Obama Benefiting From Birth Certificate Controversy?

Well, this is an interesting take by Andrew Walden, a conservative and founder of the Hawaii Free Press, who says Obama is playing the Birthers, the people who question Obama's citizenship.
I'm not sure I follow the logic on how it benefits Obama or how it's part of Obama's grand strategy. Walden insists it distracts from Obama's ties to radicals. Whatever.
I'd sure like to see the Birthers move on to greater things. But it's sort of like a cult now. They have their leaders and they've put so much effort into this birth certificate thing that to turn back now would shake the very ground they walk on. If they did move on, it certainly wouldn't be to any higher levels of conversation, so really, unless they get violent, I guess it doesn't matter what they think.

A fairly impressive internet industry has sprung up claiming that Obama was born in either Kenya or Indonesia. This is nonsense which distracts from the broadly unexplored story of Obama’s upbringing. This kind of nonsense has emerged because the McCain campaign chose not to raise the many questions about Barack Obama’s numerous hard-left alliances. Barack Obama was born in Hawai'i, August 4, 1961 at Kapiolani Medical Center in Honolulu.
Obama’s birth certificate posted online is exactly the same birth certificate everybody in Hawaii gets from the State Department of Health. It is not forged. There is nothing unusual about the design or the texture. In addition to the birth certificate, the August 13, 1961 Honolulu Advertiser also carries an announcement of Obama’s birth. The Honolulu Star-Bulletin also carries the same announcement. Both papers printed an identical list of birth announcements supplied to them by the Hawaii State Department of Health. Conspiracists have made much of the fact that the Territory of Hawaii gave a phony birth certificate in 1904 to Chinese republican leader Sun Yat Sen for diplomatic reasons. But the modern State of Hawaii has never supplied Certification of Live Birth indicating US birth for foreign-born children.

By refusing media requests for a look at the actual paper birth certificate, Obama’s campaign gave sly backhanded assistance to the forgery hype. The internet release of the birth certificate via hyper-partisan website Daily Kos on June 12 before posting it on a campaign website was likely calculated to fuel the frenzy. This is Obama’s Gramscian strategy designed to redirect the opposition down a blind alley. It was so successful that Hawai'i government offices found themselves inundated with telephone calls from mainland voters in the days before the November 4 election.

Since Hawai'i law forbids the release of birth certificates to anybody not authorized by Barack Obama or his family, Obama further feeds the paranoia by choosing not to grant such permissions. A World Net Daily story claiming Hawai'i’s Republican Governor Linda Lingle ‘sealed’ the birth certificate is totally false. The governor’s office has asked for a retraction. The forgery story was also boosted by video claims that Obama’s Kenyan grandmother, stated that Obama “is a son of this village”—a phrase which can have many different meanings. Read the rest at FrontPage

The Obama Haters Get a Name: The Birthers

This is good. I'm glad Politico is writing about the most annoying fringe out there, but the story misses the point. Why do they have an irrational hatred of Obama? But I guess that's the point-- it's irrational and therefore, irrelevant, until one of them goes rogue.

Every once in a while I check in with them at their favorite lair.

I'm not sure if they're dangerous (but I'm sure the Secret Service watches them), or just ignorant, but at times, they're very racist. Read their comments on this story here.

I think racism is at the heart of their hatred. These people were literally insulted when Obama became president. In their world, a black man simply cannot be president. So they latched on to the eligibility issue so that they could try to legitimize themselves.

I realize one of the ringleaders, Alan Keyes, is black. But he's got another axe to grind with Obama. For him, it's the sin of jealousy. Keyes ran against Obama for the Senate (read an interesting exchange here).

There is also an element of fighting the "liberal media" and fighting the government (they really hate government) that they view to be all that's wrong with the world. Scapegoating. It's kind of how some republicans have made Hispanic immigrants the root of all evil.

It's mass denial and it's interesting to observe, especially if you have any interest in psychology. This post commenting on Politico's story by one of the members of freerepublic says it all:

Discredit, ridicule the boy who shouted that the King has no clothes, that is the proven Communist method, bought hook, line and sinker by the incurious!

Little do they realize that it is they who drank the Kool-Aid.

Politico's got all the kooks covered, except for pastor Wiley Drake.
Some notables are Orly Taitz, Alan Keyes, Gary Kreep. WorldNetDaily, mentioned in the story, is sort of like that tabloid that always has aliens on the cover.

Politico: Bill Clinton had the Vince Foster "murder." George W. Bush had 9/11 Truth. And the new administration has brought with it a new culture of conspiracy: The Birthers.

Out of the gaze of the mainstream and even the conservative media is a flourishing culture of advocates, theorists and lawyers, all devoted to proving that Barack Obama isn't eligible to be president of the United States. Viewed as irrelevant by the White House, and as embarrassing by much of the Republican Party, the subculture still thrives from the conservative website WorldNetDaily, which claims that some 300,000 people have signed a petition demanding more information on Obama's birth, to Cullman, Alabama, where Sen. Richard Shelby took a question on the subject at a town hall meeting last week.

The story doesn't mention it, but Shelby didn't exactly dismiss the question.

Because they're cowardly, they look to this argument--that he's not legally eligible to be president--as a means of opposing Obama:

"Some individuals and groups who are opposed to Obama's presidency want an 'acceptable' reason to cite to convince other individuals and groups who might be on the fence to join in their way of thinking," said Patricia Turner, who studies rumors at the University of California, Davis. "The notion that his presidency is actually in violation of the Constitution has a fundamentally patriotic appeal."

I'd love to see them at a roundtable. I think if the light was shone on them and they could get some air, some of them might come to their senses.

"At some level, they're not that bad to have around because it reminds people that under the mainstream conservative press there's this bubbling up of really irrational hatred for the guy," said former Clinton White House press secretary Jake Siewert.