Trumped Up

I almost missed this one.

As Donald Trump ascends ever higher in the estimation of teabaggRs, based only on his enthusiasm for birtherism (so much for those who think Obama had no qualifications to be president -- the same people who love The Donald for none but this), it's fun to look around at what such as those who support him call evidence.

Convincing to those who need no convincing, it's been discovered that an iconic pic of BHO with his grandparents was photoshopped. The president, they claim, was, in fact, never in this picture:

The proof? Looky here, at the real picture: he's nowhere to be seen:





Well, mostly nowhere. If you don't count his knee.

Think Or Swim

Asked why he refused to call out Republicans who, in depressingly large numbers, still believe Barack Obama is not a US citizen, John Boehner said, "It's not my job to tell people what to think." I find that amusing in a clarifying sort of way.

Isn't that what all politicians do, all the time? Tell us what to think? Aren't they pretty much wholly committed to convincing people that their ideas (applying the term generously) are worth adopting? The Speaker of the House, third in line for the presidency, isn't in the business of being a thought leader? On health care, deficits, war, and Planned Parenthood?

Of late, for reasons even more unfathomable than Beckian theories on communists and Egypt, there's been an attempt (I'd say it's out of embarrassment, but I don't think the term applies to the RWS™ or R leaders or teabaggers) to toss off those birther numbers as some sort of left-wing conspiracy. Connecting dots visible only on the inside of their skulls, such people as Debra Saunders (and the occasional commenter here) claim the problem is that liberals are "flogging" the story to make conservatives look "like rubes." Creative. It's not that these people are rubes (a refreshingly archaic term) for believing Barack Obama was born in Kenya; it's that liberals keep pointing it out.

I'm still processing...

What makes that proposition particularly laughable is where we started, with John Boner simpering in his seat, coyly refusing to influence thinking on the matter, perish the thought. If, as Ms Saunders claims, birtherism is somehow a liberal plot, why doesn't the titular head of political Republicans do everything he can to shoot it down? Might it just be that he calculates such foolish flames help stoke the fires of resentment and hatred that got him his shiny new office? What are RWS™ about, if not that?

Birtherism -- its evolution and hyping and relentless promotion by the RWS™ and Fox "news" -- does, however, help me understand another and much more opaque mystery: if a majority of potential Republican voters choose to believe, against definitive and unquestionable proof, that our president is foreign-born, it shouldn't be surprising that they also accept the mythologizing about and reject the failures of Ronald Reagan, to believe he was our greatest president ever.

Now that is testimony to the power of the right-wing propaganda and disinformation media coalition. That's strange we can believe in.

Governing Principle

Maybe this guy can knock some sense into birthers:

Reporting from Honolulu —

Neil Abercrombie knew Barack Obama's parents when the future president was born here in 1961, and he has been aggravated by the so-called birther movement, which alleges Obama was not born in the United States and thus should be expelled from office.

Now Abercrombie has an office of his own — he became governor of Hawaii on Dec. 6. — and he intends to do something about it.

What, exactly, is unclear. But in an interview this week at the state Capitol, he left little doubt that torpedoing the conspiracy theorists was a priority.

"What bothers me is that some people who should know better are trying to use this for political reasons," said Abercrombie, 72. "Maybe I'm the only one in the country that could look you right in the eye right now and tell you, 'I was here when that baby was born.' "

It's a tall order. The birthers are of a piece with young-earthers and trickle-downers: people who cling to beliefs that have no relation to -- which, in fact have been thoroughly debunked by -- facts.

I can only assume that if the new governor were to place the birth certificate in a well-lit room and invite those people to file by like visitors to the National Archive, they'd come out the other end telling anyone who'd listen that Obama was born in Kenya.

Still, the prospect of the contortions and back-filling and changing of the subject from the idiocracy is fun to contemplate.