Sarah Palin Of All People Should Know How Painful Spreading Rumors Can Be For Public Figures

A reader pointed me to a Salon.com story on Sarah Palin’s comments (an effort to bring the stupid birther conspiracy movement back into the public spotlight). Since she burst onto the national scene with a well-delivered speech at the Republican convention last year, the former governor of Alaska has been using the politics of fear to spark all kinds of conversations about people palling around with terrorists, the birther movement and the deather movements. Losing on the issues, right-wing extremists were left to scare white people (constantly bringing up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright), scare old people (that they will be put to death), scare parents (your Down Syndrome baby could face a death panel), scare Americans (constantly bringing up William Ayers) and more.  Here is a good excerpt from the Salon.com story that brings some interesting points to light:

Palin is, of course, wrong to say that the public is still “rightfully” bringing up the issue — it’s been answered again and again at this point, and there’s no doubt that Obama was born in Hawaii. But she is right about a couple things: For one, whoever the Republican nominee is in 2012, they won’t “have to bother to make it an issue.” It already will be, if not one discussed explicitly by the campaign and its surrogates, because so many Republicans already have doubts about the president’s birthplace. The fact that Palin and other mainstream figures, like Lou Dobbs and Tom DeLay, have indulged the Birthers doesn’t help matters.

Palin’s also right to draw a parallel between the conspiracy theories that surround Obama’s birth and the one about her son. The two are equally nutty. You’d hope, however, that going through that experience would teach her that it’s an awful thing to happen to anyone, regardless of political party. Instead, her attitude seems to be that the two wrongs somehow make a right.

That is a great point. All kinds of ugly rumors were spread during the campaign about her as they were about President Obama and his family. Yet, it seems Palin has not learned much from the ugliness that has targeted her own family. Palin continues to help the effort to mainstream the idiotic and already-debunked birther movement by pretty much irresponsibly endorsing it as an issue worthy of discussion.

Salon:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2009/12/03/palin_birther/index.html

Hypocrite Sarah Palin Is Back At It Again … Now Posing As A Birther

Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, the darling of the right-wing, is back at it again – this time giving comfort to the nutty birthers who continue to attack President Obama. Governor Palin, who cried about the media and people coming after her as she resigned from her position in governor’s office in Alaska, now is continuing to advance the pathetic mission of the birthers. During a segment on the show of a right-ring radio talker named Rusty Humphries, it was Palin who went out of her way to provide a soothing hand of comfort to the birther morons who just can’t seem to come to grips with the president of the United States of America being a black man. That’s right, I said it. I do believe that this birther movement largely is motivated by a strong prejudice.

As documented by Think Progress:

Yesterday while appearing on the right-wing radio show of Rusty Humphries, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin expressed her allegiance with the birther movement. She asserted that it was a “fair question” to ask whether President Obama was born in the U.S. “I think the public rightfully is still making it an issue,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

She doesn’t have a problem with it because she is a right-wing extremist, who has a bias against the president and you have to wonder if it is just a political and philosophical bias.

Think Progress then added her response:

After the media picked up her comments, Palin went on her Facebook page at 1:16 a.m. and criticized reporters for calling her a birther and pushing “stupid conspiracies”:

Voters have every right to ask candidates for information if they so choose. I’ve pointed out that it was seemingly fair game during the 2008 election for many on the left to badger my doctor and lawyer for proof that Trig is in fact my child. Conspiracy-minded reporters and voters had a right to ask… which they have repeatedly. But at no point – not during the campaign, and not during recent interviews – have I asked the president to produce his birth certificate or suggested that he was not born in the United States.

And, as Think Progress later pointed out, it was Palin who left the position of governor of Alaska crying about how the media and people were advancing all of these attacks on her. Then, she turns around and helps push an attack on President Obama that was long ago refuted. She cried about how the media, politicians and political operatives were attacking her and making it so difficult for her to conduct business (she was being dogged by allegations of ethics violations). Then she turns around and contributes to the same thing against President Obama.

Sarah Palin feels the “politics of personal destruction” are OK as long as they are directed at President Obama or some other Democrat and not directed at her.

Sarah Palin believes questions  from idiot birthers in regard to where President Obama was born are OK, but questions raised about potential ethics violations against her are part of the “politics of personal destruction.”

Sarah Palin is a hypocrite.

Think Progress:

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/12/04/palin-birthers-conspiracies/

Exposing Birther Nuts Is A Good Thing

Any time nuts like Tom DeLay can be exposed for their stupid birther claims works to the advantage of common-sense thinkers who reject this kind of extremism and disguised racism/xenophobia.

Birthers: This Irrational Nut Is Your Leader

Right-Wing Nut Birthers Resort To Forged Birth Certificate To Attack President Obama

Some of these right-wing moronic birthers have really just taken a dive off the deep end.

In their efforts to attack President Obama, birthers are now attempting to use a forged birth certificate to try and assert that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. These extremists will go to any and all extremes to attack President Obama and try to portray our president as not being one of us. Boy, don’t you love those good Americans who will pull garbage like this for their own sinister purposes? I love the line in this article that talks about the weirdos who are so quick to doubt Obama’s authenticated birth certificate, but so quick to embrace a mysterious forged birth certificate that fits their obsessive agenda of lies and negativity.

From Huffington Post:

The latest development in the Obama “birther” conspiracy is the emergence of a “Kenyan birth certificate” for the president, put online by movement maven Orly Taitz.

Oddly, the same people who are so skeptical of Obama’s Hawaii birth certificate are willing to accept this new document despite many flaws, documented by the Washington Independent’s Dave Weigel and Markos Moulitsas.

The fact that these birthers are following the lead of a nut like Taitz, and agreeing with so much of she says as they nod continuously like mindless bobbleheads, proves the idiocy of their discredited agenda.

I am a little disappointed … I expected the fake birth certificate to come out sooner and with fewer errors.

Individuals who attempt to hide their hatred for President Obama rarely let the facts get in the way of a piss-poor lie that has spiraled out of control.

Another Wacky Andrew Breitbart Far-Right Column

Whining from the far-right birther nuts about President Obama’s birth certificate is serving only to make conservatives look like radicals cloaking their racism in the so-called birther movement. Now, from Washington Times columnist Andrew Breitbart, comes another tired attack on President Obama, using his college transcript as their weapon of choice <sigh>. Like many conservatives, he has been bashing the president’s attempt to bring together Sgt. James Crowley and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. after their unfortunate incident that ended in the unnecessary arrest of Gates and started a national conversation on race.

From Breitbart: 

My long-held fear is that Mr. Obama is hiding something about his education. During the endless 2008 campaign, Mr. Obama would not release his college grades. Given that President George W. Bush and Sens. Al Gore and John Kerry all had proved mediocre grades were no impediment to a presidential bid, Mr. Obama likely had other concerns.

While I have no desire to see Mr. Obama’s birth certificate, I do want to see his college transcripts. My suspicion, one could even call it a conspiracy theory, is that Mr. Obama committed himself to a radical curriculum, aligned himself with the far-left professoriate, and sought to keep this biographical information from his political enemies, especially then-rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, for fear that they would paint the former community organizer and follower of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as something other than an advocate of racial reconciliation.

Here we go back to the right-wing efforts to paint President Obama as a black radical interested in taking revenge on the white man. Considering what we know about President Obama, such a notion would be laughable if it weren’t all too real. Breitbart, as most of the far-right nuts do, got in his gratuitous mention of Rev. Jeremiah Wright (as another way of portraying the president as an angry black radical).

Racial reconciliation is code for reparations (designed to frighten whites even though it these far-right nuts forget Barack Obama is half white).

More from Breitbart:

The Democratic Party – which is now Mr. Obama’s party – now depends on the ability to keep blacks in fear: of cops, of Republicans, of conservatives, of “Uncle Toms,” and even of Tiger Woods, who proves that America, while still imperfect, is clearly heading in the right direction.

This is a disturbing excerpt. I find it interesting how conservative whites, in love with the GOP, are now experts on race relations. It’s not really much of a secret that many Republicans feel this way about the relationship between blacks and the Democratic Party. But, to say that the Democratic Party depends on fear to keep blacks in line is not only stupid, but offensive, insulting and degrading to the intelligence of black people. Breitbart paints a dark (pun intended) picture of black people (those who are not highly conservative) as being something akin to to uneducated slaves.

Really, there is painfully little Republicans have next to nothing to offer minorities (while refusing to denounce hostile attitudes toward race relations in the GOP).

This is the reason that blacks tend to vote Democratic in elections.

The comment about Tigers Woods is just plain dumb. Black people, many of whom would not have been welcomed at a lot of golf or country clubs, embraced Tiger Woods strongly when the golfer first burst onto the scene and grabbed the nation’s attention. People who didn’t know the difference between a driver and a putter suddenly wanted to play.

One more comment from Breitbart:

It took black and white blue-collar civil servants to expose that the race game is rigged at the highest levels. The majority in the United States wants to enter a better, more egalitarian and diverse, and even racially mixed future.

I am not sure this is the case with Republicans, who lack true diversity, and that is a shame.

This last note from Breitbart: His latest endeavor, Big Hollywood (http://bighollywood.breitbart .com), is a group blog on Hollywood and politics from the center-right perspective.

Come on, now.

There is nothing center about that group blog … it is heavy on the far right and light (almost invisible) in the center.

Michelle Malkin An Advocate For Bone-Headed Tea Party Movement

Conservative blogger Michelle Malkin was talking with George Stephanopoulos about these moronic and sparsely-attended tea parties we’ve seen sprouting up since President Obama has been in office. Malkin, as a far-right extremist, has been feeling the tea parties (a gathering of mostly far-right nuts who are using taxes as a way of attacking President Obama). Much like the birther morons, who are cloaking their racism with this birth certificate nonsense, the tea party bobbleheads are driving the Republican brand into extinction.

From Think Progress:

This morning, right-wing blogger Michelle Malkin joined the ABC roundtable on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Asked what the conservative opposition strategy is going to be this coming month while Congress is in recess, Malkin said there is a growing “tea party movement — these counterinsurgencies amongst taxpayer rights groups” — that is fomenting opposition to Obama’s health care plan.

Malkin claimed the Obama administration has “vastly underestimated just how grassroots this movement is.” Lawmakers are going to face “townhalls-gone-wild,” she added.

The term “counter-insurgencies” does reveal the mentality of conservatives in opposition to Obama. Like Bill Kristol has said, the right wing is bluntly stating that it is going “for the kill.” Malkin has previously declare her hope that Obama fails.

Malkin has had a prejudice against President Obama from the beginning and it makes me wonder what her prejudice is truly based on. I am not sure it’s as obvious as her followers would like to believe. The administration vastly underestimated the high degree of hatred that is being felt by a number of people on the far right still struggling to come to grips with the first black president and what some people have described as the “browning of America” with the growing Latino population and the growing number of people who are biracial.

Let these birther and tea bagging nuts have their little townhalls so people can see just how extreme the right wing is going these days and how out of touch Republicans are becoming with blacks and Latinos (it will get worse with Latinos as Republicans continue to beat up on U.S. Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor).

I doubt the Obama Administration is too concerned about the diversity-challenged and intellect-challenged tea party movement.

How Much Of A Nose Dive Can Lou Dobbs’ Ratings At CNN Take?

CNN’s conservative host Lou Dobbs, who is severely damaging the credibility of CNN as a true and honest-to-goodness news organization, may be taking a hit in the ratings according to The New York Observer. This is no surprise. Dobbs has been so one-side and so pig-headed in pushing this birther non-story, that he is behaving more like a Fox News operative placed at CNN to destroy it from within. In many ways, Dobbs’ obsession with the birther story fits his conservative xenophobic pattern (his other obsession is barking endlessly about illegal immigration).

From The New York Observer:

To wit: According to The Observer’s analysis of Nielsen data, in recent weeks, as criticism of Mr. Dobbs has continued to go up, his ratings at CNN have continued to go down.

Mr. Dobbs’ first began reporting on Obama birth certificate conspiracy theories on the night of Wednesday, July 15. In the roughly two weeks since then, from July 15 through July 28, Mr. Dobbs’ 7 p.m. show on CNN has averaged 653,000 total viewers and 157,000 in the 25-54 demo.

By contrast, during the first two weeks of the month (July 1 to July 14) Mr. Dobbs averaged 771,000 total viewers and 218,000 in the 25-54 demo. In other words, Mr. Dobbs’ audience has decreased 15 percent in total viewers and 27 percent in the demo since the start of the controversy.

Arguably, interest in cable news has slumped across the board since early July when attention over Michael Jackson’s death was still at a fever pitch.

But, that said, Mr. Dobbs’ ratings over the past two weeks, during the height of the “birthers” controversy, are also down significantly compared to his overall numbers during the second quarter of 2009 when he averaged 769,000 total viewers and 222,000 in the 25-54 demo.

In summary, if Mr. Dobbs’ affinity for “birthers” is a ratings ploy, it’s a pretty ineffective one.

But, how far can a man’s ratings truly nose dive if he already is at the bottom of the barrel?

It’s a relatively short fall for Lou Dobbs.

Lou Dobbs To CNN: Who’s Your Daddy?

This whole birther flap between conservative mouthpiece Lou Dobbs and his CNN superiors is beginning to reflect an episode of the Maury Povich Show. Lou Dobbs would be sitting in one chair, CNN President Jon Klein is sitting in another chair and Maury is in a third.

The script is all too familiar:

“When it comes to who is in charge at CNN … JON KLEIN … YOU ARE NOT THE FATHER.”

Media Matters for America:

http://mediamatters.org/press/releases/200907240039

I’m going to go out on a limb and question whether Lou Dobbs’ dance skills are up to par, but he is the daddy at CNN.

Lou Dobbs Making A Mockery Of CNN’s Reputation

Is CNN truly “the most trusted name in news” or is that just some kind of fancy slogan that is strong on the surface, but weak in substance? Now, compared to Fox News, CNN clearly is far more trusted as a credible news outlet, but Lou Dobbs’ obsession with the birther story involving President Obama eats away at the networks credibility, as pointed out by Media Matters for America. The conservative commentator has abused his high-profile CNN platform to launch what seems to be a bitter obsession to attack President Obama with one of the dumbest issues ever to be pursued against a POTUS.

Dobbs had shaky credibility prior to the manufactured birther issue, but his credibility is falling harder than Sarah Palin’s approval ratings.

More and more people are picking up on the campaign of political hate being waged by Lou Dobbs (a known conservative who has done virtually nothing but attack President Obama). But, now people are beginning to take notice of this abuse of platform and CNN’s reputation is on the line.

How will the network respond to a rogue anchor waging a nutty personal battle?

CNN’s Roland Martin Calls Out Crazies Over Birth Certificate Nonsense

The stupidity of these nuts on the far right calling attention to President Obama’s birth certificate and whether or not he was born in the United States of America is so nutty.

If you buy into the conspiracy you should close your eyes and think about just how many people would have to be involved in a conspiracy of this magnitude (including a Hawaii newspaper which would have had to have had a sort of an amazing clairvoyance to fake this birth announcement knowing Barack Obama was going to become the first black president of the United States almost 50 years down the line).

Birth announcement from the Honolulu Advertiser:

Also, here is the birth certificate of Barack Obama that the birther nuts can’t seem to find and won’t accept:

The left, in all honesty, should be thankful for nuts like this who show their extremism in the most idiotic ways to give Americans a contrast.

Here is part of Martin’s column:

The YouTube video of an out-of-control woman yelling and screaming at Republican Congressman Mike Castle’s town hall meeting in Delaware, demanding to see the birth certificate of President Barack Obama, is utterly hilarious.

To watch others cheer her insanity, and then boo the congressman who says the president is an American, shows you that we have a serious problem with mental illness in this country.

The nut jobs that continue to promote this story are wacky, right-wing radio and TV talk shows hosts and no-credibility bloggers. They have latched onto this story like bloodsucking leeches, and actually want us to believe this story has legs.

Last week, in a suit filed by perennial presidential loser, Alan Keyes, they even tried to claim a court victory after a federal district judge in California asked to listen to the merits of their case. I’m sure he simply wanted to see for himself how delusional they are.

CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/07/22/martin.obama.birth/index.html

Chris Matthews Smokes Birther Nut