The so-called “Birther” debate makes us all look like idiots.
For a while I thought I had a neat two-question template for determining if I needed to spend any time at all discussing anything more important than a recipe for bean dip with somebody I didn’t know: “Do you believe that Barack Obama was born in the United States; and, Do you believe that Barack Obama is a Christian?”
I like the idea because of its simplicity. Yes or No answers are required, preferably without any of the truly absurd addendums that typically get tacked along with answers to Question No. 1, or any of the ecclesiastical effluvium that typically flows with discussions surrounding No. 2. Nope, I’ll take “yup” for an answer to both or I’ll take a hike. I am way too old to waste any time debating questions that are long since settled.
Which makes the current climate on television “news” programs so intolerable, because those august institutions (maybe I should have put quotes around the lower-case august usage) are wallowing in just about every word that Donald Trump says these days. Since his entire alleged candidacy for President is underpinned primarily by his “Birther” beliefs, virtually every microsecond we spend with that billionaire knucklehead is time we can’t get back and time that should have been spent on something – or someone – serious.
The various news organizations skirt carefully around the real implications of the Birther nonsense, but I don’t have to. You don’t necessarily have to be a racist to have embraced this crap, but embracing it certainly increases the odds that you are one. I don’t doubt that there are other explanations why – gasp! – millions of American citizens doubt their President’s citizenship status, but racism is most likely at the core of a good deal of it.
I was startled nearly 20 years ago when it became instantly clear that millions of voters decided that Bill Clinton’s presidency was illegitimate, so I should have been a bit more sanguine when that same virulent kind of rejection was directed at President Obama. If reading those very words makes you a bit uncomfortable or even agitated, you just might be a racist. That’s not the only explanation, but it’s the most likely one and presumably the most logical inference to draw. You know the old saw: “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.”
Just imagine: Two and a half years into his presidency and we’re still debating about whether or not he’s a U.S. citizen. I have to think that historians will look back at us 20 or 30 years from now and kind of collectively shake their heads in amazement. The nation was saddled with brutal unemployment numbers, staggering national debt and approaching unfunded pension obligations that will dwarf the debt figures, medical costs that threatened to disable the whole system if not the entire nation, energy prices and costs that crippled us and enriched those who would destroy us, global instability that made us elders long for the giddy days of the Cold War, and climate change that was treated with just about the same level of intellectual honesty and collective personal maturity as we displayed with the Birther issue.
You have to think that they will be amazed/appalled that in the middle of all those potentially devastating problems, so much of our attention was focused on the grand charlatan and snake-oil salesman of our age, Don Trump. Shame on us.
I also assume those very same historians will applaud the fact that at least one of us insisted on being the only grownup in the room and refrained from taking part in the Birther silliness. It’s probably just a coincidence that he also happens to be our President.
And remember, if my use of “our” gives you a bit of that pesky acid reflux, you just may be a ….
- T.S. O’Connell
