Birther Rally May 29

Update: Birther rally canceled. Birthers decided they needed to barbeque. Read the comments section at the cancelation post. It's pretty funny. Sad too. Seems some birthers aren't very bright.

Such a hapless lot of hopeless people.
If you haven't heard of the birthers, they are a fringe group who believe that Obama was born in Kenya or elsewhere, and therefore ineligible to be president. They say Obama's birth certificate isn't his real birth certificate.

They thrive on fear and hate.

Birthers were Sarah Palin followers (when she was vp candidate) and now are tea partiers (but not all tea partiers are birthers). I believe Politico was the first media outlet to write in depth about the birthers. David Weigel has a good understanding of birthers. He talks to NPR's Terry Gross here.

Without a doubt, birthers are merely bigots.

Birthers believe that Obama is Muslim with an anti-America agenda, which tells you what they think about Muslims. Some think Obama's the anti-Christ. I kid you not. I, unfortunately, am personally familiar with birthers. I have a relative who believes Obama is Muslim (and therefore a bad man).

Birthers believe Obama is an affront to "white culture."

There are actually birthers in Congress. Michele Bachmann is a birther. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Aaron Schock, Tim Murphy and Charles Boustany are on video supporting birthers as opposed to denouncing them.

I believe Palin is a birther. Birthers often hang out at freerepublic.com, wnd.com and humanevents.com. They are led by Philip Berg and Orly Taitz.

There are also military birthers. Many birthers are older people.

Here is the birthers promo for their rally. Notice the especially racist, hateful frame at the very end:

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Obama Haters Here To Stay Unless

This movement by a small group of haters, led by Beck, Limbaugh and Hannity, could ultimately lead to violence because these people have lost their collective minds. Glenn Beck is clearly mentally ill. I don't care how many psychologists he pays to bring on his show. His level of paranoia is abnormal.

I don't know how those folks can get up everyday and spew so much hate. Their insides must be rotting.
This week's New York magazine explores and nails the Obama haters, the ones that all the republicans deny. The crazies are a small, obnoxious and dangerous group of people. Bill Cosby and Jimmy Carter have it exactly right. The only way we're going to stop these folks is to denounce them at every opportunity, shame them, apply the peer pressure. Show their children that what their parents are doing is wrong. Republicans ought to be condemning the haters. But they won't do anything until an act of violence takes place. Obama can't stop them. But democrats should stand up and so should the rest of the sane population. Some excerpts (read in full):

All around were satanic representations of President Barack Obama in whiteface, as a Nazi, an African witch doctor, a Marxist, a Muslim, and Che Guevara’s best friend—but Kathy Golya had never felt so good about the new administration as she did right now. It was a day after Representative Joe Wilson’s outburst in Congress, and the South Carolina congressman had given voice to Golya’s inner heart. He hadn’t just said it on the Internet, he had said it to the president himself.

No, it was not the appropriate place, Golya said, but still she glowed with the memory. “It was the first time in my life I felt good, since he got into office. Someone had called him a liar.”

A prim, slender homemaker in her fifties from northeastern Pennsylvania, Golya had come out to a tea party in Scranton with her friend Donna Biscontini to have solidarity with everyone else with strong criticisms of the president. Not really criticisms, actually, but feelings—anger, upset, a sense of dispossession. There had been a kind of revolution in the country with Obama’s election, the women felt. They talked about the president’s “czars.” One of the czars believed that animals should have lawyers to sue their owners. “Animals have more rights than people,” Biscontini said. Another was for forced sterilization. “Who’s that sound like? Hitler,” Golya said. The president was putting himself at a godly level, was her point; he was saying that man controls his destiny, not God. She saw that as arrogance. She mentioned that the president’s wife wore $600 shoes when she was helping the poor.

Golya, who was Kittykat on the Internet, saw her conflict with Obama as a battle of souls. She prayed for the president every day. “For his conversion.”

I asked her if she thought he was a secret Muslim. “Only he knows that; we don’t know that,” she said. “I’m praying for the conversion of his heart.”
....

When Rush Limbaugh talked about “two Americas,” he wasn’t wrong. The haters’ focus on Che Guevara, Saul Alinsky, and Bill Ayers was a kind of projection. They were radicals, and the sixties provided the readiest role models. They were determined to be the counter-counterculture, and they weren’t going away.

“It’s like if Che Guevara had written Profiles in Courage,” Cashill says, seizing on the left-wing revolutionary hero whose image crops up with surprising frequency on posters in the tea-party rallies. “If people had known before the election, 1960, not only had JFK not written Profiles in Courage but his old man bought him the Pulitzer Prize, that would have cost him the election.”

Then Cashill injected the race issue. He said he had been embarrassed to buy Obama’s book in the Detroit airport, but the black clerk had been gushing and thrilled. What did race have to do with authorship?

The Obama people at first thought that the birthers would simply go away or, maybe even better, lead the Republican Party into the light of truth, where the party would continue to shrivel. That didn’t happen.

....
This was the real concern raised by the haters. Violent fantasies, even cartoonish ones, as these seemed to be, have a way of turning real. Nancy Pelosi has likened the hateful rhetoric boiling up during the health-care debate to the anti-gay reaction that formed against the gay-rights movement in San Francisco in the seventies, culminating of course in the murder of mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, right-wingers in Texas accused him of “treason.” Today’s Obama haters throw that word around more often than the left had thrown around Fascism. At an Obama town hall in New Hampshire, a man carried a gun along with a poster of a DON’T TREAD ON ME snake with the legend IT IS TIME TO WATER THE TREE OF LIBERTY, referring to the Thomas Jefferson quote about renewing the republic with blood.

Ed Hale was obviously a bullshitter, but he took it way too far. A minute after he said he’d never ever threaten anyone’s life, he said, “My biggest villain right now is Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. Those jackasses should be found guilty of treason, stood up against a wall, and shot.”

Birther Army Officer Fighting Iraq Deployment

Birther Connie Rhodes is an Army officer trying to get out of deployment to Iraq because she believes (or so she says) that Obama isn't eligible to be president. I say they need to throw her out with a dishonorable discharge. She's obviously mentally unstable. We can't have these types in the military. She could be a danger to her fellow soldiers. Birther Queen Orly Taitz is representing her and others, using this defense to get out of the military:

Taitz kept going back to Obama’s birth certificate. Twice she called Obama a “usurper.”
Land repeatedly pointed out it was a courtroom where the rule of law was all that mattered.
“Whenever I give you a minute, you go off on these talking points,” Land said.
“We have not seen Mr. Obama’s birth certificate,” Taitz responded.
“This is not a forum to lay ground work for a press conference,” Land said. “This is a court of law.”
In her final argument, Taitz asked Land why she had to prove a “Kenyan birth certificate” she submitted as evidence was authentic, yet her opponents didn’t have to prove Obama had an authentic United States birth certificate.
“Who has the burden of establishing that the president of the United States is not eligible to serve in his office?” Land asked Taitz.
The judge pointed out that burden fell on Rhodes because she sought the restraining order to stop her deployment.
Rhodes received her officer’s commission in March 2005, according to Monday’s testimony. It took two years for her to complete medical school at the University of Illinois. She went on active duty June 18, 2007, while doing her internships and residency at Army hospitals.
For the Army paying for her third and fourth years of medical school, Rhodes committed to serve two years’ active duty. That commitment started in July 2008. Ledger

Orly Taitz Gets Hysterical on MSNBC

Why in the world would anyone listen to this hysterical woman? I have to say, though, the anchors exploited her for entertainment purposes, which isn't nice. It's too bad republicans weren't decent enough to stop the Birther movement early on. They let it roll throughout the campaign, even fueled it. Now the democrats are using it as ammunition. Republicans really screwed themselves. Serves them right.

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Army Soldier Challenging Obama's Birth Won't be Deployed

This soldier shouldn't be deployed because he's obviously mentally unstable. Hello. Orly Taitz, birthers (just search birthers on this blog if you need background). These people are a wee bit on the nutty nut side. We can't have people like Stefan Cook serving in the military. That would be dangerous. It's a good thing the Army revoked his orders.

U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook, the reserve soldier who says he shouldn't have to go to Afghanistan because he believes Barack Obama was never eligible to be president, has had his deployment orders revoked, Army officials said.
Lt. Col. Maria Quon, U.S. Army Public Affairs Officer, U.S. Army Human Resources Command-St. Louis, said Tuesday evening, Cook was no longer expected to report Wednesday to MacDill Air Force Base in Florida for mobilization to active duty.
Cook is an Individual Mobilization Augmentee (IMA), meaning he is a reserve soldier assigned to an active component unit for duty. He is assigned to the U.S. Army Element of U.S. Southern Command. Last week he filed a request in federal court seeking a temporary restraining order and status as a conscientious objector through his California-based attorney, Orly Taitz. Read more here.

This is big news on Fox "News"

Here's a taste of Orly, Cook's attorney. She thinks that the media elected Obama so they could have more free reign. Really. More fun--fellow birther Phillip Berg sued Taitz for who knows why.

Another radical birther and Obama's former opponent, Alan Keyes:

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.