Ever wonder what happened to all those right-wing loonies who sent you email in 2008 insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim? Turns out they now have greater ambitions: They're trying to convince the world that Obama isn't even a "natural born citizen of the United States," and so is ineligible to be President.
Amazingly, these debunked conspiracy theorists not only have created a large Internet-based movement in recent months, they've also managed to convince some Republican members of Congress that there is real doubt about the legitimacy of Barack Obama's presidency.
The movement has been dubbed the "Birthers" — a play on the word "Truthers," who believe that the September 11 terrorist attacks were an inside job perpetrated (or known about) by warmongering elements within the U.S. government and/or military.
Like the Birthers, the Truthers are widely dismissed in the mainstream media as conspiracy theorists. But lumping the two groups together is actually insulting to the Truthers — for at least three reasons.
1. Birther theories are completely nuts — even compared to the most way-out factions of the 9/11 Truth Movement. Most people dismiss the notion that the U.S. government would slaughter thousands of its own citizens as a pretext to invade Central Asia and the Middle East. But there is nothing to say that such an evil plot isn't theoretically possible. Other governments — from the Soviet Union to Nazi Germany — have staged equally evil "false flag" attacks to stir up popular opinion against an outside enemy. Even America's own military plotted a somewhat similar fake terrorist attack as a pretext to attack Cuba in 1962. In the case of the Birthers, by contrast, the underlying conspiracy theory doesn't even make sense: We are supposed to believe that Barack Obama's pregnant mother, living in Hawaii at the time, flew halfway around the world — by herself — so she could give birth to Barack in a Third World Kenyan hospital … and then flew back to Hawaii and conspired with Honolulu's Kapi'olani Medical Center to place bogus local birth announcements in not one, but two local newspapers — after which she hacked local birth-records offices to create a fake birth paper trail … and for what? To install her child as President of the United States … in 47 years.
2. Birthers tend to be racist. As some readers may know, I am writing a book about the 9/11 Truth movement, to be published in 2010. When I embarked on my research, I assumed that a lot of the folks I'd be interviewing would be anti-Semites and general hatemongers. But in fact, I haven't met one person who answers to that description. Most Truthers actually bend over backwards to distance themselves from anyone in the movement who sounds a note of old-fashioned bigotry. (The idea that 4,000 Jews had advance warning of the 9/11 attacks — and similar notions involving Jewish complicity in the attacks — tend to be characteristic of 9/11 conspiracy theorists in Muslim countries, where anti-Semitism is common.) Birthers, on the other hand, tend to be thinly disguised hatemongers and xenophobes who just can't get their head around the idea that the United States has a Black president. The idea that Obama is somehow a bogus or counterfeit American acts as a psychological proxy for their underlying bigtory.
3. Birthers are crude political partisans. I've met plenty of Truthers from both sides of the political spectrum — from Alex Jones on the hard right to Canada's own Michel Chossudovsky on the left. Some are libertarians, others are Marxists. Some are Democrats. Other are Republicans. In the case of the Birther movement, on the other hand, I am yet to hear of anyone who isn't a hardcore GOP partisan — which is why the Birther movement, unlike the Truther movement, is having major political repercussions in Washington: It's popularity in some GOP circles, and the willingness of various GOP figures to encourage it, has become a disgrace to the party. It's encouraging the notion that the American right is descending into looniness.
And here's one more amazing difference: Despite the fact that Birther theories are bizarre and hateful in a way that transcends anything produced by the Truther camp, it is the Birthers — not the Truthers — who have gained the attention of the mainstream media. Birthers even have a prime-time CNN champion in the form of once-respected-journalist-turned-xenophobic-weirdo Lou Dobbs.The Truthers, on the other hand, have no one: Not a single mainstream, national-level journalistic talking head gives them the time of day.
The birther phenomenon goes to show what has become of America's increasingly shrill and tribalized media and political culture: So long as an idea stirs up the lunatic base of one party or the other, it is guaranteed to find traction. Obama a Muslim? An Israel hater? A racist who despises "whites" and "white culture"? Sure, why not? All of the above!
I have no idea whether Barack Obama will succeed in revolutionizing American health care, curing the U.S. economy, making friends with Iran, or fulfilling any of his other stated goals. But when it comes to driving the American right positively stark-raving bat-crap, mission accomplished.
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/07/31/307786.aspx
jkay@nationalpost.com
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