The Noah Diaries 2011 (11): Birther nonsense is all about dehumanization

FOX's birther "experts" debate, nutters rage over Obama's choice of church, Big Bad Gov't except . . . , Repugs & Ayn Rand


by Noah

4/27/11 -- Birther nonsense is all about dehumanization

A mere birth certificate can't stop a pack of rabid dogs. As soon as President Obama released his birth certificate, Republicans were torn between questioning its origin and moving on to the next phase of their ongoing efforts to dehumanize and delegitimize his very existence. Many prominent Republicans simply pivoted to another form of their Nazi-like "papers, please" approach. Within minutes of Obama showing his certificate, Drudge headlines screamed: "Now show us your transcripts." It's all about saying that a black man has no right, that he couldn't possibly have done so well in school, that he got special treatment, that he doesn't belong.

I remember when Eddie Murphy first made it big on SNL. He stayed in his hometown on Long Island, but he went out and immediately bought a Porsche. The result? Constantly being pulled over by cops for driving while black. They continually assumed that a young black dude in such a car must have stolen it. Murphy, in their eyes, didn't deserve his car, just as, to Republicans, Obama doesn't deserve to live in the big white house. After all, Republicans say, it is called "the White House."

Think about what this behavior says to children. It says that, if you are not white, no matter what you achieve and no matter how hard you work to achieve it, the Republican Party and its media slaves will not just question your legitimacy, they will go so far as to question your identity and humanity. One week later, one out of three in the crackpot party still believe that President Obama is from another country.

Why? Well, FOX continues to push the idea. FOX Business's Follow the Money (Eric Bolling) gathered "a panel of experts," for instance, and held a discussion on the matter, complete with a large blowup of the birth certificate. They talked about the "suspicious" border of the document and other "suspicious" aspects, even focusing on the color of the certificate.



In the clip, Bolling and total blithering, out-on-a-day-pass-crazy Pam Geller make a real special team. Former Nixonite Monica Crowley chimes in with her usual brand of gibberish. Like I always say, watching FOX is like going to an insane asylum and looking in on some kind of group meeting of poor souls who will never get out of the building again. During the segment the FOX camera lingered, without comment, on the stamped date of April 25, 2011. Of course that was just the date of the copy, but the FOX loons said nothing. They just wanted their sucker audience to have an "Aha!" moment.

FOX and the Republicans have been twitching badly since Obama got elected. Since then they have progressively gotten more and more whacked out, just spinning off farther and farther into the outer reaches of the solar system. I don't know how much more out-to-lunch you can be, but, if the president gets reelected, we will see their complete mental disintegration before our eyes, and no amount of meds will help them.


4/27/11 -- More Easter nuttiness: The Nutter Party wants to know where President Obama and his family go to church!

In a previous diary entry [see 4/24] I mentioned that the righties got their knickers all in a twist over President Obama's Easter message. The Nutter Party has gone so far as to question where he takes his family to church on Easter. We're not talking about Jeremiah Wright here. I'm talking about Bill-O putting on his Grand Wizard suit and whining about the minister of Shiloh Baptist Church in Washington, Wallace Charles Smith, and his views on the Constitution, damning him with one of the worst charges a Repug loon like Bill-O can make, calling him a "race activist." Hey, Bill, you mean like a "civil rights activist"? How dare people who aren't white fight for their right to vote or equal opportunity or even to exist!

Yes, how dare an African-American minister stand up for them darkies, eh, Bill-O? O'Reilly quotes a poll from the wingnut Rasmussen polsters. It paints a picture of Obama thinking our country is not fair. O'Reilly never says to whom. Just as he likes to paint the president as "untraditional," he slyly paints a picture of Obama not thinking like "normal" Americans do. He goes on at length about what an enigma he finds Obama to be, even managing to mention a book he wrote that included his "thoughts" about the president and how he, the great Bill-O, just can't get a grip on who or what Obama is.

He also says: "It is fair to ask exactly why President Obama would seek out a preacher like Rev. Smith. It doesn't seem to make much sense." Incredible. It's all this racist sicko's way of painting Obama as other, as strange -- all in the same day that Newt Gingrich mused that Obama was "very strange." Bill-O asks:

"How does President Obama see his country? . . . After almost two and a half years in office, Americans remain confused over that questions. I am confused.

No, Bill-O, you aren't confused at all, and those of us who don't drink your Jim Jones-like Mind Kool-Aid aren't confused either. But your agenda and that of your bosses is to confuse as many naïve folks as possible and scare the crap out of them about the man in the White House. This twisting is all about marginalization, delegitimization, and dehumanization. On the birth-certificate issue, Bill-O even claims that Obama could have ended the controversy years ago if he had just released it when asked.

Bill-O sneakily ignores the fact that no other president has had to justify his existence in such a manner. And then he says the whole thing was contrived by Obama for political reasons! He is so twisted that he thinks everyone thinks like he does. He does it all in a very sneaky manner and closes by saying that Obama won't get reelected if he continues to do "inexplicable" things. For his followers, the vileness O'Reilly spews is pure gold.

You can be Eddie Murphy or you can even be president of the Harvard Law Review, graduate from the most prestigious law school in the land and even become president, and Republicans will question your humanity, say you got where you got by some chicanery, or just don't deserve it. Would they have done this if Dubya was a Democratic president? Nope. They didn't even question his mediocrity at Yale. Did the media question McCain's fitness for office after his long stay in the hands of commies at the Hanoi Hilton? In the NFL there used to be a feeling that African-Americans couldn't be quarterbacks. The feeling was that they aren't smart enough to handle the complexity of the plays. To Republicans, Obama isn't smart enough to quarterback the country. He couldn't be! An L.A. Dodger official, Al Campanis, once said that African-Americans "lacked the necessities" to be managers of teams.

Batshit crazy birther queen Orly Taitz, given a chance to apologize on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, failed to. Instead, she babbled and shrieked incoherently, to the point where I expected some guys in white coats to stick a needle in her shoulder and haul her off to the asylum where she belongs. O'Donnell did the sensible thing. He cut her off. Pulled the plug on crazy. You get the notion that Reagan closed so many mental health facilities and put homeless and crazy people out on the curb just so they could work for FOX , vote for Republican candidates, or even be candidates themselves. How else do you explain this, or things like Republicans in Arizona even wanting to see circumcision records [see 4/17]? They've almost instantly gone from "May I see your papers, please?" to "Now I must see your penis."

Some Repugs are still saying that Obama spent millions on hiding his birth certificate. Obviously if he had, there would have been something in it when it was shown. FOX News had 50 segments devoted to the birther nonsense, complete with Trump's daily call-ins to the FOX morning show. No one at FOX ever mentioned that the story was a fraud.

Trump is speaking code to his fellow teabaggers when he says Obama should get "off the basketball court." And then he casts aspersions on how Obama got into Columbia and Harvard, implying that it's suspicious, like he didn't deserve it on merit. As Bob Schieffer said to Katie Couric, "That's just code for saying he got into law school because he's black." Trump spends a lot of time bitching to his naïve followers about China "eating our lunch" while at the same time he's manufacturing men's suits over there. This guy has zero credibility, period.

Speaking of zero -- Sarah Palin brought up the idea that Bill Ayers wrote Obama's book, harking back to the 19th-century days when Frederick Douglass had to have a respected white literary figure vouch for him. The Repugs would still have us believe that an African-American couldn't legitimately write a book, get into Columbia, get into Harvard, and certainly couldn't graduate magna cum laude from thate most prestigious law school. He had to have help. You know, they "lack the necessities."

The thing here about Palin that the lamestream media (to use her phrase) allows Palin to seriously imply that Obama's "terrorist pal" wrote the book without mentioning her very real but rarely discussed terrorist connections to the Alaskan secessionist movement. She squawks about how American the president of the United States might or might not be, but it is she who hung out with people who hated being part of the United States and it is she who even addressed them when they held one of their little "hate America" coffee klatsches.

The birthers and their allies enjoy living in a state of group psychosis. It's remarkably similar to the thing that got the followers of Jim Jones to drink the cyanide-laced Kool-Aid or enabled the purple-shroud guy to convince his followers to off themselves so their souls could all take a ride on a comet. If Jim Jones were alive and active today, he'd have a show on FOX.


4/28/11 -- Get Big Government off our backs, except when we're on our backs

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has spent a lot of time and hot air chirping about how his state doesn't want federal money, that Washington is the Big Bad Government, blah-blah-blah, all the usual crap you get from these crap artists. Then came a horrible tornado that cuts through his state and decimates Tuscaloosa, Bentley instantly sought out the nearest operating TV camera and made his plea for federal money to help repair the damage. How often have we seen this? It's so predictable. These people go around mouthing the words "Get government off our backs" and railing against FEMA, but when the tornado, hurricane, fire, or flood comes to town, it's a different story. Some things never change.


4/29/11 -- Repuglicans and Ayn Rand (and Ayn Rand vs. Jesus)

It's not so amazing that the Nut Party embraces Ayn Rand. After all, she based her philosophy on the actions and ravings of William Hickman, a mass murderer, and she felt that Hitler had some damn swell ideas about how to govern. What is amazing is that the Republican Party is so bouncing-off-the-walls desperate that they arranged funding and went overboard in promoting Atlas Shrugged: Part I, the start of a four-decades-delayed film adaptation of the novel (planned as the first of three parts!) by a militant atheist who openly despised everything Jesus Christ is credited with saying. Rand hated the very idea of Christianity and railed against it.

The Republican Party is a party that has previously devoted its entire being to claiming to be the voice of God and Jesus. Now that that isn't working as well as it once did, they embrace Rand and act as though they never heard of Christianity. They have revealed who they always have been, phonies who operate without a conscience. (No wonder they do so well in Washington.) Rand was completely pro-choice and had even less problem with abortion than your average pro-choice person. It was almost as if she championed abortion. How does that one reconcile with what your typical Repug Nutter has to say on the issue? Bottom line, she was a sociopath, so in that way she was perfect for the Republican Party.

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History in the making:
Selections from THE NOAH DIARIES 2011

Yesterday: (10) Birther news from America's new number-one nut state. Plus: Homo-haters hate "gay" identity, selling Altoona, Orange County weasels' "wit," mean Charlie Manson, and a war on Easter? (4/17-24/11)
Tomorrow: (12): Obama's real death panel -- the death of bin Laden. Crazed Repugs don't know how to react. Plus: Mel Gibson learns a better way to communicate, and more bin Laden craziness (5/2-7/11)

FOR A COMPLETE LISTING OF THE SERIES, CLICK HERE

And don't forget 2010's Year in Review series and 2009's "12 Days of Christmas Scorn"!

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