It looks like facts finally sink in:
Here’s another key metric. Orly Taitz only gets one mention in the teabagger list that I follow:
Osama bin Laden is the new conspiracy theory flame for these moths.
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WereBear
Keeping competing ideas in our heads since… well I don’t get into history, you Pointy Head!
/Republican Conspiracy Theorist
Mark B
It’s a really obvious indication that the hatred isn’t about birtherism or bin Laden conspiracy theories. They hate Obama for another unmentionable reason, and they simply need something more socially acceptable to hang their hats on. The real reason, which they can’t say out loud, is pretty obvious.
aimai
It has to hurt that their anti-Obama suspicions (that he hadn’t actually killed Osama) were contradicted by al Quaeda, thus putting them in the uncomfortable side of an equation in which they would appear to be rooting for Osama to still be alive and Obama to be a wimp. But if they acknowledge that he had Osama killed then they have to love him because they always prefer violent solutions.
The perfect encapsulation of their quandry is found in John Yoo’s calling Obama a “coward” for ordering the hit because it would have been more better for him to capture Osama and torture him. This is truly having your cake and eating it too–you get the President you say you want, who kills your enemies, but you can still accuse him of being a weak livered coward and protect what you think is your brand against democratic/obama encroachment.
aimai
RSA
Thanks for the context. When I saw that birtherism had dropped to 16% even among conservative Republicans I thought, “But that’s way less than 27%! What will that do to the coherence (so to speak) of the wingnut faction?”
Cat Lady
@Mark B:
This. My wingnut weathervane is a prototypical Republican Fox watching Palin loving couple from Florida I know who’ve been birthers since Obama got elected. They never failed to raise the subject. They haven’t mentioned it, or bin Laden, at all. They don’t have their socially acceptable talking points yet, but you know they’re coming, as soon as Frank Luntz figures out what they are.
Roger Moore
FTFY. This isn’t about facts sinking in. It’s about realizing that they need new talking points once in a while.
WereBear
I didn’t know he had done that.
Geez, the Bush administration sure found the right guy for their nefarious schemes. Which, frankly, gives me the cold chills.
Omnes Omnibus
@aimai: It is funny in a way that Yoo came out with that gem. I hadn’t thought it was possible for him to be any more repellant, but he managed it. It seems there is no bar so low that he cannot slither under it.
Mark B
I think a better plan would have been to surgically attach Yoo’s body to bin Laden’s corpse and set him free in Afghanistan. I’m sure that would have yielded lots of good intelligence.
aimai
@Roger Moore:
The birther thing did its job. It was just part of the legitimizing of a radical suspicion that the American people had been fooled into voting for an “empty suit” a “teleprompter reading” “czar appointing,” “reparations offering,” “new rims on the white house limo ordering,” manchurian candidate from someplace “not america” (per cokie roberts.) The actual content of the accusation that he was not born in America really didn’t matter except to that moron who got court martialed for it or the people who were dumb enough to think that Obama’s stumbling over part of the oath of office somehow invalidated everything and they’d get to call a do-over.
For the magical thinking base it really no longer matters. They were only committed to the basic argument that there’s something not quite right about Obama and that if the real truth ™ were ever revealed the rest of the American people would recoil in horror. That’s why they could seamlessly flip from Obama is a coward to Obama is a secret Muslim terrorist, from he’s too stupid to be president to he is viciously destroying everything on purpose.
aimai
Omnes Omnibus
@Mark B: Human-animal hybrids are illegal.
mai naem
Yoo comes across as you typical machoman bully who if he had to actually go to war or physically get into a fight, would cry like a baby.
Linda Featheringill
@Omnes Omnibus:
I had long assumed that Yoo allowed himself to be used by torture-loving bad people. Perhaps I was wrong. Maybe Yoo was a torture-loving bad person and was glad to be on the team.
balconesfault
I want to see the photo of Bin Laden forging Obama’s birth certificate.
RossInDetroit
Birtherism isn’t just racists and ‘wingers. One good friend is a liberal Chicago Dem with a Masters in Poli Sci who kept repeating “where’s the birth certificate? Why won’t he release it?” for the last year. She’s far from stupid and she’s skeptical about the media but somehow that seed took root.
But mostly, yeah, bigots and fools.
aimai
@WereBear:
The Yoo thing was absolutely horrific. I had always sort of entertained the idea that Yoo was just a mid level bureaucrat from hell, mindlessly doing what he was told. That interview, which I think happened yesterday, tells you that Yoo was the ugliest kind of true believer and what he believed was truly evil. Brad deLong wrote a scathing letter to Berkeley demanding they look in to getting rid of Yoo but the Dean declined because the Law School makes its own rules. But I’m wondering and wishing that he could lose his law lisence over this. Its actually worse than the testicle crushing argument, especially in light of the testicle crushing argument since it ends up being pro-torture under any and all circumstances without even the hope of a deference to a presidential finding. Even the president, in Yoo’s new formulation, doesn’t have the right to decide against torture.
aimai
Mark B
As a moral absolutist, I’m disappointed that bin Laden wasn’t captured alive and held for trial. As a progmatist, I’m really fucking glad he’s dead.
A live bin Laden would have caused so many problems as potentially thousands of people could have been held hostage for his release. It wouldn’t matter how secure a location he could be held at.
Yoo, besides being an awful human being, is just really fucking stupid. He didn’t give the slightest thought as to how many lives would be endangered by his desire to get off his torture jones.
Omnes Omnibus
@Linda Featheringill: I can’t find a link right now, but it is interesting that Professor Yoo published Op-Ed pieces criticizing the Clinton Administration for taking unilateral military actions and then ended up arguing that a president could do whatever the hell he wanted as soon as a Republican was in office. In an earlier thread, I noted that Yoo’s public writings show, IMO, very poor legal reasoning and writing. He uses his status as Berkeley professor and ex-Supreme Court clerk to put a surface gloss of plausibility on very weak legal arguments. Of all the Bushies, he is very near the top of my list of assholes.
Emma
Ross in Detroit: I’ve known a couple of people like that, which was why the lightbulb went on early for me. It wasn’t really about the birth certificate. It was about a kind of free-floating “there’s something wrong about this guy” and not being willing to examine their own beliefs because they could not handle coming face to face with their own unconscious racism.
Aimai: Short answer: unless the rest of the law faculty raises up in arms against him, nothing will happen. (edit): But he has a lousy legal mind, IMO, so there’s no telling
Hal
@RossInDetroit
I think you can be a birther based purely on your dislike of Obama, regardless of political leaning. Plus, I wouldn’t exactly say being Liberal means you can’t be a racist.
Some people just gravitate towards conspiracy as a way of life.
Mark B
@RossInDetroit: But even then, there has to be something going on. If you actually look at the facts, Obama released his birth certificate (the only legally recognized form of it) in 2008. Anyone who didn’t know this was incurious enough to believe the right winger propaganda without looking at the real information that was freely available.
The fact that something that was so clearly at odds with easily researched facts gained such wide purchase among Americans says a great deal about how poorly educated and incurious the average American is.
Roger Moore
@aimai:
Can we crush John Yoo’s testicles just on general principle? It’s possible he might know something useful, so it would be morally wrong not to take every step that possibly might give us some useful information.
Josie
These people are so deep in their loudly echoing racist bubble that they really didn’t believe that a black man could possibly be elected president. When he was elected, they decided that the election was fraudulent and that he was ineligible for the office. When those two things were proven false, their Obama derangement syndrome drove them to find other arguments. I am truly concerned for what form this will take when/if he wins a second term.
Extra comment: John Yoo is pond scum.
RossInDetroit
@Hal:
I think bitterness and disappointment over Obama beating Hillary in the primaries may be to blame in this one isolated case.
But it doesn’t help when Dems feed the fires on the Right for their own purposes.
Suffern ACE
@Mark B: The idea took hold that there was something called the “long form.” Or the “original.” Even the (swearword) New York Times refers to this thing as the “long form” confirming that indeed there are two types of birth certificates.
Omnes Omnibus
@Roger Moore: Actually, per Yoo’s logic, we must crush his testicles; we have no other choice. Yoo really is the worst kind of human scum; he has had the opportunity to become well educated but instead simply chose to become well credentialed.
aimai
@Roger Moore:
I always wanted something more socially horrifying and subtle, like for anonymous students in the Berkely area to walk behind him to class and leave bloody handprints/footprints on all his daily rounds. Or to approach him whenever he’s in a coffee shop, or out to dinner, and ask him “is it true you advocate crushing the testicles of small children as long as George Bush wants you to?” These people love to go on TV and be “known” as an expert in something, but they couldn’t take the shame of being publicly excoriated night and day. Force him to hire a bodyguard to prevent ordinary people from spitting while he passes.
aimai
Mark B
@Suffern ACE: Indeed, I probably shouldn’t have placed all of the blame on average Americans, a lot of the blame needs to be placed on the media for carrying water for the right wing narrative, instead of doing a modicum of fact-checking.
RossInDetroit
Big error in the debate over torture, the latest blot on our national character. Opinion against torture goes like “It’s morally wrong. Plus it doesn’t work.” The response from the Party of Pain: “Yes it does.” By diluting the right/wrong argument with the efficacy argument the defenders of waterboarding, etc. are allowed to avoid defending it on moral grounds.
Omnes Omnibus
@aimai: Win, that’s just full of win.
WereBear
I do blame the media; they are merry collaborators in this game of so confusing the public about what is true and what is important.
Yes, it’s friggin’ sick so many people are so clueless about these important issues. But I figure they were mostly raised by parents who relied on authority figures, still not yet grasping that this trust has been horribly abused.
Omnes Omnibus
@RossInDetroit: My view has evolved into this: 1) Use the moral argument. Get the person to admit that torture is wrong and wait for them to argue that the effectiveness, nevertheless, justifies it. 2) Hit them hard with the ineffectiveness data. Show them that it doesn’t work. 3) Revisit the moral argument and see if they have anything new to add.
nancydarling
@Omnes Omnibus: I can’t remember where I heard this argument recently. Chemical warfare undeniably works, but we DON’T do it. Same should be true for torture which has very little proof of effectiveness and a lot of proof that other interrogation techniques actually work better and faster.
piratedan
so the latest conspiracy is whether OBL was born in the US because he’s never produced his birth certificate? Seems kinda like a moot point to me.
Omnes Omnibus
@nancydarling: I am entirely on board with the idea that there are some things one just doesn’t do and things like torture, chemical warfare, and mayonnaise are among them.
fhtagn
@Omnes Omnibus:
I take your point about mayonnaise, but let’s not rush to extremes just yet.
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: We’ll have to agree to disagree about mayonnaise.
Brachiator
@Mark B:
I don’t think you can blame the media either. I recall reading a story on Trump’s bizarre accusation that there were no photos of Obama as a child the news story was filled with photos of Obama as a child, all of which had been depicted many times before.
Birtherism has always been about racial anxiety, fear, and insanity, abetted by the permanently cynical GOP strategy of delegitimizing Obama by any means necessary.
Joey Maloney
@Mark B:
As a moral absolutist myself, I’m more disappointed that we haven’t treated Yoo the same way.
nancydarling
@WereBear: Especially my homemade mayonnaise. I wonder if Omnes is a Miracle Whip guy.
aimai
What about egg salad? Will no one think of the egg salad?
aimai
Mark B
@Omnes Omnibus: Mayonnaise? You’ve gone too far, sir! If I get a sandwich with that Miracle Whip crap on it, I send it back. How day you slander mayonnaise … and on Derby Day, too.
Roger Moore
@nancydarling:
That’s a weaker argument than you think. Chemical warfare kinda sorta works, but nowhere near as well as its proponents suggest. There are all kinds of problems with things like which way the wind is blowing and whether the other guys can get into their MOPP suits fast enough. Military people dislike chemical weapons almost as much for their unpredictability as their other bad characteristics.
fhtagn
@Mark B:
David Moyes
I don’t trust these numbers if that is the question they were asking. I’m sure that a good percentage of people (especially Dems) who gave the “birther” answer in 2010 simply did not know that the Pres has to be born here and so were going on nothing more than a foreign-sounding name and maybe having heard something about him growing up abroad. Not everybody gives a shit about this stuff.
I’d want to see a poll that asks “Do you think the President is lying about where he was born?” That would bring the real crazies into relief.
Mark B
@Brachiator: It’s a combination of lazy, sloppy media, an active propaganda campaign, and a cohort of people who will willing latch onto any weakly supported argument which supports their preformed prejudices.
The example you cited of actual decent journalism was more the exception than the rule. For every article which showed actual photos of Obama as a child in addition to Trump’s rather stupid assertion that they didn’t exist, there were several which quoted Trump without any opposing narrative.
aimai
@David Moyes:
That is a very good point. These poll questions are so stupid and people are so frustrated answering them when the questions are often so vague. You really need a very sophisticated poll question, or a series of grounding questions, to ascertain what people are really thinking.
I don’t want to defend the “liberal friend” up above who wondered “why he didn’t show his birth certificate” after Obama already posted it but its also the case that some people who are not very political or not very tuned in to the way the media operates still remember a time when journalists didn’t push obvious lies. Even true rumors about presidential mistresses used to be buried. So the very fact that “people are still talking about X” is often taken to mean that there really is some issue that has the potential to be true. I know my mother can be like that. They just don’t really grasp how utterly fake all the major media outlets have become, how news of worldy, how entertainment tonight.
aimai
Uloborus
@Mark B:
‘He’s a democrat’. I mean, the framing of the conspiracy makes their racism baldly obvious, but they’d have some other dumb theory if he was white. Vote fraud, I’m guessing. I think @aimai put it eloquently. They want to delegitimize him. He’s the ‘other’ and that’s enough for their base, but there are all sorts of others!
Omnes Omnibus
@nancydarling: I hate Miracle Whip as well.
aimai
@Omnes Omnibus:
Haters gotta hate. What about mustard?
aimai
Brachiator
@aimai:
Even though I know that there are all kinds of massive legal and constitutional hurdles to prosecuting the Bush Administration for war crimes, I would really like to see Yoo and others, including some pundits, put on trial for abetting crimes against humanity. Because these people not only feel vindicated in their view that “torture works,” they are eagerly awaiting an opportunity to help advise a future GOP administration.
Yoo and all the others who happily would support torture need to be publically and definitively rejected.
fhtagn
@aimai:
Mustard, ma’am, is an invention of the nefarious French, aimed at unmanning the sturdy sons of America’s soil. Likewise arugula.
RossInDetroit
@aimai:
Woeber’s Wasabi mustard FTW. The only kind I want.
aimai
@fhtagn:
Jesus’s General, is that you? If you start talking about your little soldier saluting, I’ll know.
But, seriously, c’mon, mustard is the original english condiment the french made fun of when they said the English had hundreds of religions but only one sauce. It goes with good english beef.
aimai
danimal
I utterly despise John Yoo. His amoral support of the torture state is despicable. I can hardly think straight when I see his mug or read his writings. I would never torture anyone, but I might be willing to crush Yoo’s testicles as a public service. Can’t stand the man. Arrrrrrgggggghhhhh.
Which, I suppose, makes him the likely new host of a Fox News gig.
fhtagn
@aimai:
No, ma’am, I am not Jesus’s General, whoever that worthy soul may be. In any case, mustum ardens was a Roman invention, not English, subsequently filched by the Gallic provinces for their own perverse purposes. It is true that Henry V observed that “War without fire is like sausages without mustard”, but the point of the French gibe was not that mustard was bad, just that it was the only thing known to the English. Indeed, a very plausible case can be made that the introduction of mustard to England was a wily French ploy to destroy a more war-like, manly opponent, just as the devious, effeminate, morally-corrupt, soc.ialistic- health-service-embracing weasels have now re-introduced it to America’s shores in order to bring down our pre-eminent empire.
fhtagn
@aimai:
No, ma’am, I am not Jesus’s General, whoever that worthy soul may be. In any case, mustum ardens was a Roman invention, not English, subsequently filched by the Gallic provinces for their own perverse purposes. It is true that Henry V observed that “War without fire is like sausages without mustard”, but the point of the French gibe was not that mustard was bad, just that it was the only thing known to the English. Indeed, a very plausible case can be made that the introduction of mustard to England was a wily French ploy to destroy a more war-like, manly opponent, just as the devious, effeminate, morally-corrupt, soc.ialistic- health-service-embracing weasels have now re-introduced it to America’s shores in order to bring down our pre-eminent empire.
Omnes Omnibus
@aimai: Mustard is, in my opinion, a perfectly cromulent condiment. Mayo and MW both instantly trigger my gag reflex. I have few foods that I dislike, but, those that I do, I tend to dislike strongly.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@aimai:
This is a very important point. A toxic after-effect of the lies told during the Vietnam War under the LBJ and Nixon admins and various scandals since is that for most people ( especially those who aren’t paying obsessive attention to politics) assuming that whatever the media is talking about, the actual reality must be even worse, that has been a pretty good first order approximation. And a lot of people haven’t figured out just how bad our contemporary media are in terms of lying.
This is a powerful headwind in terms of basic lack of trust in the govt which Obama and the Dems have to deal with, and that lack of trust opens up a fertile field for the weeds of conspiracy thinking to sprout in. I don’t know if any one conspiracy theory enjoys majority support in this country, but it wouldn’t suprise me if a solid majority of Americans believe at least one objectively crazy thing about the govt from one direction or another of the political spectrum (Birthers, Truthers, Anti-Vaccine folks, etc.). How do you run a democracy in a country where the majority of the population is convinced that the govt is lying in a deeply sinister fashion about something they think is important?
maya
Crushed testicles just slide in and out of the mouths of Teabaggers easier.
OzoneR
@RossInDetroit:
Simply put, there isn’t anyone in this country willing to go down in a moral victory, that’s why they can win on the right/wrong argument. People see true patriotism as being willing to do anything to protect your country, no matter how immoral. You know the saying “A moral victory is a nice way of covering up a loss”
Svensker
@fhtagn:
Morzer?
WereBear
@Omnes Omnibus: My partner is similar; he will put mayo on his roast beef sandwiches, but with an eyedropper.
Whereas I think roast beef is a license to apply horseradish mayo. That’s the beauty of the Democratic Party; they practice condiment parity.
fhtagn
@Svensker:
Oh God, not you too with the crazy conspiracy theories. Anyway, I thought your former comrade clarified everything. Besides, how do I know you aren’t morzer?
Elie
@WereBear:
I really believe that some of our predicament comes from the culture we are in that has become more and more “Darwinistic” and authoritarian. Even among people who are so called “educated”, there is a penchant for following “rules” and conforming to authority. This rigidity is seen in the things we value — power and control over influence and learning.
Its not a surprise any more about all this birther crap. Obama IS different. He signals a change in culture in his approach to governance and the model he provides for leadership behavior. He is not a showboat. He is, almost to a fault, a negotiator and a believer in soft power. This attitude can be catching and the fear in that, for the right is that they want the American populace fearful, reactionary and therefore obedient. If folks actually start to think and learn, well, their whole shtick suddently gives them no power over us.
Just my two cents thinking on this…
Elie
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
I also think a fair number of middle class folks in this country live in unreasonable fear of crime. I have a couple of friends who live in the suburbs around two major cities and who themselves have not experienced crime, but obscess constantly about crime and are fearful to do things “in the city” because of the people they see. Who are those people? Well, poor, brown, young, etc.
This crime shit started full throttle, pushed by the Republicans in the Nixon years. It was an effective proxy for pushing racism along with busing. But what the crime shit set up as well, was ongoing FEAR. Since then, the right has dominated using one fearful tool or another from IMMIGRATION, to TERRORISM and the solution to these is to clamp down and push more rules and of course, the ultimate enforcer, guns and I guess torture.
Having adopted fear as a major tool, it is very hard to give it up. The right’s desperation is that we cease being a nation of fearful reactionaries that they can manipulate. THAT is what Obama means to them and if he is successful and calm, they lose a little more power to use that tool.
WereBear
Precisely!
I have such a low opinion of those who abet this situation that I think most of their shills believe their own BS.
But not all of them.
Brachiator
@Elie:
I think I understand what you mean about the conforming to authority, but I don’t get the thing about “Darwinistic,” unless you mean the distortion and misuse of Darwin by so-called “social Darwinists.”
ruemara
@Omnes Omnibus: Sirrah, homemade mayonnaise is entirely a different animal than that slop in a jar. Exhibit A. I believe you have been trumped, good sir.
aimai
@Elie:
I don’t know about people in general being more into social darwinism and authoritarianism–not exactly the same thing–than they ever were before. I think a certain percentage of society has always had a tendency to follow their leaders and look for authorities to legitimize their lives (and deaths.) But in addition there have always been people who prefer the status quo because they are doing very well under the status quo.
I just don’t see what that has to do with people’s feelings about Obama as a different kind of politician. I see that there are tons of white people who are very disturbed by Obama because he’s a democrat, and because he’s black, and because they fear in their hearts that what they did as the party in power, or the race in power, will boomerang on them when they are out of power. But despite his soft words and his conciliatory manner Obama isn’t really a new kind of politician. He just chooses a slightly different method than the current Republican method of slash and burn to try to get his way politically and in terms of policy.
I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t think anyone’s frightened of Obama’s new style politics. Some people are opposed to Obama’s policies because they see them as destructive of a status quo the upper class prefers (low taxes, eternal war, no regulation) while others are opposed to Obama’s policies because they think he’s not moving hard and fast enough to change the status quo.
aimai
aimai
@ruemara:
I have to put in a plug here for a condiment as yet unnamed: Harissa. I make my own following the recipe in Ana Sortun’s cookbook “Spice” and then tinker with it adding fennel and pomegranate molasses. Its so strong you pretty much have to dilute it with–wait for it–Mayonaisse and greek yogurt. But it goes where all other condiments fear to tread: swordfish, lamb, new potatoes.
aimai
Uriel
@aimai:
Feh-Mint jelly mocks you and your brave, imaginary sounding coniment.
I say good day, ma’am!
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
You wouldn’t be creating a new species. Just sewing on a backpack for his slithereness to carry around.
Matt
These results don’t quite line up – it should be obvious to anyone that “conservative Republicans” is polite for “teabaggers”, and they shouldn’t be included in “all adults” as the average teabagger never got past a mental age of about fourteen (no wonder they luuuuve Ayn Rand so much).
Odie Hugh Manatee
What puzzles me is seeing dim bulbs being attracted to a bright light.
I wish they would just burn out.
Darnell From LA
FOBP
“Fear of Black Penis”
For 200 years white men have marveled at the size of the black penis and salved their pain by thinking that at least black men are not equal to the white man in most other areas. And no other position in American society was more of a firewall than the Presidency. A black man will NEVER be elect….
Oh no.
The skill Obama shows as President is part of the fear and the anguish, but the day an intrepid paparazzi confirms Obama is packing a 9 incher, white Republicans will crawl into a fetal position and suck their thumbs.