When this shit started several years ago, it drove me insane. Nowadays, I love it, because it really helps to expose the crazies:
There is an argument that it’s best to ignore crazy people. You have nothing to gain by reasoning with the guy on the subway shouting about the end of the world. But what if the crazy guy’s a prominent law enforcer, and what if he’s shouting about the president of the United States?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-appointed terrorizer of the Hispanic population of Maricopa County, Arizona, who is currently under federal investigation for discriminating against Latinos, held a press conference today that might stir up the ridiculous “birther” movement.
The sheriff released a 10-page document challenging the authenticity of the long-form birth certificate that Mr. Obama released last year. He claims it’s a “computer-generated forgery.” Based on news accounts, the report consists of previously aired and well-refuted claims about the typography on the document.
At this point, only the most addle-minded lunatics think there is a chance Obama is not American.
The other thing I am kind of curious about is what do they think will happen should the country decide they are right? The last three years have happened. You can’t get them back. Do they think every bill will just be undone? Who would be President? McCain or Biden? It’s just so much fail in one place I’m surprised it doesn’t create a black hole.
Cargo
that still cracks me up.
Also, “addle-minded lunatics” is a great descriptor of the 27%.
Elizabelle
So much craziness.
Wondering if this might give us the Presidency, Senate and House this fall. Although we’ll have to work for it.
Hard.
cathyx
This is what I keep saying about people who engage the trolls who visit here.
Xecky Gilchrist
No birfer investigation can ever result in anything other than “even more questions were raised” and a bunch of conspiracy muttering, racist dogwhistles or overt racist spewage, and the usual contard butthurt and victim-playing.
JPL
Since we are talking about lunacy, why not talk about rumors that Pittsburgh could be one of the teams trying to trade up for the number 2 pick. (By, by Ben?)
Maude
@Elizabelle:
This stuff has been going on for a long time. People get tired of it and it doesn’t take hold as it did at first. You may be onto something.
cathyx
He reminds me of Sarah Palin in how he’s just do this to get attention.
Elizabelle
@Maude:
I hope so, Maude. I hope so.
Mnemosyne
I’m guessing there’s an Arpaio indictment from the DoJ that’s right around the corner, so he’s desperately trying to establish a claim that he’s being “politically persecuted.”
bleh
This is like asking why GM — or better still, Gillette — keeps paying mind-boggling amounts of money to run commercials on NFL games. What, you ask, could possibly be so interesting about yet another GM sedan, or even more so a disposable razor, that it’s worth literally hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute?
Likewise, how could you possibly be willing to invest so much public credibility in such a stupid idea as birtherism?
The answer in both cases is the same: brand management.
They’re keepin’ the home fires burnin’.
Martin
ACORN!
Hill Dweller
It should give the president some more material for the WH Correspondents dinner.
Martin
And they really should introduce him at B-Rock “The Islamic Shock” Hussein Superallah Obama at the Democratic convention. The news would have to explain it, and that’d be fucking hilarious.
Rick Massimo
SARAH!
But seriously folks, they don’t care what happens afterward. That Black Man is sitting in the White House, and he must be removed. It doesn’t matter to them what happens after that.
Betty Cracker
I go back and forth between finding all the birfer nonsense hilarious and finding it sad and infuriating. It’s nakedly racist, so it mostly makes me angry and ashamed. As you noted, Sheriff Pinkshorts isn’t just some bug-eyed crank shouting at clouds. He wields actual power. And that absurd wig-stand Trump isn’t just a harmless buffoon; he’s an actual force in US politics, though less than he imagines. It’s embarrassing.
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
Obviously they’ll pass laws to ensure that no Blackie Black Demoblack can ever be presnit again because obviously all of them are foreign Islamohomosecular Usurpers. Then they’ll work on outlawing the Democratic Party and Liberalism.
JPL
I don’t know what GA folks are around but I just got a reminder to vote for Obama in the primary. The thinking is that if the turnout is high, he might put some money down here
for the primary. The democratic party is dying down here so it would help, I guess.
What does everyone else think?
Elizabelle
This time last night, Andrew Breitbart was still walking this world.
Still had hopes, dreams, plans, a future.
His kids had a father.
Things change.
Mnemosyne
On the good news front, the governor of Maryland signed their gay marriage bill.
JPL
@Elizabelle: What was he doing roaming his neighborhood after midnight? I have heard about midnight strolls but…
I guess he could have been home with his children.
Tonal Crow
Sweet! Now Mitt, do you agree with Sheriff Arpaio that Obama is not a native-born American? Discuss at length.
ETA: FSM how I love it when freaks let their freak flags fly! Don’t stop now, Republicans! Meep-meep! Meep-meep! MEEP-MEEP!
Cacti
The trouble with Arizona is that it’s full of Arizonans.
MikeBoyScout
Clearly this opens the door to Donald Trump’s re-entry in to the Klown Kar!
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@Mnemosyne:
As if O’Malley’s smackdown of McDonnell wasn’t enough reason to love him.
gnomedad
A summary of Arpaio’s findings have been released on video.
The Moar You Know
@Mnemosyne: There is (civil rights violations, I think voting issues), and he is.
Martin
@JPL: Voting always helps. But I think his big target will be Texas. He only lost GA by 5 in 2008, so it’s close enough that he might go in there as well.
Maude
@Elizabelle:
That’s it in a nutshell.
I always think that when someone dies. They were here and then they weren’t.
Elizabelle
@JPL:
Maybe he was restless. It’s a safe neighborhood.
Palm trees, breezes, half a moon.
amk
so was o’rly there giving him a blowjob while the racist pig was giving teh proof ?
Suffern ACE
@Mnemosyne: B-I-N-G-O
Amusing Alias
This is probably about an effort to keep the president off of the AZ ballot in this election. Remember there’s been talk that AZ will be competitive in Nov.
Even if they don’t ultimately keep him off, they can force the Obama team to devote money and personnel in order get a place on the AZ ballot. Money and personnel that would be otherwise devoted to defeating the Republican candidate.
This is not as crazy a stunt as it seems. Arpaio did it, no doubt, in hopes for a different Justice Dept. come next Jan.
Augie
I’m sorry Cole but your interpretation of the birther movement is dead wrong. Polling shows it’s stronger than ever.
Check this post – http://dixonthewall.blogspot.com/2012/02/birthers-wont-go-away.html
Cacti
The State Motto of Arizona is “Ditat Deus” which I believe is Latin for…
“Thank God for Mississippi”
Rick Taylor
I hope someone asks Romney what he thinks of sheriff Arpaio’s findings.
Elizabelle
@Maude:
It’s so brutal.
And life goes on, for other families. Eventually for yours.
Billy Beane
and of course Not Republican Cole is more than happy to give more attention to the birthers while still pretending he is just some fly on the wall and not enabling them in any way.
Then again given the backwater swamp nature of this unknown and unread blog site that has never quite worked properly, that is sort of unintentionally true.
His posts are almost as pathetic as the now daily posts on that orange site by people asking for money for their sick grandmother or whatever.
JPL
@Rick Taylor: Why because we all know how he feels. He’s against it and he’s for it.
Suffern ACE
This isn’t the same Joe who I saw being interviewed on CNN on Tuesaday, being hailed as “The Kingmaker of Arizona”, is it? Why the anchor was practically laughing about pink underwear or something. No mention about any investigations.
It would be nice if Rosenthal would spend more time on that rather than a few passing sentences, but at least he didn’t stop to chuckle about the pink underwear, which is more than most reporters in the great northeast do.
Martin
@Elizabelle: One of the nice things about living in Socal is that you can go to the outdoor pool at 11PM for a swim in February. There’s always a few people about. There are no bugs. It’s not oppressively cold or hot. It almost never rains. So midnight walks are easy habits to develop. I usually walk the dog around that time.
PeakVT
Who would be President? McCain or Biden?
Biden is the easy answer, because there’s no provision whatsoever for any other process. The SCOTUS could try to insert itself and rule the entire ticket was invalid, but the chaos resulting from that would be unfathomable.
muddy
I am just watching Jennifer Granholm on her show on Current, she just tore Rush a new one in a delightfully enraged tone and then showed the sponsors (Quicken, Century 21, Sleepnumber beds, Legalzoom), and and said who owned the company. The plot thickens, she says, Clear Channel is owned by Bain!
Does this make Rush Mitt’s bitch? Let him deny it, I say.
Elizabelle
@Martin:
I miss it out there!
Rick Taylor
I remember fondly how Andrew Sullivan opined that if Obama would only produce his long form birth certificate, we could put all this nonsense behind us.
JPL
@Rick Taylor: It wasn’t long enough.
Soonergrunt
Nothing would happen. The only way to remove a sitting President under the constitution is to impeach, and get a conviction in the Senate. Nothing else matters. Even if President Obama came out tomorrow morning and said “hey, you got me. I was born in Kenya and my mother wasn’t a US citizen either” he would still be President until such time as he was impeached and convicted by the Senate. At which point, Joe Biden would become the next POTUS.
Not only that, but in the mean time, until conviction and removal, every otherwise lawful thing President Obama has done and would do would still be the lawful acts of the President of the United States because of a legal doctrine called the de facto officer doctrine.
The doctrine, as described by SCOTUS in Ryder v. US:
FuriousPhil
How does this guy have time to devote to this? Has he already rounded up all the brown people? Got bored with firing assault weapons down at the old desert shooting range? Found some meth in the evidence room and has been up all night, all month – and had nothing better to do?
I’d like to see a Professional Asshole tag on this one. We could use it for the federal judge sending unfunny racist e-mails too.
Suffern ACE
@Rick Taylor:
Quote stolen from another blog’s comments section.
Hal
The Maricopa County Sheriff has the resources and jurisdiction to investigate the President?
I can’t believe it isn’t some rule/regulation violation for him to have engaged in this investigation with what I’m assuming is tax payer dollars.
amk
twitter
If Obama put together a forgery that was found out by this “posse” of mustachioed tree stumps, then he deserves impeachment.
gnomedad
@Soonergrunt:
Very impressive. If you are not a lawyer, you should play one on TV.
Catsy
@Hal:
This. Whiskey Tango?
Also, if you haven’t read Soonergrunt’s comment, do.
Soonergrunt
@gnomedad: The google-fu is strong with this one.
Actually, I spent a lot of time researching this stuff last year during the run up to the court martial of former Lieutenant Colonel Terry Lakin, MD. and I remembered a lot of what I learned from the military lawyers who talked about the case.
SiubhanDuinne
@JPL:
Most assuredly will be voting for President Obama next Tuesday.
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: I don’t know about an indictment, but I sure as hell hear one big consent decree barreling down the tracks at the MCSO like a runaway freight train.
Soonergrunt
@Amusing Alias: Well, considering that the lawsuit success ratio is something like Birfers-0 / Obama-80 at this point, there’s not much hope for that either.
WaterGirl
@Soonergrunt: Didn’t the republicans used to be against the whole frivolous lawsuit thing?
Soonergrunt
@WaterGirl: It’s like everything else with them. Whatever suits their needs of the moment is OK, and then it goes back to being a bad thing(tm) for everybody else. Hypocrisy is their default mode.
Evolving Deep Southerner
@JPL: Nah. As a Georgia nate and recent resident, your vote would be better cast for Little Newty.
Rick Taylor
Do we have the long form of Romney’s birth certificate? Is there such a thing? I want to see it.
Jebediah
@Rick Taylor:
No. There is the owner’s manual and warranty card, but both do bear the hexadecimal string indicating factory of origin and the date and time of post-assembly testing.
RossInDetroit
@Rick Taylor:
Interesting that both Romney and McCain have complications in their births. McCain was born in The Canal Zone (perfectly legit) and Romney’s father was born in Mexico (also legit). But where are the Dems trying to gin up controversies over those facts? There are none, they’d look like fools. Apparently not a deal-breaker if you’re a Republican.
Jimbo316
“…only the most addle-minded lunatics think there is a chance Obama is not American.” At this point? Really? From the very beginning of his campaign it was obvious that only lunatics actually believed he was a Kenyan citizen.
All the other noise and froth came from utterly cynical Rethuglican politicians and vermin from the right-wing commentariat who knew this assertion was false.
Jimbo316
@RossInDetroit: Nice post.
Soonergrunt
Jebediah: FTW!
El Cid
So what if they just had a press conference and howled non-word syllables and grunts and groans and woo-woo’s and waving of hands and such?
Would there be respectful live coverage? Post-event serious pundit discussion?
Soonergrunt
@El Cid: That’s about what happened from a legal perspective.
Villago Delenda Est
These idiots are fucking with primal laws of the universe.
Questioning a state’s birth registration system like this is asking for trouble with a capital T, which rhymes with P, which stands for Palooka.
They’re nihilists, obviously. No way to deal with them but by ending their existence.
Hob
@Augie: The post you linked to provides no evidence of what you’re asserting. It cites a poll that says slightly more Republicans are now birther-curious than a few years ago– but the overall number of people who swing that way has still decreased. So no, the birther movement is not “stronger than ever”; it’s just that the Republican Party has continued to drive away the subset of its members who are not nuts.
Jado
Legal question –
Would the Secretary of State for Hawaii have a case for a slander suit? Arpaio is accusing the Hawaian state government of fraud and coverup. Could he be sued for every plugged peso in his stupid little bank account?
El Cid
[NOTE: This was actually an old study from 9/26/2011. Sorry, came to it indirectly, didn’t notice.]
Another interesting study, via Der Spiegel.
TruthOrScare
@Amusing Alias:
This. Now the wingnut shitheads in our Legislature can run hard and fast with a birther bill under cover of Joe’s crack investigative results and there’ll be none of this business of Tipsy Jan thinking she can veto it. Never mind that this “investigation” was literally conducted by a volunteer “posse” (kid you not) of Barcolounger Berts who roused themselves between naps to declare the certificate a forgery.
And to answer those wondering what they think will happen: I listened to one of the drive-time wingnut gasbags on the way home tonight (in Phoenix). The near-unanimous consensus of callers responding to this very question is that OF COURSE the 2008 election is null and void, everything he has done or signed would be voided, Biden wouldn’t become Pres, and instead Walnuts and Snowbilly Snooki would be installed post haste. Don’t bother them with your silly Constitution (which even the radio gasbag mentioned might mean Snooki shouldn’t rev up the snow machine and head to DC just yet). Comments were also running heavily in favor of not just his automatic removal from the WH, but from the COUNTRY — back to Kenya for that illegal immigrant!! No joke.
Soonergrunt
@Jado: No idea. I don’t think you can actually slander a state government, or if one can slander a government officer when referring to that person by the title he/she holds, but I shouldn’t think so.
Slander laws in the US are pretty restrictive in keeping with our tradition of free speech, especially as it pertains to governments and their operations.
Otherwise, Erick Sonoferick over at Red Ass would be staring down a libel/slander suit for having once referred to a Supreme Court Justice as “a goat-fucking child molester.”
Todd Dugdale
Apparently, when you scan a document it creates a file on a computer – and this is suspicious to Arpaio.
Also, long-form birth certificates aren’t written out by hand with a quill and ink. Digital printers are used – which means forgery somehow.
The real mystery is how any of this involves the jurisdiction of a County Sheriff in any way whatsoever.
Mnemosyne
@Soonergrunt:
Here’s the really weird question though — can one government slander another one? Arpaio was acting in his official capacity as an elected county sheriff when he slandered Hawaii’s secretary of state. So can the state of Hawaii make some kind of complaint to the state of Arizona?
RossInDetroit
@Todd Dugdale:
Anything that gets Joe in front of a TV camera is his jurisdiction as far as he’s concerned.
I’m fine with the ‘wingers and crazies repeatedly running up this dead end. It’s like a self-administered intelligence test. Anyone exhibits Birtherist sympathies, disregard out of hand anything else they say.
Soonergrunt
@TruthOrScare: They thought they had their best shot at that with US v. Lakin.
Turns out they were wrong.
The current count of legal actions by birfers is something like Birfers-0/Obama-80. Hell, Obama’s lawyers didn’t even go to a couple of hearings in Georgia recently. The guy literally faxed it in and still won.
opie_jeanne
@Billy Beane: Why aren’t you in Arizona for Spring Training?
Soonergrunt
@Mnemosyne: I suppose the Governor and the Seceretary of State could complain, but since the government of Arizona appears to be overrun with walking salted nut rolls at nearly every level, it probably won’t do much.
Any dispute between states is settled by the federal courts and the question there is whether or not there was an actual damage (which I doubt could be found) and even if there was actual damage, I don’t think there’s any remedy that could be applied.
TruthOrScare
@Soonergrunt: Won’t ultimately hold up in court, but I’ll bet you $10,000 (hee hee) that a birther bill gets passed here within a month (happened once before without nearly as much ‘solid evidence’ as they now have) and that Tipsy Jan will get no pass to veto it again. She may be a shrew but she at least had the sense to listen to the money boys down at the CoC and veto a few of the most hideous of their creations. And then of course the court filings start, but they do drain time and money from his campaign. And when it’s struck down by some activist judge, it’ll fire up the wingnuts who might have sat home instead of morosely ambling down to the polls to fill in the bubble for the Marquis de Mittens.
pseudonymous in nc
@Hob: What it says, I think, is that birtherism is increasingly a key tenet of Republican self-identification. If you’re a GOPer, you have to say that president is a Kenyamuslosoc!alist. It’s belief-as-creed, not belief as judgement.
Captain C
@amk: You owe me brain bleach! (Warning: TV Tropes links.)
Soonergrunt
@TruthOrScare: Well, the birfers are fun to watch, I’ll give you that.
This should make for an interesting diversion.
Captain C
@Jimbo316: Yes, but now we’re talking only the cream, the pluperfect, the past-several-standard-deviations-down-the-crazy-tracks of all the lunatics.
TruthOrScare
@Soonergrunt: A couple years ago I would have had more fun watching them trip over the clown shoes on the birfer issue, but my last shred of patience as a taxpayer has been exhausted after enduring (and paying for) one too many of our local wingnuts’ stunts. Now it just feels like yet another rodent to whack as part of the grim daily whack-a-mole routine, wherein no sooner do you knock back one lunacy than two pop up in its place. I know that wearing down our enthusiasm for the fight is a key part of their strategery of just drenching us with the puke funnel, and I’ll push on, but it would be nice to get even an hour’s break from their depraved, insane agenda.
Monkey Business
I really want them to keep talking about this. Please oh please let Santorum or Romney or Gingrich be stupid enough to take this bait and force the rest of the candidates to take it too, and just watch the whole GOP slate of candidates go down in absolute flames.
dww44
@JPL: I’ll be there voting for him. Yep, we gotta rebuild from the ground-up but Mike Berlong is a credible and VISIBLE state party chair.
Jaques Straw
Listen to a story bout a man named JEB,His CIA created cousin couldn’t keep the nation fed.Then one day came questions from sheriff Joe and a brokered GOP was all she wrote.Well the next thing you know Jeb is POTUS his kinfolk said the NWO is the place we ought to be so they loaded up the truck and headed for Hades.
jaquestraw
Listen to a story bout a man named JEB,His CIA created cousin couldn’t keep the nation fed.Then one day came questions from sheriff Joe and a brokered GOP was all she wrote.Well the next thing you know Jeb is POTUS his kinfolk said the NWO is the place we ought to be so they loaded up the truck and headed for Hades
Jess Sane
The real aim of all this, of course, is to get some lone nut with a sniper rifle riled up enough to do something violent.
Ruckus
@Soonergrunt:
Hypocrisy is their default mode.
I understood it to be their only mode.
Keith
Arpaio-Gaffney ’12….or Gaffney-Arpaio ’12. Please, God, please.
MomSense
I’m way beyond bemused by this BS. Between Arpaio and the awful, vile “joke” forwarded by a Federal Judge I am just mad at this point. There really is no excuse for this from supposed “public servants”.
Quarks
@Suffern ACE: Kindergarten records? Ok, I’m convinced. Who KNOWS what evils lurk there. For all WE know, Obama regularly stole brownies from little wealthy kindergartners and distributed said brownies to little kindergarten slackers (who, even then, were busily trying to think up ways to get free birth control out of the hands of god-fearing taxpayers — look, trust me, you have NO IDEA what kindergartners obsess about.) It’s THERE. You only THINK those kindergarten records are innocent because you don’t know the evil that lurks in the hearts of five year olds.
Kathy in St. Louis
Yahoo, which I really plan to get rid of and never look at again just as soon as I can figure out how to keep my email address, features this on its news as a real story. No wonder whacko bullies like this old fart do these things. They never get called on any of this. Personally, I’d like to see old Joe in a prison in some middle eastern country, without a lawyer.
Brachiator
@Soonergrunt:
This is very good. Obviously, most people are not aware of this.
I was listening to talk radio this morning, and one producer on the show was giddy with the fantasy idea that if somehow a judge ruled that Obama was not really the president, then Obamacare and every other act that he signed into law would magically disappear, just become null and void.
She was even giddier with the idea that this would also mean that the Obama presidency itself would be erased from history, like a bad baseball record with an asterisk behind it.
In a very sick way, the worst of these people want Obama and his physical existence in the White House to be expunged, and a Real White American(tm), even Joe Biden, installed in the White House as caretaker until a Real Patriotic Republican American(tm) could be elected the real president.
Nemesis
Uh, no….
This issue is a big fat turd for the gop. Yes there have been many states that appeared to be moving toward disenfranchising Obama, that is, eliminating him from the ballots in those states.
If birferism is the reason for any state to void Obama from the 2012 ballot or entangle his campaign in a drawn out process of qualifying, the gop will pay dearly. Its a scam, a joke and a wide swath of Americans know it.
So no, there wont be attempts to accomplish this UNLESS the baggers in state legislatures tell the party bosses to suck it and move ahead with certain political suicide.
Could be yet another trap set by the WH. Just like the contraception kerfuffle. The gop take the bait every time. Its because they are so primal.