Who doesn’t, these days?
Franklin Graham, son of TV evangelist grifter Billy Graham has officially joined the Racist Birther Brigade:
Rev. Franklin Graham wonders: Why can’t Barack Obama produce a birth certificate?
The son of the legendary Billy Graham told Christiane Amanpour on ABC’s “This Week” that the president “has some issues to deal with” when it comes to proving he is indeed an American.
“He can solve this whole birth certificate issue pretty quickly,” Graham said. “I was born in a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. And I know that my records are there; you can probably go and find out what room my mother was in when I was born. I don’t know why he can’t produce that. It’s an issue it looks like he can answer pretty quickly.”
Graham, who has prayed with Obama, said the president has told him that he’s a Christian, but allowed that “there are many people that do wonder where he really stands on” his religion.
“But the debate comes…what is a Christian?” Graham said. “For him, going to church means that he’s a Christian. But for me, the definition of a Christian is whether we have given our life to Christ, and are following him in faith. And we have trusted him as our lord and savior. That ‘s the definition of a Christian.
“It’s not as to what church you’re a member, a membership doesn’t make you a Christian.”
Apparently calling oneself a Christian doesn’t make you a Christian either.
Looks like Frank is still bitter that he was uninvited from that National Prayer Day at the Pentagon last year because he called Islam evil and wicked. Tsk tsk.
Also, I doubt that he could go to the hospital and find out what room his mother was in when he was born unless the room was labeled “Spawn of Billy” with a branding iron.
In any event, Frank should shut the F up and have a Cadbury Creme Egg.
Linda Featheringill
Franklin Graham is not worth getting all worked up about.
ruemara
Mr. Franklin needs to read his bible just a bit better, with more humility and openness to the Holy Spirit.
Lolis
Wow! The white evangelicals are coming out of the closet as the dumb bigots many of us knew they were. Still, I am truly repulsed.
President Obama has had to face so much bullshit, but he and his family continue on with grace and faith in America. I don’t know how they do it, but I am truly thankful they have the strength.
KG
to paraphrase Puddle of Mudd, hate is a strong word, but I really, really, really don’t like them.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Yes, please, please, please make the test for ReaLAMEricaness being able to get the medical records related to your birth and produce a hospital employee who can tell people what room the mother was in when she delivered.
God damn these are some dumb motherfuckers.
I also love that Frankie has moved the RealXtian goalposts so far that going to church doesn’t count. Good luck finding a real job fucker, you’ve just given your flock an excuse to spend Sundays doing something else.
Nellcote
And what did Amanpour say in response?
Tweety has taken to carrying around a hard copy of Prez Obama’s birth cert. to show to birthers when he confronts them.
Mark B
You know, if Obama produced a super-8 movie of his birth with a slow pan to Mauna Lea (or whatever the volcano nearest Honolulu is called) the birthers would just rush out and call it a fake. There is already plenty of proof that he was born in Hawaii. Honesely, we should deport all of the birthers for stupidity … except for the fact that no other country would take them.
scav
Bother. I misread and thought you’d tole Frank to shut up and be a Cadbury Cream Egg, in which case these procedures would be far more amusing to think about. Ah, well, at least they’re topical for Easter in a peepsian sort of way.
RossInDetroit
Cocky bastard stands in FRONT of a cross in a leather jacket with his arms crossed. That’s some serious disrespect for his Savior. When I was a born again type anyone would have gotten his ears boxed for a pose like that.
Yutsano
Oh they want to say it. They want to call Obama that six letter N word so badly they can taste it on their tongues. But that isn’t enough for them. They want to know they can say the six letter N word AND THAT WILL STOP HIM. It won’t, but they still want to be rewarded for it. They want that smug satisfaction of putting him back in his rightful place in their eyes. Obama plays this right, he just ignores it. Since no one is calling him on it to his face.
Elizabelle
Franklin Graham does not deserve a forum, and certainly not Christianne Amanpour.
You will recall it’s FGraham who intoned “one nation under Jesus” at GWB inaugural.
That (1) was not an error, methinks and (2) is spectacularly inaccurate, offensive, and shows little respect for the Constitution the Lesser Bush was being sworn in to protect.
JonF
And he’s pimping for Trump. About as religious as Ralph Reed.
ppcli
<blockquoteI also love that Frankie has moved the RealXtian goalposts so far that going to church doesn’t count. Good luck finding a real job fucker, you’ve just given your flock an excuse to spend Sundays doing something else.
Naw, that’s just standard evangelical boilerplate. Ask any fundamentalist if joining a church and attending every week and striving earnestly to live the charitable and moral life preached by Christ is enough to make you a Christian, and you’ll get the same response. That’s not what does it. The phrase “Not by works, lest any man boast” might make an appearance.
Mark B
“a membership doesn’t make you a Christian”
I’ll disagree, but FG is good evidence that membership in a Christian church doesn’t make you a good person.
gnomedad
My memory for historical climate may be poor but while the right really hated Clinton, I can’t recall this level of hysteria and conspiracy fantasies during his administration. Sure, there was the Clinton “death list” and other crap, but I never saw that as mainstream. So I’m going with racism here.
dr. bloor
.
Like every other racist fucktard on this bandwagon, he doesn’t even know what he wants Obama to produce. The hospital DOESN’T HAVE THE GODDAMN BIRTH CERTIFICATE, STUPID, THE MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENT OWNS THAT DOCUMENT.
Maude
@Yutsano:
Great comment and I can’t add anything to it.
JGabriel
Well, that should solve the issue right there. Graham is clearly a Muslim.
.
kay
@Linda Featheringill:
I feel really strongly about birtherism. I think everyone should. Conservatives have managed to convince the entire commercial media that any random accusation they produce out of their addled confused minds demands a response from the accused.
That’s backwards. If media and conservatives want to continue to promote this lie, the burden is on them to produce something, not the other way around.
Since 2007, Linda. They’ve been promoting this character attack (and it is a character attack: the premise behind it is Obama and his entire family lied) without anything to back it up.
That’s wrong, and I’m wondering if the Graham family or any random CNN anchor or media personality wants this bullshit “standard” applied to them and their family.
They’re teaching the controversy on birtherism, and they all have it backward.
“Put up or shut up” applies to the person leveling the character attack, not the person who is the subject of the attack.
Joseph Nobles
Any Christian out there second-guessing Obama’s Christianity needs to sit down with Romans 14:4 and reflect on their own pride and arrogance:
Yes, Obama as a public servant answers to us, but on the subject of whether he’s a faithful Christian or not, the only two people that need deal with that are Obama and his God. Everybody else needs to meet my mom’s friend, Nunya.
And any Christian minister worth his salt would know this. You think Franklin’s daddy would have been caught dead saying any such thing about any American president? Jesus wept.
benintn
Franklin Graham is about as relevant as … Roger Clinton, Michael Reagan, and Paris Hilton.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
Let’s see what North Carolina says about medical record retention:
Whoopsie.
rikyrah
ABL,
he’s always been on the wrong side. this is no shock to me.
kdaug
@Lolis:
Precisely. Who’s the Christian again?
rikyrah
OUT OF THE CLOSET?
when have they ever been IN the closet?
he’s a fraud just like his father is a fraud.
where was Billy Graham during the Civil Rights Movement?
NOWHERE TO BE FOUND.
so, spare me, about how religious hs and his son are.
fucking frauds, the lot of them.
TuiMel
And preferably he should ingest in anally.
lacp
Wasn’t he the clown who wanted to ship a whole load of bibles to Iraq right after we invaded?
maya
He just looking for a televangelicalist gig on FOX.
Mark B
@lacp: Out of Iraq, IIRC. Pretty sure it was a baby selling scam for desperate childless couples.
dmsilev
There’s literally nothing that Obama could produce which would satisfy these nuts. He could produce sworn affidavits from every medical professional practicing in Hawaii in the early 1960s (including the ones who have since died), a DNA analysis of his mother’s placenta which the local hospital kept in a freezer for the past 50 years, and the news stories about the sudden appearance of a new star on the eastern horizon and something about three wise men.
It wouldn’t matter.
dms
Mark S.
@benintn:
Paris Hilton is much more relevant than Franklin Graham.
And I thought Billy was dead. Nope.
Citizen_X
Pardon me, fuck you. Who the fuck elected you Pope?
PS: I welcomed you back last thread ABL, but now you’re starting to harsh my Easter mellow with this parade of idiots. UR HURTIN MAH UNICORNS! [Hugs peeps.]
maya
This Graham is just another cracker.
Martin
2012 GOP primaries are going to be fucking awesome. On this side we have Mother Teresa, on the other Charles Manson. In order to win the Presidency, the winning candidate will need a platform to appease both.
Martin
@Citizen_X: Ah, but that’s the great thing about Protestantism – everyone gets to be Pope. What could go wrong?!
Redshirt
This Birth Certificate fake controversy is an apt symbol of where we’ve come to as a country. It’s an entirely fake issue, created as a smear by paid Republican consultants, and yet here we are, still talking about it. Talking about it a lot.
Witness the power of the conservative’s to create BS from thin air, and make it real, and then have it become a major part of the national dialogue.
It’s incredible, and truly despicable. But that’s our “Liberal Media” for ya!
Joshua Norton
Since they’re all hot and bothered about “birf certificates”, it wouldn’t be problem for them to prove Obama’s mother was actually in Kenya at the time of his birth, if it was true. Travel records are available to the public on request.
All they can do is muddy the water with their fact-free assumptions based on assumptions.
David
Look up the Full Faith and Credit clause. If you can’t accept the state of Hawaii’s official and repeated authentication of Obama’s birth certificate, you’re not American.
Mark B
Honestly, my own conspiracy theory about the birth certificate stuff [purely speculative] is that it’s payback for the controversy involving Bush’s oddly missing service records and how Rather got played with 2nd generation copies. Republican operatives decided to trump that real controversy with a fake one involving missing documents that weren’t actually missing, but they didn’t figure in the absolute gullibility of thier base and the thing blew up HUGE!
If the actual original documents did show up, the kerning patrols would go into overdrive claiming that that particular font didn’t exist at the time Obama was born or that the documents were faked somehow. We saw this 3 years ago when the certified copies were produced. There’s no reason it wouldn’t happen no matter what documentation was produced.
Kay Shawn
Amanpour should be fired if she let that stand.
I just want to express my additional outrage at the now-vetoed bill in Arizona requiring a Presidential candidate to show a “certificate of circumcision.” This was reported, but the implications were dodged consistently in the coverage I saw/read. It’s so unspeakable I’m still speechless about it.
cathyx
I would guess that most of us over 40 couldn’t produce a valid, or any, birth certificate either.
Mark B
@Joshua Norton: Yeah, and even if you were able to prove he was not born on American soil, his Mother’s citizenship is sufficient to establish him as a ‘Natural Born Citizen’ as required by the Constitution. You would have to accept a pretty tortured definition of the phrase to not allow that, and most of thos would have also prevented McCain from being president since he was not born in the U.S.
rikyrah
I couldn’t produce a long form birth certificate if someone put a gun to my head.
TheOtherWA
Some days I think all the ridiculous email hoaxes from the last 10-12 years (deodorant causes breast cancer, the Klingerman virus, robbers using ether in perfume bottles to knock out women, etc..) was a test. Every jackass who forwarded that crap is now a teabagger. Someone wanted to see how many really, really stupid people there are in the country.
If the emails had died out, as they should have, there would have been too many smart people to fall for the conservative bullshit. We’re so screwed.
Warren Terra
I realize this is unseemly, and is unlikely to amuse others as much as it amused me, but inspired by the adventures of our own beloved Sarah Proud And Tall, I responded to a birther troll in a thread at The Reality-Based Community in a manner that I rather enjoyed.
The afore-mentioned troll, one “Brett Bellmore”, had said:
To which I replied:
But my proudest moment was when another commenter took me and others to task for feeding the troll, and urged us to move on:
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Why is ABC giving airtime to this nitwit? Have we learned nothing about listening to the idiot sons of famous (and at best over-rated) fathers?
TheOtherWA
Several years ago I had to request my birth certificate from Illinois to get a passport. It’s just like what Obama has shown. No hospital info, no doctor signature, just a state issued, State Dept accepted document.
I wonder how many teabaggers have passports? Not many is my guess.
Warren Terra
@rikyrah:
Weirdest mugging ever.
Karen
Franklin joined the Racist Birther Brigade?
I never knew he left.
Citizen_X
@Martin: Was it always that bad, though, before the Fundies declared themselves the Only True Christians(C)? (Okay, probably back during the Wars of the Reformation…) But now it seems like every asshole waving a bible gets to declare himself infallible every other minute.
ABL
@Warren Terra: FTW. ha!
Martin
@Citizen_X: Well, anyone with a Bible can declare their own interpretation as being the only right interpretation (apparently with no regard for the fact that what they’re interpreting is itself a translation of a version of the work that had been revised repeatedly for a millenium). For a bunch of people that usually yell and scream against relativism, it’s pretty funny to watch.
But yeah, from the moment the Romans pounded in the nails, everyone was fighting over how deep they went, and what that had to do with how hard you should fuck your wife.
jeff
The state I was born in provides the kind of photostat reproduction of the original handwritten certificate that the birthers want. But nobody would ever question my birth anyway, any more than they would my grandmother’s DAR membership. It’s just a somewhat objective correlative of their anxieties, a missing sacred relic that focuses all their fears.
Ultimately, there is no original text, and we have to go out into the world with some evidence plus some faith in our fellows goodwill. There’s no way otherwise to do anything.
I spent too much time recently with a truther. Every one of her “damning facts” about the WTC were wrong, but taken together they were somehow stronger for her than any single one, and there was no shaking her conviction.
ABL
@Linda Featheringill: stating an opinion as fact — a woman after my own heart.
Cassidy
Ban Christianity. It’s toxic voodoo that has poisoned this country. Run it into the oceans.
RossInDetroit
To me the last word on the Birth Issue is that the Bush FEC cleared Obama to run, knowing that he was a strong candidate. The same FEC that rat(fink)ed the Dems for years.
Karen
Did you know as of April 1, 2011 if you’re a first time applicant for a US passport, you have to have the following:
Full names of applicant’s parents on all certified birth certificates to be considered as proof of US Citizenship.
You also need:
You can find all that info here
Is this because of Birtherism?
jeff
@Cassidy:
Oh great. Yes let’s regulate religion from the Politburo. Christ, what an asshole.
jeff
@Karen:
That looks approximately like it’s always been, or am I missing something? That’s what I had to have for my passport when I was 18.
Dream On
And these bible-thumpers are different from Taliban theocrats how?
I love how Obama can pray with the guy and still not get any respect.
Cassidy
I don’t want to regulate it. That implies still allowing it on our shores. And Jesus wasn’t an asshole; only his followers.
Bottom line: What has the magical Jesus Death Cult done for our country lately?
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
@dmsilev: This.
Because the shorter for anything any ever birfer says is always “Go back to Africa you dirty n gger!”
Cassidy
@Dream On: The Taliban actually had the balls to persecute the civil war they wanted. Our version of the Taliban are a bunch of pant-wetting cowards.
Mark B
@Karen: I’m not sure what’s motivating this, but the certificate that we’re all familiar with issued by Hawaii for Obama would satisfy the listed requirements. The hospital birth certificate is only listed as a secondary document, so it’s actually LESS acceptable. It looks to me to be more of a clarification of earlier rules than any new requirements.
Allan
I would like Franklin Graham to prove that he’s never spent a night in a bathhouse with a bottle of poppers shoved up his nose while anonymous well-hung strangers double-teamed his gaping mangina.
Eyewitnesses who can account for his every waking moment since puberty will be sufficient.
PurpleGirl
@jeff: Based on my recent experience, that might be different now. I went to the NYC web site to request a BC and was redirected to a web site maintained by some company called Vital Check which seems to handle processing of BC requests for all the states now. I had to put in certain information and about a week later I received a certification of birth. It’s a multi-colored safety paper with embossing of some sort. It’s got a machined signature of the City Registrar. The printing of the information about me was done by a high speed matrix printer of some sort (very light).
I have a for-correction-purposes photocopy of the paper filed by the hospital with the City when I born, but that doesn’t have a seal or embossing so I guess it wouldn’t be accepted for anything by now.
Martin
@Mark B: 9/11 is what motivated it. But the point about birtherism is missed. Obama has already met this standard, several times over. The birthers want those original documents presented to them individually, as if they individually are the government.
Any presentation of the documents to an authority is unacceptable, as it has been since day one. Any facsimile is a fraud unless they can rub the raised seal with their own fingers. This is actually an isolated manifestation of the freeman movement.
Dream On
@Martin: Bingo.
jeff
@PurpleGirl:
Wow that is way different. I called the courthouse in the county in Georgia where I was born and the woman who answered the phone seemed real happy I called and I think she just sent me an official copy. This was 2004, but it’s a small town.
ABL
@Warren Terra: Holy shit, dude. That is outstanding. I may have to post that, with your permission, of course.
grandpajohn
Well another son of famous person bringing disgrace and humiliation to the family name
Cacti
I welcome the white right coming out of the closet about their birtherism.
It takes away any plausible deniability that their problem with Obama is that he’s blackity black black.
Cermet
Very sorry ABL about he yumor growth – one critical thing you MUST do is up your vitamin D level to between 2000 IU to 10,000 IU and never take multi-vitamin when fighting a tumor. Best of luck.
grandpajohn
Here in SC you can go to the nearest health dept , since their computers are networked into the state, you can get a certified copy of your certificate. But nobody gets a long form, in SC the state issues a wallet size certificate about the size of a drivers license
Warren Terra
@ABL: Sure, do anything you like with it.
sue
Wouldn’t Mother Graham have been, like, in the DELIVERY ROOM when she gave birth?
Martin
@sue: That’s what they want you to think.
ABL
@Cermet: I’m at 5000 per day. Vitamin D — who knew!
debbie
Franklin Graham is Exhibit A for why the separation of church and state must be maintained.
And by the way, can he prove he’s not a pedophile? No? Then he must be one!
Buck
@Linda Featheringill: Franklin Graham is not worth getting all worked up about.
Done in one.
WereBear
@sue: Being a woman, she doesn’t count.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@cathyx: Nah. It’s a piece of cake. You write to the Secretary of State of the state you were born in, pay ’em the fee ($6.00 for NY, last time I got one) and you get a birth certificate with the official seal of the state. In PA it’s a computer printout, just like Obama’s. In NY, it’s a photostat of paperwork submitted at birth, at least mine is, with the official seal of the state.
That’s a birth certificate. Period, the end.
Maybe after 40 you can’t get any hospital records, but that isn’t a birth certificate.
Sorry for the rant and retreading long trodden ground.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Karen: You forgot one. My adopted kids got passports based on their Naturalization Certificates. Which were a pretty simple deal to get.
ET
Most definitely a pale imitation of a poor copy facsimile of a photograph of his father.
He won’t achieve what his father did. And knows it.
jazzgurl
More to the point,what is happening with Christiane Amanpour? God,what a DISAPPOINTMENT she has turned out to in this gig!
And yes, i expected more from her!
OzoneR
Why not? Everyone gets to be a center of attention for saying this shit.
Mark my words, within a few months we’re all going to be dumbfounded by polls showing 40%-45% of the country thinks Obama was born outside the US and we’re going to wonder WTF happened
Again
MikeB
But IMO, this is a great issue for Obama to ignore, further unfuriating
the nutters and increasing the volume of the debate.
Bottom line, this is a trivial and irrelevant issue. Whether he is a natural born
citizen or not, he has been president for 3 years and probably will be for
5 more. To be screaming about this issue at this point is to reveal oneself as
an extremely unserious person, given the magnitude of the real problems
the country faces today. It relegates the birthers to the lunatic fringe, and alienates
voters of all stripes who are looking for solutions.
I’m sure Obama’s people are loving Franklin Graham for this.
BC
People who want to see a different birth certificate from the one Obama has released want something that has no official status – that hospital certificate thingy the mother was given when she was discharged with the baby. They have those, they probably don’t realize they couldn’t use them to prove their own citizenship – they would need a state-issued certificate for a passport, etc.
AAA Bonds
“I was born in a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. I went back there and a couple lesbians tried to sell me a geode and now I’m pretty sure that gay African Communists run the entire country.”
AAA Bonds
The ins and outs of this conspiracy are pretty interesting from the point of view of public administration.
As many have pointed out, almost no one knows the difference between a hospital record and a birth certificate. The truth is that they have no reason to know that, because they will likely never run into it.
Citizenship is practically established in everyday life – work, school, etc. – by a paper trail from various sources.
Legally establishing citizenship in court is harder, but most people don’t have to do that, and for good reason, because it’s very difficult to acquire that redundant paper trail if you weren’t a citizen to begin with.
The current madness over citizenship seems like two trends dovetailing: first, the strange old Bircher madness compelling the fringe to seek out the hidden Communist conspiracy responsible for all woes, and second, the even older xenophobic impulse to “control” cultural shifts in the United States.
In light of the real vagueness of and irrational stress over these issues on the right, President Obama appears to be a grotesque monster who must have SOMETHING to hide. As a President of the left-wing party, he would always have been victim to the current far-right-American orthodoxy that every lost election is illegitimate somehow if the right legal loophole can be found. As the son of an immigrant who lived abroad for years, he’s guilty until proven innocent.
The method for justifying this is far heavier on the Bircher side. It’s the same gibberish sovereign citizen nonsense that convinces people that income tax doesn’t apply to them, a sort of voodoo legal reasoning that converts urban legend into precedent, and believes that the power attorneys and judges wield is based on magic spells hidden within the law that can be chanted to change reality.
There is a real basis for this in the powerlessness that many feel on the far right as marginalized and disaffected whites, mostly white men. They believe their visitation rights were denied and their business lost its permits because someone somewhere knew how to wield this power correctly, and they’re more than half right.
The problem is that they think there’s a shortcut to that power, and they think it’s through a Moldovan mail-order dentist.
Here’s as good a response as any.
zuzu (not that one, the other one)
@Mark B: I’ve seen a couple of arguments made in court documents (and, yes, I’ve looked up the complaints in a couple of the birther cases). The arguments are either: 1) Because Barack Obama, Sr., was a bigamist, the marriage was invalid, and at the time of the birth of Barack Obama, Jr., a single mother could not confer citizenship on her child born outside the US; or 2) Obama became an Indonesian citizen when his mother married Lolo Soetoro and he was enrolled in a school that only allowed Indonesian citizens, and since Indonesia does not allow dual citizenship, it means that his US citizenship was renounced.
Of course, the problem with 1) is that it’s probably not true even if he were born in Kenya (I say “probably” because I can’t be bothered to do the research; although there were some funky rules about men and women and their respective ability to confer and retain citizenship, I think they’d been worked out by then or have retroactively been applied). The problem with 2) is that you can’t lose your US citizenship unless you yourself renounce it. Ann Dunham didn’t lose hers when she married Soetoro; why would Obama lose his just because he got enrolled in a school?
BTW, has anyone else noticed that the birthers waited until Obama’s grandmother died to start this shit up?
lol
@zuzu (not that one, the other one):
Waited? It started in 2006. It was initially deployed as a smear against Hillary Clinton because she was deploying this TOTALLY NOT TRUE conspiracy theory against this young and upcoming black man and it proves that Democrats are the real racists. Of course, once this young and upcoming black man became a young and front-running black man, the conspiracy theory became TOTALLY TRUE.
kimp
I hate to say it, but I actually admired his father. That being said, I find it incredible that GOD, (you know that one he is oh-so-close-to, ) was into affirmative action. Without his father’s name, he would be holding a cardboard sign and living on the streets.
Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen
I’m going to assume that all states are like Maryland in that you need an official B.C. to get a learner’s permit/driver’s license, ergo that is B.S.
Birther’s are just creating a definition of citizenship that Obama can’t meet. The fact that they also can’t meet it is inconsequential because The Sheriff is Near.
lucslawyer
What else would you expect from the son of billy graham cracker…during the Civil Rights struggle billy was out playing golf with the pharoah….
Silver
Aww. Obama wants to believe in a sky fairy and is disappointed to find out that it isn’t a rational group of people who believe.
My heart bleeds.
AAA Bonds
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
Nope.
catclub
@Dream On: Fewer beards.
SRW1
Jebus, I am no longer affiliated with any church and haven’t been for quite a while. But if I were among that fool’s flock, this photo alone would make me leave on the spot. There must be secret parts in the bible they only reveal to you once you’ve been ‘born again’. Cause the attitude he’s expressing in that pic sure ain’t in the New Testament I got to see while growing up.
AxelFoley
@Silver:
Fuck you.
Greyjoy
You know, the really irritating thing is that Obama’s a citizen whether he was born in the United States or not.
All of that applies to Obama and his mother.
TenguPhule
We can set up suicide booths across the country asking the Birther Question.
Those who press yes for birther get incinerated and recycled into dirt.
TenguPhule
Reality doesn’t matter.
What matters is that there is a black man with D next to his name in the Whitehouse.
Nothing short of mass purges is going to make it stop.
Chris
@Lolis:
As I recall, his daddy actually refused to speak at segregated events in the United States and South Africa, and once actually went down into the audience to tear down the fence between the two “races.”
The apple has fallen very far from the tree.
Chris
@Thoughtful Black Co-Citizen:
I find the religious right a lot easier to understand if you keep in mind that it’s basically a rebranding of the Dixiecrats for the post-civil-rights era (the movement erupted when Carter removed the tax-exempt status of “Christian” schools that continued to segregate their students, remember).
The “faith, not acts” (even if going to church is such an “act”) mentality lends itself to that wonderfully. For racists and fundies alike, it’s not what you do, it’s whether or not you’re part of the Tribe. If you are, you can do no wrong. If you’re not, then nothing you do matters.
Rorgg
@Mark B: Diamond Head is the one just East of Honolulu there. Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea are on the big island.
RobNYNY1957
I see that he has taken over his huckster father’s grifting business.
Gregory
Like Hitchens said of Falwell, “If you gave Falwell an enema, he’d be buried in a matchbox.” Just substitute Graham and you’ve got he whole story — I slapped him on my blog: http://sorenadams.com/2011/04/25/an-enema-for-franklin-graham/
you are not right
Did you know the KKK say they are Christians, the republicans say they are Christians, and finally the Devil also says he is a Christian so, Rev Graham how do we know you are who you say you are..you could be all of these in sheep clothing which i think you are. hope that you pray for yourself so that you don’t go to HELL and meet your father. Not Jesus he is not your father..because if he was you would not say such Nasty and boasting and prideful things.
Chet
Funny, I don’t remember Franklin’s old man bringing up these types of theological fine points while palling around with Nixon back in the day.