You seem to be missing my point. I'm disagreeing with the "birthers", not supporting their ideas. I'm pointing out that they don't make their case, and no matter how strong (or weak, I'm not actually claiming they are strong) their counterarguments to the critics are, they need to establish their basic idea to a great extent first if they expect to be taken seriously on this issue. And I'm saying they have not done that, or for the most part even tried.
I suspect that some small part of the group really thinks Obama was not born in the US. With a larger part probably not really thinking its true, but thinking there is some chance.
Another part of the group apparently believes Obama's hiding something about his birth, and views the effort as a way to root that out, but doesn't really think Obama was born outside the US.
Another part just grabs on to anything that attacks Obama for partisan reasons.
Are these ideas in general a good thing? No. But "something seriously wrong" is a bit too strong, at least if your implying that such odd beliefs are really a new thing and are likely to have very negative results. (If you just mean serious factual error by overwrought people, than I agree something is wrong.) This time it might be a fairly large fringe instead of a small fringe, but its still a fringe, and its not getting bigger to any significant degree.
No one as far as I know went to search for birth certificates of Ronald Reagen, Richard Nixon, or George Bush.
I believe they all where born of two citizen parents, so even if they where born outside the US there would be no issue.
But despite his birth to two citizen parents, some on the left tried to argue that McCain was not eligible to be president of the US.
Decades earlier a few claimed that Goldwater wasn't eligible because he was not born in a state (he was born in the Arizona territory), even though the territory was part of the US, and he had two citizen parents. And an LBJ campaign ad suggested that Goldwater woulds start a nuclear war.
Going back further all sorts of ridiculous rumors where spread about political candidates in the more distant past of our country.
None of this is really new, its just a slightly different form of the same old thing. |
