Birther Madness

Today I received an email from a man I quite frankly used to respect. He is a retired school superintendent, was president of a club I belong to, has a great sense of humor, and generally is a pleasant man to be around.

I have visited his home, met his wife; they seem like nice, decent people.

But he is a birther. He confronted me about a year ago, all excited that Obama can’t produce his birth certificate!

Frankly I had not paid much attention to the birther madness, seeing it for what it was (and is), radical right wing lunacy; conspiracy theory that attests to the panic they had pre-2010, that they were losing big politically.

The political motivations of what I perceived as bald faced lies were hugely transparent. At least I though most rational clear thinking people saw that.

Reluctantly I did some searching around the Internet to look into the lies.

It didn’t take very long before I was routed to WebPages that were filled with falsehoods, lies, and fantasy.

Then, I searched for fact based sites than operate to refute Internet lies. This was not hard to do at all, and I immediately found a host of sites that refuted what is basically birther lies.

Today, my friend’s email breathlessly proclaimed a story that Obama had not attended Columbia University at all, and in fact had mysteriously appeared in the mid 1980s and “nobody at Columbia” remembered him. Very mysterious, my friend proclaimed, and that is why conservatives like Donald Trump are “curious”.

I happened to remember a small issue in the 2008 campaign about a “theses” that Obama had allegedly written at Columbia that was un-American. As I recalled it was not a theses at all but a paper in an advanced Political Science class, that was anti-war in tone.

Obama claimed he had lost the paper, and his professor said he once had it but “threw it out” in a house cleaning.

Conservative pundits at the time accused the presidential candidate of covering up his un-American paper that he wrote at Columbia. The anti-Americanism of Obama was the gist of that lie.

Hmmm. He wrote the controversial paper at Columbia, and cons were making a big deal about it in 2008.

In 2010, the story has been resurrected that he never attended Columbia at all!

It appears the cons are trying to have it both ways, criticizing the candidate for a college paper he wrote, but now claiming he never attended the college at all. You can’t have it both ways!

So, back to the Internet I went and quickly found the absence of Obama at Columbia is pure fiction. In fact his roommate has come forward and told of his friendship with Obama the last two years at Columbia (Obama transferred from Occidental College in California as a junior). There is even a newspaper article he wrote that was published at Columbia, has been claimed by the Columbia Alumni Association as the “first Columbia graduate to be President of the United States” and so on (college transcripts, attendance records; et al).

So, I did something that cons do all the time, I papered my friend’s email with refutations of this nonsense, with links to many pieces of evidence that prove President Obama was: 1. Born in Hawaii in 1962. 2. Attended prep school in Hawaii, Occidental College, graduated from Columbia and Harvard Law. There are pictures, personal accounts; etc.

I then thought about my own past. I wonder what I would do if someone outright lied about my past, in an effort to portray me as some kind of mysterious threat, or undercover foreign agent. I have the yearbooks, I have the diplomas, but I would be highly upset, and would be very reluctant to discuss my past, in the face of outright lies. It is perfectly understandable that the President refuses to even acknowledge this nonsense. Of course, cons see this as a cover up.

I told my friend he was a fool, and our friendship had been jeopardized.

We all need to start doing this. If a conservative friend goes off into birther la la land we need to attack back with facts and figures. Ultimately friendships need to end.

Why? Because, and I have to warn you this is controversial, the tactics of the Birthers are exactly the same kind of propaganda lies the Nazi Party used to come to power in Germany. In that case, the Jews were the target, and German right wingers lied constantly about Jews causing the depression, Jews killing Christian children, Jewish conspiracies to destroy Germany; etc.

Progressive Germans at the time derided this radical foolishness as harmless, and suffered in concentration camps as a result.

America is no different. The Birther nonsense is not nonsense, it is a carefully planned propaganda war, directed at the President of the United States, African-Americans, and progressives in general.

The Birthers have shown they will do ANYTHING to discredit political opinion that does not merge with theirs. And worse, by stirring up irrational fears about the President, that he is somehow a foreign entity that mysteriously appeared to wreck havoc in America (the anti-Christ), they are purposely hoping some wing nut acts in unspeakable ways. In short, they are setting the President up!

If you don’t think this is the intent, remember what just happened in Arizona, where a U.S. Congresswoman was gunned down, with a nine year old, by a deranged man.

This is not fair, shout the cons. We didn’t put him up to it, he was mad.

Irrationality appeals to the irrational, the sick, and the perverted. The SS Storm troopers, supposedly Hitler’s elite, were irrational, sick and certainly perverted. Many of their members had been in insane asylums before Hitler came to power. Hitler was jailed during the 1920s for irrational behavior.

How else can you explain the systematic extermination of six million men, women and children? Madmen essentially took over the country and led it to ruin based on fantasy, lies and madness. There are several books about Hitler than chronicle his fantasy, his lies, his base madness.

Hate needs a fuse to start. The birthers are doing this on purpose to stir fear and hate

If we do not react and fight back against this, we could suffer the same fate as the progressive German of 1935.

It is called fascism.