Maher Takes Aim at Birthers

Here's a Bill Maher op-ed in the LA Times about the latest right wing obsession. Here are the key bits:

Never underestimate the ability of a tiny fringe group of losers to ruin everything.

For the last couple of weeks, we've all been laughing heartily at the wacky antics of the "birthers" -- the far-right goofballs who claim Barack Obama wasn't really born in Hawaii and therefore the job of president goes to the runner-up, former Miss California Carrie Prejean.

...

And yet, every week, the chorus of conservatives demanding to see his birth certificate grows. It's like they're the Cambridge police, Obama's in his house -- the White House -- and they need to see some ID.

And there's nothing anyone can do to convince these folks. You could hand them, in person, the original birth certificate and have a video of Obama emerging from the womb with Don Ho singing in the background ... and they still wouldn't believe it.

Which raises the question: Why, in this country, is it always the religious right that won't take anything on faith?

...

This flap might be a deluded right-wing obsession that is a total waste of time, but so was Whitewater, and look where that ended up. A handful of Republican operatives, enraged at Bill Clinton's unprecedented economic growth and budget surpluses, found a woman named Paula Jones, which led to a woman named Monica Lewinsky, which gave me enough material to eventually be able to buy a big house in Bel-Air. Which I'm still conflicted about.

More recently we had the Swift Boat allegations against John Kerry, in which Kerry was accused of volunteering to serve in Vietnam so he could jump in front of a bullet so he could get a medal and then throw it away to satisfy his urge to insult real Americans. This was so stupid that Kerry refused to even discuss it.

And we all know how well that worked out.

Maher fails to mention the vicious attack ads directed at Max Cleland, a triple amputee from Vietnam. The Saxby Chambliss attack ads said that Cleland did not love his country enough to care about its security. Odd. Cleland gave three limbs. Meanwhile, Chambliss the mad Republican attack dog:

In the 1960s, during the Vietnam War, Chambliss received five student deferments while attending the University of Georgia and the University of Tennessee College of Law and was also given a medical deferment (1-Y) for bad knees due to a football injury.

But facts don't stop the insane Republicans. They learned from Hitler the "big lie" technique. And, sadly, it works. Americans should be outraged. Look what Hitler did to Germany and the Germans. Sadly, the Republicans have used this technique again and again. Think of the Willie Horton ads. These Republican attack dogs even used this big lie technique of George Bush in the 2000 presidential primary:

An anonymous smear campaign began against McCain, delivered by push polls, faxes, e-mails, flyers, and audience plants. The smears claimed that McCain had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter was adopted from Bangladesh), that his wife Cindy was a drug addict, that he was a homosexual, and that he was a "Manchurian Candidate" who was either a traitor or mentally unstable from his North Vietnam POW days.

When will the American people reject this gutter politics and demand that elections run on platforms stating policies and providing a vision?

Update 2009jul31: I think the following graphic demonstrates clearly that racism is alive and well in the US. Notice which region supports the "birther" nonsense. Then ask, which region historically has had a vision that people like Obama are not truly human:


Seems to me if you are willing to decide that certain people are "not people" then it is very easy to decide that some birth certificates are not real birth certificates.