We may all laugh at the crazy birthers, but they are doing real damage to our country. Baratunde Thurston posted this video yesterday in response to Donald Trump’s boastful claims and the release of President Obama’s long form birth certificate. I think the title of the video says it all “With President Obama’s Birth Certificate, Klansman Trump Reminds Blacks They Will Never Be.”
Dalitso Njolinjo at The Moderate Voice adds his thoughts as an African-born American:
I hate using race as a rationale to complex problems, but it has made me sick to watch the mainstream media “not call a dog, a dog” when it comes to people questioning Obama’s citizenship. Advocates or ‘sympathizers’ of birthers argued that it was very simple to solve and move on from – he could just release his birth certificate. Even after Obama released his certificate of live-birth which in some cases is more legally useful than the long-form birth-certificate, birthers and the mainstream media kept on with this issue. Why? Again, they would tell you because he hadn’t released his ‘real’ birth certificate, the short-form wasn’t good enough for them, even though it was good enough in a court of law. In a court of US law!
You had a birth announcement which could only come from the health-department appear in the local-newspaper, and that wasn’t good enough.
You had Republicans from the state of Hawaii say they have seen his real birth-certificate and that he was in fact born in America, again, not good enough.
You had private investigators, fact checkers and media investigators saying the man was born in the US of A but again not good enough.
You had actual elected officials question their President’s birth-place in congress and in public addresses.
(This is the one which kills me) You had the leader of the House of Representatives say that he took the President at his word that he was born in the US but neglected to denounce the birthers and their issue.
I personally find all of this incredible.
So why not call a dog, a dog and just say this issue, birtherism, is racist? As plain as that. I can’t find any logical rationale for people to question this man’s nationality and therefore his legitimacy to be President. As far as I know (happy to be proven wrong), no US president has been subjected to the same pressure as Barack Obama to disclose his long-form birth certificate to prove that he is in fact who he says he is. Personally, I thought there was more of an argument to be made against John McCain’s legitimacy to seek the presidency as he was born in US controlled Panama – I don’t remember his being forced to release his birth-certificate to the press. Where’s both Bush’s certificate? How about both Clinton’s? Reagan’s maybe? Were they released during their campaigns or presidencies? How do we know that they were not born in some far off village in Africa where they gather, dancing and chanting around a large cauldron of boiled human flesh, Huh?
That’s the point. Obama was questioned the way no other president has ever been questioned and nothing was ever good enough. I’m hoping this is the final airing of the birthers. Oh, they’ll continue on, demanding some other proof and pretending that the certificate is a fraud. How this plays out will depend on what the media does. Will they keep giving a platform to people like Trump? Will they pretend there’s some kind of controversy?