President Obama should be celebrating his birthday next week in peace. However, there are people who simply refuse to accept the fact that the Chief Executive was in fact a native of Hawaii.
They call themselves "birthers". I call them attention-seeking idiots who are mere flies on the wall compared to the larger problems that Obama has to deal with. These people refuse to accept the fact that the President, who represented Illinois as its junior Senator prior to becoming President last year, is a Hawaiian native, instead insisting that he is originally from Kenya. Obama is of Kenyan descent, and spent some of his formative years there, but as of Monday, Hawaii state officials once again verified that he was born in their state. That should be the end of the story right there, but these "birthers" won't let it drop. They listen to talk radio gasbags like Rush Limbaugh, and accept his word as gospel. Limbaugh's better off writing for a supermarket tabloid if this is what his "dittoheads" have become.
No, the truth of the matter is the "birthers" are upset because Obama is the first African-American to be elected President. They needed to find a cause to rally around in order to get attention. It doesn't matter to them that their outrageous claims have been denied repeatedly. They think it needs to be investigated completely, top to bottom. Sorry, geeks, it's not X-Files-worthy, and it never has been.
I have a pen pal in Long Island who is developmentally challenged, and believes in ridiculous conspiracies like this. I have told him repeatedly that "birthers" such as Philip J. Berg are way, way off base with their claims, but he won't listen. Neither will the "birthers" themselves, but I've got one simple, solitary message for these people:
The President is an American citizen. Get over it, get over yourselves, and get a life!
Birthers are a pretty contemptible lot, but you can go too far by assuming that they're just attention-seekers. By that logic, anyone who takes a controversial or non-mainstream position -- right, left or otherwise -- is an attention-seeker. I imagine that the majority of birthers seethe in anonymous paranoia. They're bad enough as they are without adding unfair charges against them.
ReplyDelete"Unfair", Sammy? I think not. I cannot help but think of these "birthers" as a bunch of paranoid, pseudo-racist, insecure jerkwads who just don't dig the current President. I hope you've got something to say over at the Institute.
ReplyDeleteI didn't dispute their paranoia, crypto-racism or insecurity. I only dispute your charge that they're motivated by a craving for attention. And I said my piece on the subject earlier this month.
ReplyDeleteThe last thing I'm going to say on this, Sammy, is that if Obama had lost the election, none of this crap would be continuing.
ReplyDeleteGoogle "John McCain" and "Panama Canal Zone" and get back to me on that. In any event, partisan bias doesn't translate into attention-seeking, and that was your original charge.
ReplyDelete