What is wrong with these people? Thoughts on the "Birther" movement

As you may or may not know, President Obama is not a native American citizen. He was not born in the US. He was in fact born in Kenya, his ancestral homeland, and then quickly removed to his mother's country, the US, whereupon he used all the powerful connections of his lower class white mother and foreign student father to falsify the necessary documentation to make him into an "american citizen". Or something to that effect.

Of course none of this is true. It is however the determined opinion of a growing anti-Obama fringe movement dubbed "Obama Birthers". They are a people devoid of simple human logic, driven by an ideological determination that demands they find something, anything, to delegitimize the President. Why? I shall address that momentarily. It doesnt take more that a mite bit of logical thinking to see how silly the idea is. Why would a pregnant American woman travel to what was then still British Colonial Kenya to have her child? How did she do so without turning up any travel documents or being noticed by the colonial authorities? Why would she then hurriedly speed back to the US in a move that cannot have been healthy for mother or baby? How did she, on returning, manage to fake Obama's documents given she and her husband were hardly persons of influence. And of course never mind the fact that even IF Obama had been born in Kenya (and he wasn't) his mother's natural american citizenship would have transferred to him irregardless, making the whole issue moo*. It is of note that John McCain WAS born outside the United States, in the former Panama Canal Zone, but no one seriously questioned his eligibility for the Presidency, he too had an american mother (and father) who could pass to him that crucial natural citizenship.

In pursuit of their cause, Birthers have dissected the birth certificate provided by the Obama campaign last year, inventing problems with it and demanding that it is not sufficient and that Obama should provide more documentation or other evidence. Their cause has gone viral in recent weeks, spreading rapidly through the far fringes of the online right. It has popped up in press conferences and town hall meetings, annoying white house figures and forcing GOP politicians to defend the president and denounce their erstwise supporters. It is reminiscent of John McCain having to defend Obama against insult at McCain rallies last year.

This of course is not the only malicious rumor about the President. Many others have been tried. That he is a black nationalist. That he is a muslim radical (both of these are sometimes mixed with the Birther narrative). That he is a radical socialist. That he is anti-Christian hardline Secularist. And many more besides. The Birther idea has worked best because, unlike the others, it also poses a solution. A black nationalist/islamist/socialist/secularist is still allowed, constitutionally, to be President. Someone who is not a natural US citizen is not. The thinking is that if they can just prove their case, they can get rid of Obama and replace him with someone like Joe Biden, a more comfortable democrat to them.

Why they are so determined to get rid of Obama is related to a second reason for the movement's success. That if Obama isn't an American, then these people can pretend that everything he represents isn't American either. Birthers are often seen to proclaim things like "I want my country back!" in public appearances. Obama represents a more modern, urban, diverse and socially liberal America than these people are willing to accept. Obama is the symbol of fundamental changes that have been going on in how America is constituted for decades, and the Birther movement, flourishing in conservative rural strongholds and traditionalist parts of the suburbs, needs to believe that if they can kill the head, the body will die as well. They cannot accept that Gay Marriage has now swept New England (Rhode Island aside) and now threatens the midwest, that their schools have more and more hispanics, that the culture wars have died down, that the concerns of cities have asserted themselves in a political discourse so long dominated by suburb and country, that the country is less christian every year, and most of all they cannot accept that ever more "real" (which is to say Whites born to non-immigrant parents as far as most of these people are concerned) Americans simply don't care that it's happening. the "country" of which they speak is one that, to the extent it ever really existed, has now been envelloped in social changes they neither want nor understand. Of course, getting rid of Obama isn't going to change any of that. Indeed Obama has been far more conservative in office than the mass of his support anticipated. The mass of anti-Obama hysteria is just that, hysteria, whether its about returning tax rates to Clinton levels (when, apparently, there were no rich people and everyone was unemployed), or any of the silly lines of personal attack. It's not about the truth, it's about desperation, about the determined belief that there MUST be something insidious behind the scenes, that the changes in America cannot be real, they must have been masterminded by clandestine forces, because if they weren't, then they can never be reversed. And these people, can never have 'their' America back.


* - It doesn't matter, like a cow's opinion. If you don't get this reference you are a terrible, terrible human being.

While We're There - More on Latin America

Well since I'm already on the subject and ordering my thoughts on Iran takes time, I thought I'd expound a little more on Latin America. More particularly on those Latin American states that have participated in Chavez's so called Bolivarian Revolution. That "revolution", and i use the term cautiously because none of its participant leaders came to power through revolutionary means, has entailed the massive centralization of power, the abolition of independent institutional forces within the state, the subjugation of civil society, the stoking of class and racial tensions and the suppression of the media and core popular freedoms. Simultaneously the process has involved pushing for economic nationalization, massive welfare projects, wealth redistribution and confrontation of Latin America's infamous super-oligarchs. The process has now been most obviously played out in Venezuela, but has also manifested in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua, and other countries, such as Honduras under Zelaya, seemed to be heading in a similar way.

I bring all this up because I was reading an article on newsweek's website today, http://www.newsweek.com/id/204835/page/1 , about Venezuela and I was struck by the naivete of the reporting. Or at least the foolishness of the slant taken. Now I am no Chavista. I cannot stand the man or his minions, but those who seek to characterize him as nothing more than a madman despot are missing the point.

These guys, Chavez, Morales, Ortega and Correa, are the product of the still unresolved problem at the heart of most of Latin America. Inequality. Since the colonial era these countries have been constructed on a deeply unequal basis, and maintained on that basis. While progress has certainly been made from the days when a landed (if not titled) nobility of pale-faces lorded over a far browner peasantry, the region still contains large underclasses whose political discontent has latched as tightly to the Bolivarians as it once did Moscow's envoys.

So when that article, or the western thought process in general, bemoans the flight of educated Venezueleans, and the increasing limits on their lives under Chavez, they ignore the questions: where does Chavez come from? Who supported him? Who does now? and most importantly, Who can defeat him?

The answer to the last is not something many of the right wing intellectuals who so stridently denounce Chavez will like. The only way to beat guys like Chavez, and stop them coming back again in the future, is to tackle the social tensions that fuel them. That means supporting the kind of pragmatic center-left politicians that have been successfull in recent times in Chile and Brazil. And it means that we in the West need to support such individuals even as they undertake policies we won't like, policies that at times will look more like Chavez's than our own. It also means not allowing figures from the old oligarchies to take the place of the Bolivarians. We need to accept that the future successful leaders of Latin America are unlikely to be white folks (except in Argentina of course) from the same old established political dynasties. That group are unlikely to ever produce meaningful socio-economic change, because that would be a direct threat to themselves.

Fortunately Obama, in his handling of the Zelaya Affair, seems to have realized that last point and taken a stand against what increasingly to me looks like a coup by an oligarchy made nervous by Zelaya's willingness to address the fundamental issues of the underclass.