

We don’t know if we should laugh or cry, and when you see a PF Mentor backing up this kind of conspiracy crap – I think it’s the later...

Anyhow, all crackpots should be ashamed and stop rambling – today http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/apr/27/barack-obama-birth-certificate-statement#":

Where's the embossed stamp? That's got to be the next critique.

Anyway, the mentors have decided to put the *birther* topic on the banned topics list.