Matthew Norman: The insanity and enduring racism of the American right
The Republicans now make the Tories at their worst seem achingly inclusive
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Radio host Rush Limbaugh joins the other oracles of US radio and TV in keeping the birther debate bubbling
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As we gloomily maintain the deathbed vigil for a Government whose end cannot come soon enough, it is the opposite end of the life-cycle that fixates US politics. Fittingly enough, on the eve of the nine-month anniversary of Barack Obama's election, America obsesses about the President's birth, and specifically his birthplace.
The gestation period for any conspiracy theory is far longer than that for human infants, of course, or even elephants. It tends, in fact, to be endless. It is 45 years since JFK was murdered, 40 since the first moon walk, and almost eight since the Twin Towers fell, and while the various notions (second gunman, studio mock-up, Mossad plot) were conceived almost immediately after those events, they have yet to deliver anything more substantial than lovingly nurtured insanity.
That rag-tag coalition of shock jocks, publicity hungry attorneys, the credulous and simple-minded, plain nutters and above all frustrated racists collectively known as "the birthers" have spent a year banging on about Mr Obama's arrival in this world, and their successors will be banging on about it long after he's left it for the next.
With the hissing wrath of those struggling ferociously to repress the volcanic pressure to screech "uppity nigger" at their head of state, these people conveniently conclude that Obama isn't their head of state at all. The second article of the US Constitution dictates that "no person except a natural born citizen" can be president, and the birthers argue that since Mr Obama was born in Mombasa, Kenya, he is disqualified.
One army officer, a Major Stefan Cook, refuses to serve in Afghanistan on the grounds that, since Obama isn't rightfully his commander-in-chief, the order to deploy is illegal. As for his lawyer, if you thought Esther Rantzen cuts an unconventional figure on the national political stage, here's a bottle blonde to make the old turnip-botherer look like Geoffrey Howe. Her sobriquet is Queen Bee of Birferstan, and the on-screen mini-biog accompanying a recent appearance on CNN briefly imbued that sober channel with Springeresque exoticism. "Dr Orly Taitz," it ran. "CA Attorney. Dentist. Real estate broker." As the sublime Jon Stewart pointed out, if you're contemplating a scam whereby a lawyer wins you enough in damages for botched root canal work to buy the home of your dreams, here's your gal.
Were it just Orly, whose legal qualification was earned over the internet, and a smattering of fellow narcissist-fantasists, the whole thing might be dismissed as touching idiocy. After all, if people wish to think that the August 1961 certificate of live birth is a forgery despite verification from Hawaiian officials, the state's Republican Governor and independent body factcheck.org; if they want to believe that birth announcements were planted in local Honolulu papers solely to prepare the ground for the day he could illegally enter the US and start his Islamist sleeper march on the White House; if they choose to trust a carefully edited interview with his Kenyan step-grandmother, cut off before she repeatedly confirms that he was born in Hawaii... well, that's their absolute right. Many of us solemnly believe objective absurdities. I believe that Tottenham Hotspur is one of the world's great football clubs, for instance, while a late relative was unswervingly convinced, as recently as 1989, that Hitler was working as a porter at a block of service flats in St John's Wood. Which of us is without a meshugas?
What is more intriguing about the birther "movement" – even than Orly's professional range – is the light it casts on the necrotic state of the American right. Concerns that the Grand Old Party would respond to Obama's near landslide by aping the post-1997 Tories, and adhering to the Tebbitian doctrine that the only mistake was in not being nasty and insular enough, prove naïve. The Republicans now make the Tories at their dog-whistling absolute worst seem achingly inclusive.
Who leads them at the minute is a mystery. Some think it's Sarah Palin, others the deliriously repugnant Rush Limbaugh, who inevitably joins the other oracles of US radio and TV in keeping the birther debate bubbling. What leadership there is, so it seems to this ignorant observer across the ocean, comes from the grass roots ... the sort of God fearin', gun-totin', sister-shaggin' sweethearts who screeched "terrorist" and "kill him" when John McCain mentioned Obama on the stump. Unable to compute that America elected a black man, they have decided that he isn't their President at all. No longer can they use the "n" word or fantasise publicly about lynch mobs. But they can divert their rage into a bogus legalistic dispute, rejected time and again by the Supreme Court, as freely as they like.
And their elected representatives follow them in dumb terror. A Huffington Post reporter approached a clutch of Republican congressmen on Capitol Hill this week to ask if they think Obama was born on US soil. Several scurried away, one at a trot, without replying. Another spent 20 minutes pretending to examine CDs in a shop to avoid the question. The only one prepared to answer said that Obama was a natural born citizen "so far as I'm aware" – an echo of Hillary Clinton doing her genteel bit to foster the myth about him being a Muslim sleeper during the primaries by referring to him as a Christian "so far as I know".
As Obama suggested after the arrest of the esteemed Harvard professor Skip Gates in his own Washington home, his election was not the magical cure-all some hoped. But then racism is stubbornly resistant to silver bullets. I was in Sydney on the day of the 400m women's Olympic final, and the Australian media was hyperventilating at the prospect of a Kathy Freeman victory healing all the wounds with the Aborigine people. She duly won her gold, and we left Olympic Park drunk on utopian dreams. The next day a colleague of Indian birth related how, outside the stadium that night, the first six empty cabs ignored his hails. The seventh also drove past before reversing. "Sorry, mate, couldn't make you out properly in the rain," the driver apologised as he beckoned him in. "I reckoned you was an Abbo."
These things take time. How much is anyone's guess, but America is waking to the realisation that untold millions aren't even close to accepting the democratic will that put a black man in the White House. The likes of Orly Taitz will parlay the issue into regular slots on Fox & Friends, countless more will kid themselves that their objection is constitutional rather than racial, and a few will be emboldened to hatch plots to uphold their patriotic ideals via an assassin's gun.
The Prez, meanwhile, is content to deal with such banalities as healthcare reform, and stay silent on the question of his birthplace. Politically speaking, this is a gift from heaven, exposing the vicious dementia of the Republican right to a degree of riducule that should help sweep him to a second term. The wider implications will please him less. But before we get too smug about British tolerance and racial maturity, perhaps it's worth acknowledging that, where the most senior elected black politician in American history is Barack Obama, ours remains Paul Boateng. All of us, it would seem, have a little way to go.
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Comments
I honestly don't believe racism would even come into it here - the barrier is class and cronyism, which prevents pretty much all of us lesser mortals getting anywhere near politics
I remember polls in the 90s showing americans were a lot nearer to voting for a black man than a white woman - so far they've been proved right, at least we have had someone of the gender that make up 50% of the population of every country
We don't actually elect a 'leader'. Here in the UK we elect a local representative (usually along party lines)to be our MP. These MPs decide which among them will be the Prime Minister.
The current party leader can of course be a significant factor in deciding which party to vote for, but only if the voter is undecided I would suspect. Hence we get Gordon Brown as our 'leader' even though none of the electorate voted for him to be PM.
In the USA, the electorate vote specifically for a President, so the President has a very personal significance for the American people. The president is a point of pride (hopefully) and a focus of their hopes.
Here in the UK, the PM is somebody we put up with and can be a focus of fun, anger, humour. We don't really trust any of them anyway.
I hear that hospitals just across the Mexican border are cheaper and offer better health care. How do we know that Barbara Bush didn’t nip across, drop the brat and hop back to Texas with an illegal alien in tow?
PS: You win the award for the best line in print this year: "if you thought Esther Rantzen cuts an unconventional figure on the national political stage, here's a bottle blonde to make the old turnip-botherer look like Geoffrey Howe." (Sorry Esther - it may be unfair, but it IS funny!
The difference so that you know is that the Certificate of Birth he showed does not require one to actually be born in Hawaii. A Record of Live Birth must be signed by a doctor who delivered the child, signed by the hospital administration and must be recorded with the Public Health Commissioner.
So what is President Obama hiding by not showing his Record of Live Birth? Just show it and be done with it instead of spending millions of dollars to keep from showing it.
The general consensus seems to be that there is a chance that some people within the US intelligence community were complicit in either (a) turning a blind eye or (b) giving a helping hand to whoever carried out the attacks.
This Mossad business is a red herring designed to throw any disagreement with The Consensus into the same pot - the theory is that by dragging Mossad into this, you can then claim that 'crackpot conspiracy theorists' are anti-semitic at the same time.. why not throw the Protocols of Zion and Lizards in whilst your at it!
There's something almost child-like, if not naive, by the way in which you consistently paint everyone right of centre as being bad and everyone left of centre as good. You can't really be this ideologically unsound or simplistic? Not in 2009, surely not?
I even love the way you reverentially refer to a "Huffington Post' reporter" in your piece. Reporter? Are you sure you don't mean blogger hack? Let's not forget that this great bastion of political commentary is the same one that recently referred to Sarah Palin's likely 2012 presidential run as being on a "more retardation platform". A nasty reference to her Down's Syndrome child Trig. In other words, if Limbaugh preaches to the converted on the Right, than Huffington does the same to those on the Left. In both instances, what they say should carry a strong political health warning.
Dude, you need to raise your game, because in all honesty what you're producing at the moment isn't adding anything new to the debate, on any subject, let alone racism. And, whether you like or not, no pointing of fingers at Republicans will ever quite erase Obama's naked emperor moment last week, in front of a live TV audience, when he took sides in a local dispute between Gates/Crowley on the grounds of race; and he chose to do so, despite his Harvard Law background, without having any of the detail or facts. You couldn't make this shit up.
If you really want evidence of the "insanity of racism" today, then this moment was surely it. And the fact that all 3 parties involved are having a brewski at the White House today suggests just how badly the Prez is desperately trying to repair the huge dent that he's put in his own, supposed, post-racial credentials.
droppings! What's certain is that he's a bigoted racist, as well as like-minded counterparts of his for
whom ANY non-paleface would not be good enough for the "White" House. This was the mentality of
the wild, wild gun-toting West...then - and it seems, horrifyingly enough....even today!
And judging from the tenor of some contributors here, one didn't mind having a president who took the
nation to war causing so many useless American deaths, as well as those of nonwhites of a distant country, as long as he had that John Wayne-ish pistol-packin' glint in his eye, making him the darling
of the U.S. arms lobby.
What's actually funny is that McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Most constitutional scholars agreed that he would still be considered natural born (since the important thing is having US citizenship at birth, and the canal zone was US territory anyways), but it actually was a legitimate legal question.
Don't get me wrong, were I American I would have voted for him, especially if the alternative were John McCain. But let's have a little even-handed due diligence here. Those who endlessly chanted "Bush stole the 2000 election" would presumably be interested to know about how Obama first got to Congress, but they won't find out unless the media are prepared to apply the same level of scrutiny to candidates they like.
In the rush to get her required signatures for her petitions to be on the ballot, mistakes were apparently made and 2/3 of her signatures were determined to be invalid and she was forced to pull-out with hundreds fewer signatures than were required.
So, I'd hardly call that "going over her election paperwork with a fine toothed comb".
If you are going to swallow the Right's urban legends about Obama, you should probably do so with more than a few grains of salt. But thank you for proving the author's premise of the numerous conspiracy theories and their complete invalidity.
The United States is not a democracy. It is a Constitutional Republic bound by the WRITTEN Articles of the US Constitution. Among these articles, expressed by the Founding Fathers (FF), is Article II Section I - which requires a Candidate for the highest office in the land be a 'Natural Born Citizen'. This definition requires that the candidate's parents both be American Citizens themselves and the candidate be born in United States sovereign territory. One of the reasons this is so important is that the FFs understood the division of loyalties offered by dual citizenship would permit the President to be compromised in urgent matters such as National Defense and Security. So far - Barack Obama has shown utter contempt for the process, document and country he raised he right hand a swore to protect. The American Patriot's of all parties are correct in wanting to know WHO this man - who has their lives on the line - really is. Sorry if this demand is offensive to you in any way.
Gill - US Citizen and Patriot.
Don't bad-mouth. Show the long-form. Then the whole issue will be settled.
So how did John Prescott, Harold Wilson, Jim Callaghan, Dennis Skinner, Michael Meacher, George Brown, Ken Livingstone, George Galloway and Neil Kinnock get on in politics?
Can't have been cronyism so it must have been class.
If that isn't a delusional concept I've never heard one.
'Marxist' Bill Clinton supported the implementation of NAFTA which, being neoliberal, is about as far from Marxism as it gets.
Every US President from Carter onwards has been a neoliberal. No one has done more, with the exceptions of Pinochet and Thatcher, to bring about the current 'autonomous individualism' than 'thinkers' from the US of A like John Paul Nash, and James M. Buchanan.
This bunch of nutters and headbangers now run the world for their own benefit and call it freedom.
And when their theory goes belly-up this useless bunch of loud-mouths demand that John Maynard Keynes - who they abused for years - is resurrected to bail them out!
Where has Matthew Norman been the last thirty or more years?
The Republican Party has long been a breeding ground for hate and stupidity.
Spiro Agnew's many ridiculous and shabby words at a time he was taking brown paper bags of money in his vice-presidential office?
Phil Gramm and all his dumb talk about what his mama used to say about "gettin' down outta the wagon to he'p push the wagon"?
Nixon and wife Pat's "Republican" cloth coat anf their little dog?
Nixon's first Congressional campaign won by insulting a capable and honest woman?
Every word ever uttered by that dense chunk of sod, Bush?
Dick Cheney's organized programs of murder, hate, and denial of rights?
Rumsfeld's murder of 3,000 prisoners in Afghanistan?
Dan Quayle and everything he ever said? Plus the words of his truly nasty wife?
The late Senator Roman Hruska and his public claim that the Supreme Court should reflect all groups, including mediocrity?
Lamar Alexander and his ridiculous (custom-made) red lumber-jack shirts and his ideas about having a part-time government?
The absurd former Senator Bob Smith and his claim that Clinton was running a "damned concentration camp" when they rescued that poor Cuban boy Elian from his hateful kidnappers in Miami.
Tom Delay and his name-calling and spitting venom while all the time running a crooked fund-raising scheme?
Pat Robertson's claims that natural disasters were God's vengeance on America for immoral ways plus just about everything else ever uttered by Robertson?
Newt Gingrich and his "family values" crap while divorcing a wife dying of cancer?
And that's just a short list.
The Republican party needs to totally reinvent itself. Palin for President and Limbaugh for VP!!!!!! What a ticket that would be. What a gift for the Obama campaign that would be.
I remember hearing about one of the elections that M. Thatcher won. As the campaign kicked off one of her cabinet came in to her with the Labour party manifesto and an incredulous look on his face. M. Thatcher asked him what's up as he handed her the document. the Labour party has just handed us the next election her minister said.
The Republicans have proved themselves to be the losers but as yet they are not completely unelectable, but that is the path that they have chosen. If they continue for 6 months more Obama will win a second term and political historians will be able to say that they accurately predicted the re-election 3+ years before the campaign started. The only people who don't seem to realise this are the Republican party itself.
Maybe some young canny Republican politicians are waiting in the wings for a second electoral disaster and the inevitable mass clearout of the old guard that would bring. One thing for sure though is that the Republican party are an unelectable bunch of extremists, racists and bigots.
As for the Republicans ... remember the name Eric Cantor.
It's clear you know nothing about American history.
I know I have to smoke a lot of pot to deal with the fact I live in the same country as these idiots!
Lastly to those requesting he release the long form of the birth certificates, isn't the problem that Hawaii destroyed all of them and replaced them with this shorter form sometime in the 1970s? How can he produce something that does not exist?