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."
Jamie forgot to mention the ones who openly express doubts that Obama’s a citzen, like Cathy McMorris (R-WA), Charles Boustany (R-LA) and Greg Harper (R-MS). Sure it was an oversight.
"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.
Cue Roy Blunt:
"What I don’t know is why the president can’t produce a birth certificate. I don’t know anybody else that can’t produce one. And I think that that’s a legitimate question – no health records, no birth certificate."
Cue James Inholfe:
"They have a point," he said of the birthers…"I don’t discourage it."
Cue Rush Limbaugh:
Barack Obama has yet to have to prove he’s a citizen.
But Jane’s the one who’s "wildly irresponsible." Mmm-hmm.
And what about that legislation requiring presidential candidates to submit birth certificates, introduced by Republican Bill Posey (R-FL) who said he couldn’t "swear on a stack of bibles" that Obama is a citizen? Just a coincidence!
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.
Er, of course Obama would pass. That doesn’t mean Posey’s bill isn’t birther bullshit.
Finally, we get the "but the left has kooks too!" whine.
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.
And lots of Republicans.
In the Research 2000 poll, only 7 percent of Democrats have doubts about Barack Obama’s origins. That compares, in the Rasmussen poll, to 26 percent of Republicans who had doubts about George Bush’s role in 9/11, and 43 percent who had doubts about whether the CIA had advanced knowledge of the attacks.
That was all Daily Kos’ fault. Or was it Atrios?
Related posts:
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- Obama’s Health Care Address: The Republican Response
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BT, little do they know that it is really you who is manipulating the whole enchilada! They are so stoopidz!
Welcome Daily News readers! Take a tour of the website that has Jamie Kirchick scared to death. There’s beer in the fridge and I understand that Blue Texan has got burgers and brats on the grill outside.
Thank goodness for foul mouthed fembloggers!!!
(WARNING: anything that reveals the truth is considered very foul at birther sites…)
Great takedown, BT!!
far-left…
And birthers are?
If “far left” is now the “voice of reason”, I’ll take the name calling and label with honor.
PW, how are you liking your new senator so far?
Don’t forget that Obama also had his grandmother killed.
[slaps forehead]
Do these nitwits not realize how much power they are conceding to the liberal bloggers by saying that Jane and others did this? Their lack of coherent thought is ever amazing.
So much crying shows that this small, southern, political party is just not ready to play in the big leagues.
It fits their victimhood mentality. The liberal media, the liberal bloggers, and George Soros — and of course all those unions and minorities — really run the country. Those lowly, downtrodden and despised conservatives are badly outnumbered, and if it wasn’t for people like the very brave Jamie Kirchick giving them a voice, they’d be practically powerless.
It’s them damn Liberals it’s always their fault !! LOL !
This is issue so ridiculous that I can’t believe it’s still out there !!
The stupid runs real real deep in this country and the birthers got more than their share !
Oh, so are you trying to tell me that the Sept. 11 attacks did not occur with the foreknowledge of George W. Bush? (Click the link before you hoot at me — it doesn’t go to the 9/11 truthers.)
Right, cervantes. That’s what makes that a tough question to poll. “Bin Laden determined to strike US” is pretty explicit.
“far-left Web site FireDogLake”
FDL Pups. If you believe you are “far left” I have bad news. You are not.
When compared withe the British Labor Part up until it elected a Tory, Tony Blair, as its leader. Now there was a hardline socialist party, and even the British labor Party had a “left wing”.
They have seen teh power of teh Rabid Venomous Lambshers of the Left, and tremble with fear . . . except for brave, brave, Sir Jamie.
And Republicans couldn’t have undone all the economic protections of the New Deal, if that damn Roosevelt hadn’t put them in place. So really, this economic downturn is Roosevelt’s fault.
There, do I have Republican “logic” down?
Better to be far left than far out.
So it’s Jane’s fault that 47% of Southerners are not sure if Obama was born in the United States. That number rises to 70% if only white Southerners are included (Daily Kos front page last week), since non-white Southerners answer the question as rationally as people do outside the South. Hopefully, the people in my city of Nashville answer the question better, given that Nashville is not part of the Republican base in the South.
We were so much younger then… .
That stuff about 1/3 Democrats thinking Bush had “foreknowledge” of the 9/11 attacks is a zombie lie.
Unsurprisingly, this was a Rasmussen poll, always worthless when it comes to issues polling (as opposed to election polling). Anyway the Rasmussen question was to do with “foreknowledge” on the part of the Bushites in regards to 9/11 — which creates ambiguity, since the Bushites really did have all sorts of warnings that they at best ignored. Anyway the poll is always used by wingnuts as if it proves “a third of Dems are conspiracy theorists,” but that’s not what the poll actually reveals.
Scripps-Howard did ask in 2006 a much more specific question about if the Bushites knew about the specific 9/11 plot and deliberately did nothing — the actual conspiracy theory along the lines of FDR letting Pearl Harbor happen — and only got 16% of all Americans to say they did.
This particular stat comes up a LOT, never with a source, and is part of the folklore. Extremely irritating. Especially given the high numbers of Republicans who continue to think Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11.
See, for openers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_opinion_polls
How profound!
Best that you explain to New Yorkers just what “brats on the grill” means.
*puts on editor hat*
That should be Inhofe, not Inholfe.
*removes editor hat*
Bratwurst. LOL.
Don’t they have bratwurst in NY??
Republic logic: it’s never their fault if bad things happen; it’s always to their credit if good things happen. Limpy Limbaugh has built his entire career on this same logic.
Somebody in Hawaii is missing a chance to make money. They should put a link on their state website ORDER YOUR OWN COPY OF BARAK OBAMA’S BIRTH CERTIFICATE and set up a profitable service charge.
Boxturtle (Everything in life worth knowing comes from the Ferengi)
And Gawd will fix Gov Sanford
Of course. It’s the get-out-of-jail-free card for Republics. Works every time, but only if you are a Republic. If you try it and you are not a Republic, you will be scorned and riddiculed loudly by Republics
Has anyone heard that at least one Freshman Democratic Rep has been physically assaulted by an astro-turf mob?
It’s just shameful. And right-wing talking heads won’t acknowledge their complicity in whipping up the wingnuts.
Wouldn’t this be considered an act of terrorism based on the legal definition put in place during the W admin? It was clearly a politically-motivated act of violence.
I DEMAND my check from Soros! Where is it? Yes, it’s FDL’s fault that the Republican Congress folks look so stupid! Why, how dare Mike Stark actually videotape them staying stupid, stupid things about the whole birfer controversy? Have you no shame, Mike Stark? Don’t you have a celebrity death upon which to comment?
Yeah anyway, btw where’s my cursed pitchfork?
Democratic “Infighting,” Or Keeping Blue Dogs From Selling Out Health Care?
Jane’s upstairs
Hey now we can all have our very own Kenyan birth certificate
http://kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com/
oo
Jane to be on MSNBC
Awesome!1!
“That Jane was always up to no good !” – Jakuna Hamsher, Jane’s Kenyan/Hawaiian/Islamofascist Granny
Yes we have nuts on the Left.
On the other hand a large number of claims made back in 2001 to 2004 by DFH’s in blatant violation of Godwin’s Law turn out to have been fully grounded in fact. I mean Robert Fisk was so discredited back in the day that the execise in deconstructing his work by the 101st Fighting Keyboardist’s got its own name. Any claims that Bush took this country into war on a lie were well and thoroughly ‘fisked’. )http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisking
I mean what kind of an idiot would claim that Saddam had no WMD? And did you know that Scott Ritter likes teenage girls. Well Fisk and Ritter and DFH’s like Billmon and Steve Gilliard are in retrospect looking pretty god-damned vindicated. But all at the time were condemned as anti-American crazies afflicted with BDS. As of course was Kos. How dare he dismiss brave U.S. contractors killed for no reason as ‘mercs, screw-em’. At the time it flared up into a huge blaze called ‘Screw ‘em-gate’ and forced the Kerry campaign to apologize and give back some on-line contributions. Because it was just beyond the pale to besmirch the brave men and women defending freedom under the employ of Blackwater, Inc. (Yes those four guys killed and hung in Fallujah were actually heavily armed former commandos and not escorting a phantom food shipment). http://revcom.us/a/1236/blackwater.htm
Given yesterday’s release of court papers about Blackwater I doubt many people are demanding apologies from Kos today, some hired murderors ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Screw ‘em
As to 9/11 Truthers most of them are crazy, or anti-Semitic, or crazily anti-Semitic. The notion that the Bushies ARRANGED for the towers to collapse is insane. All they needed to get this country to go to war was an attack, they didn’t need to go to the lengths assumed in the typical Truther narrative. On the other hand there are enough open questions about the details of the timeline around Bush’s departure from his hotel to his arrival at Booker Elementary on the morning of the attacks to raise some serious questions about what ‘Bush Knew’ that morning. Unfortunately we will never be able to extract those questions from the morass around the larger Truther narrative and still less get them answered.
Similarly there are, or at least were, legitimate questions about whether actions that Soetoro took or might have took in regards to his step-son might have effected Obama’s citizenship. As it turns out the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made all those questions legally moot, you can grant them every claim of fact and their case STILL falls apart. But they were not necessarily crazy to raise them at the time. On the other hand Orly Taitz trying to get an easily proved forged birth certificate ‘authenticated’ by a Federal District Court is pretty bat-shit crazy.
Not all Birthers and Truthers are equally crazy, just as not all BDS afflicted DFH’s were unhinged back in 2002, Bush and Cheney WERE engaged on a huge criminal exercise to undermine the Constitution. But we should not forget there was a time when Digby and Jane and Kos were considered by most of America (or most of that minority of America that knew of them) as crazy.
‘Bush lied’ is no longer in much dispute. ‘Bush knew’ is still considered crazy talk by association with the current band of Truthers. But deep in that morass of paranoia are some unanswered questions about the morning of Sept 11, 2001. Because it all depends on exactly how you define both “foreknowledge” and “9/11 attacks”
Signed, Ambiguous Zombie.
Kirchick’s a Log Caibinette wuss.
Well, a PDB from over a month before 9/11 would presumably imply some foreknowledge on the part of the P for whom the DB was prepared. But…
Saying Chimpy had foreknowledge based on this PDB would also imply that he actually read the damn thing. And you know how he feels about reading anything at a higher level than “My Pet Goat”. (BTW, wasn’t this PDB the one where his response was something to the effect of “You covered your ass, now go away”?)
A real conundrum, no?
Badwater –
Love your parallel use of “Republic” to counteract the ridiculously childish “Democrat Party” crap the wingnuts hurl. I thought I was the only one who did that.
Maybe we can start a movement!
Also fluoride in their water. Or does that cause communism?
They call this a ‘far left’ blog? Why couldn’t they at least say “foul-mouthed far left”?
The Truth will out if Jane Hamsher has a say in the matter!
And, as we all know, the Truth has a left-leaning bias.
I blame Atrios. Plus that lazy bastard went to a ball game tonight.