What is behind the Birther Movement?

Racism.  Mixed with Nativism.  Two different impulses, though perhaps the difference between the definition of the two words is a distinction without a difference.  But Barack Obama is Black., and comes from off the mainland.  And his father is from Kenya, and he extolls those roots.

A few days back, I heard a caller to a conservative talk radio show — the same sort of woman as the “I Want My country Back” lady who made famous a town-hall meeting with Mike Castle — made this concrete.  The radio show was, um, the Sunday morning I should have the radio on to NPR and “This American Life” but for some reason have it on here instead  Kramer and Abrams — which actually is, to be fair, a conservative and a quasi-liberal show with a a conservative listener and caller base…

The woman went off on Sonia Sotomayer, and demanded to know why they were not covering the fact that Sotomayor was an illegal immigrant who didn’t really have a Harvard Law Degree.  And then she asked why they weren’t covering Obama’s Birth Certificate controversy.  The two items go hand in hand, and are the product of the same premise, inextricably linked.

The best lines of comparison for the Democratic side on this fringe into mainstream movement are the “Stolen Elections”, (in particular 2004 and Ohio; I say that by way of lending my own credence to Florida and 2000), and the 9/11 Truth Movement — which is to say, Democrats and Liberals holding town-hall meetings uncomfortably squirm with audiences peppering them on questions over those matters.   Ohio 2004 can be explained by Florida 2000, directly.  9/11 Truth is a tad more complicated, but it comes in part from the manner people concoct fanciful conspiracies due to the fanciful conspiracies that actually exist, the less than stellar motives of people and institutions in power, and their not wholly democratic nature.

My point is “9/11 Truth” is a marginally more sympathetic cause than the “Birther’s”, because their underlying assumptions have more grains of truth than the “Birthers”.  The Birthers come from a simple distruct of black (and, as that radio talk show caller showed, brown) people.

To what degree does the Republican Party have a “Birther” Problem?  They have more of one than they might be willing to admit.  We have seen a rise in legitimizers of this “movement”.  There is, by dent of a large number of co-sponsors to a presidents must show birth certificate bill, a Birther Caucus in the House of Representatives — I suppose every constituency needs to be fed.  Rush Limbaugh has poked one step beyond his previous joke (which I defended on this blog) to a statement.  (And why not?  He cites World Net Daily with all seriousness, which is a source that is right there in “Birther Land”).  The “Fox Nation” website, a strange blunter version of Fox News, has a forum for discussion of Obama’s birth certificate.  And there are several conservative radio hosts, if you flick your am dial back and forth, who discuss this seriously.
As well Lou Dobbs.

The opinion journals should take the matter head on.  As a means of comparison, Eric Alterman for the Nation wrote an item a few years ago where he addressed the groups of 9/11 Truthers who always poked that question in his book and speaking tours.  This inevitably makes him a “Gate-keeper” for the conspiratorialists, and that is the point.   (As well Markos Moulitsas who banned that thing from his blog).  National Review gives us this, from David Horowitz (after some mild “raising of the issue” from Jim Geraghty).  I think we can say that “Birth Certificate Madness” is more extricably tied with the Republicans than 9/11 Truth is for the Democrats — so I suppose a brusk and regular mocking in the bullet-points section of those magazines might serve them well.

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