I've written before that I'm pretty tired of this, and less than amused by the few who keep trying to keep the "Is President Obama Really a US Citizen" meme alive. Over at Breitbart's "Big Journalism", Kurt Schlichter has also had it, and gives the whole thing both barrels.
"Birthers" are very much a fringe thing, but there are times when fringe things are dishonest about something serious enough that they deserve to be targeted in the public arena. And the responsibility for doing so should fall, as it does here, to their allies/ co-belligerents on the political spectrum. Responsibility is something that has taken a huge holiday in modern culture, on way too many levels. Politics is no exception, for reasons of technology and policy. Centralized party systems have become weak in America, and we can talk sometime about whether that has really been a good thing. But no matter the reasons, the result is a shift to generalized responsibility within political movements to balance accountability with coalition building.
That's why I'm cautiously pleased to see conservative spokespeople who continue to take on this particular issue, and hope the more general lesson spreads. The years ahead may well be filled with very angry politics, across the spectrum. Political centers of gravity that take more responsibility are something we're going to need, as a nation, in order to pull through.
Hear, hear.
Schlichter nails it when he says that "I'm just asking the question," is deceitful when then asker already has an answer and will refuse to reason about it. That's not "just asking the question," it's making an argument and pretending not to.
Moreover, it's a strategic gambit not unlike a distributed denial of service attack, tying up resources on ludicrous questions demanding 100% certainty instead of the 99.999999999% certainty we live with for anything else. "How do we know the sun will come up in the East tomorrow? I'm just asking the question." It's a bad faith question used to make a bad faith argument when there's no supporting evidence.
Intuitively, most people know this, but it's a tough position to articulate. Which makes the Birthers, and their mirrors on the left, not just idiots, but corrosive idiots.
Re: "I'm just asking the question":
"I know those stories ain't true. I know Sam wouldn't rape a little colored baby or steal the gold teeth out of his grandma's mouth or beat his pappy to death with a stick of cordwood or rob a widder woman of her life's savings or feed his wife to the hawgs. I know a fine feller like Sam wouldn't do nothing like that So all I'm asking. . if them stories ain't true, . . . . . . . . how come almost everyone claims they are true?"
James Thompson, "Pop 1280"
The vast majority of comments at that link are pro-Birther.
You know that expressing 9/11 Truther nonsense was an automatic ban from Daily Kos?
Andrew,
That's not surprising. Sad, but not surprising.
Of the politically oriented sites I read, I only rarely dip into the comments sections, because they nearly universally have such a low signal-to-noise ratio that they're unbearable. Having looked, after seeing your comment... yeah, that's about what I expected.
(Participating, especially on a regular basis, is even more rare. Winds is rather special to me in that regard.)
No, Andrew, I did not. Glad to hear it.