Commenter Eric K summarizes the birther issue perfectly:
“50 years ago you shouted nigger, 30 years ago you talked about States Rights, now you ask to see the president’s birth certificate.”
Update. Here’s the quote (from Lee Atwater) that refers to
You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
General Winfield Stuck
Ah, yes. A necessary updating of Atwaters — GOP Bigotry For Dummies.
Lev
Haha. Progress, people, progress.
Zandar
And six months from now, they’ll be doing all three.
gopher2b
Bingo
tgs
I live in MS and still get called n* every so often. This never fails bemuse me because 1: I’m Samoan and 2: I’m married to a white woman.
Crashman06
@tgs: Maybe they’re getting the wrong message from Fear and Loathing…
Lev
@Zandar: Umm, they’re doing all three now. Glenn Beck, anyone?
LD50
Could someone fill me in on what the original Atwater quote was?
Tax Analyst
Zandar said:
“And six months from now, they’ll be doing all three.”
They don’t need to. The birfer audience knows what the
birfer question is all about.
Molly
You know, we’re feeding this by talking about it as much as we are. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, the more cazy exposed, the better for everyone. I, for one, have learned all I care to know about the birthers to last me a lifetime. They’re nuts. I can now explain the sheer insanity to anyone who brings it up. I’m over it now. Want this to just go away, and showing the birth certificate will not end it. So, seems to me the best thing to do is STOP.
Like Sully, I am tired and cranky and want this to go away. Unlike Sully, I am not under the illusion that showing the “long form birth certificate” would make that happen. So, I am planning to release this insanity from my mind and go drink a Red Stripe in honor of GatesGate.
Derelict
If you’re into spectator sports, you can examine the growing logjam of bills being put forth by Republicans. Between the “Birther Bills” and the resolutions calling for Obama to apologize for any number of things, there’s just oodles of lunatic fun.
So sad!
DougJ
Original Atwater quote (from his wiki):
By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
David
The Freepers are claiming that they’re happy that:
the Republican anti-Birthers are being “outed.”
Zandar
@Tax Analyst:
No I meant “all at the same time.”
And yeah, Beck is real damn close as it is now.
Lev
@DougJ: I often wonder if guys like Atwater, who apologized right before death, really mean it when they do, or if they just want a little absolution. At least George Wallace actually undid a lot of what he did in his last term.
iwantcssfile
.
DougJ
You know, we’re feeding this by talking about it as much as we are. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, the more cazy exposed, the better for everyone.
You know, I *really* do believe that exposing the crazy is important. I can’t say that strongly enough.
Citizen_X
It sounds like a Richard Pryor joke or something from the 1970s:
“In 2008 we’ll elect a black president!”
“Wow! Right on! Shouldn’t take that long, but still!”
“…and 40 million Republicans will make up some bullshit about his birth certificate and deny he’s a citizen!”
“Awwwww, man!”
Paul L.
4 years in the future the standard for being a racist will be you voted against Obama.
DougJ
I often wonder if guys like Atwater, who apologized right before death, really mean it when they do, or if they just want a little absolution.
I think Atwater meant it. He had a lot of black friends and I think he always knew what he was doing was fucked up, but he didn’t know how fucked up til he reflected more. Don’t forget, he thought that he’d be embraced as a board member at a traditionally black college (instead, he was booted).
I think it was for real.
jenniebee
Obama’s race isn’t making the crazies like him any better, but what makes you think they’d be any less nuts if they had lost to, say, the woman they’ve spent the last two decades calling “Hitlery”?
gex
@DougJ: Studies have also shown that if a group of people are having a discussion and one person makes a false or offensive statement, that others in the group will lend that statement more credence if no one else in the group speaks against it. Psychologically, we interpret the silence as agreement.
Demo Woman
@DougJ: Atwater did not care about what he was doing. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” That was Atwater’s motto.
freelancer
Goddamn, Sully’s Pissing me off today. Verbatim Email I just sent him.
2 things:
First, yes while the Birther nonsense takes away from Obama’s legislative agenda, prolonging the madness and hanging this around mainstream Republicans’ and GOP Leaders’ necks is destroying their credibility. This knucklehead obsession is Absolutely Killing them politically.
Second, knowing the habits of the average conspiracy nut, the release of the document (if it even exists anymore*) will not stop the Charge of the Birthers. Even if it is never released, the birthers’ point is moot. Stanley Anne Dunham never renounced her US citizenship. Immigration laws passed in the 1950s automatically made the offspring of US Citizens (even one US citizen) themselves, natural born US citizens. The law as it stands today, would have made Barack Obama an American even if he had been born on Mars.
The question to ask, in light of these very real, very legitimate laws, is since John McCain was born in Panama, what is the real distinction, the stark obvious difference in the choice between questioning Obama’s citizenship and not questioning McCains?
Warren Terra
@ #19
Paul L, when I want an opinion on racism from someone who just a couple of days ago linked to the blog of Robert Stacy McCain, I’ll just shoot myself.
Joe Lisboa
4 years in the future the standard for being a racist will be you voted against Obama.
Paul L, you deserve an award for excellence in simultaneously missing the point whilst exemplifying a caricature.
I hereby deem it the Cartoon Ostrich award, and you, sir, are its first recipient. Congratulations. Expect a celebratory phone call from your “president” any moment now. Just be sure to show up for the ceremonial beer with a 40 oz. of malt liquor and a wounded sense of unreflective privilege. Douche.
handy
@Paul L.:
That’s okay, Paul, wingnuts are claiming anyone who votes for Obama now are the racists.
DougJ
Atwater did not care about what he was doing. “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” That was Atwater’s motto.
All of that is true.
But if you watch that documentary about him, I think you’ll conclude he really meant his apologies in the end. A good friend of his, a black musician who was by him on his death bed, argues very persuasively for this.
Meanwhile, Mary Matlin says he didn’t apologize because he didn’t do anything wrong.
IndieTarheel
@Citizen_X: You win the thread.
cosanostradamus
.
THE LONG FORM: “OBAMA’S REAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE”
Interesting that this bullsh*t suddenly explodes at the same time as our healthcare legislation hits the floor. Hm.
.
jenniebee
Jeebus, Tweety is asking why there’s a benefit for counseling every five years on living wills. He’s asking why there’s “social policy being jammed in this” because young people don’t need living wills.
gwangung
Nah, the standard for Stoopid(tm) is a Paul L. post.
SrirachaHotSauce
The Obama = Racist thing has now reached the level of “I know you are but what am I?” rhetoric.
At one and the same time, the idiot bloc can dogwhistle the racists with Birther nonsense, and then call Obama a racist for calling the false arrest of a Harvard professor “stupid.”
What I really don’t get is why the morons get all the attention these days. If these morons went around saying the moon were made of green cheese, would we be wringing our hands over the demerits of green cheese?
Zandar
@SrirachaHotSauce:
Because the people in charge of giving attention to the morons are in fact morons themselves.
David
Barack, a male calf born on the inaugural eve of the 44th President of the United States at 11:50 p.m. is our first Asian elephant born as a result of artificial insemination. This calf is a first for fourteen-year-old Bonnie, who also was born at the Ringling Bros. Center for Elephant Conservation, and until recently was performing with The Greatest Show On Earth®.
read more about the new calf
elephantcenter.com/?id=5050
J.D. Rhoades
@tgs:
I live in MS and still get called n* every so often. This never fails bemuse me because 1: I’m Samoan and 2: I’m married to a white woman.
You travel armed at all times, I hope.
anonevent
@SrirachaHotSauce: The difference is that green cheese isn’t president of the US. There are plenty of UFO people that we don’t care about. It’s the fact that they would like to undo an election they lost because they cannot stand a black man in the White House.
Demo Woman
The public gave Bush a pass when it was revealed that the CIA warned him about a pending attack on the USA almost 8 years ago. Obama can’t get a pass because he doesn’t have a long form of his birth certificate. WTF is a long form of a birth certificate?
Paul L.
@cosanostradamus:
BREAKING NEWS!!!! Shocking proof that Obama was not born in Hawaii
Faxed from a Texas Kinko’s
DougJ
If these morons went around saying the moon were made of green cheese, would we be wringing our hands over the demerits of green cheese?
Would those morons be Congressmen and CNN anchors?
LD50
@tgs: There’s a Samuel Jackson quote from Pulp Fiction that’s appropriate here.
SrirachaHotSauce
@Zandar:
We have met the enemy, and he is us? Heh.
I dunno, I think the birther crap helps our side. Other than that, I can’t see any particular effect.
It’s like that guy I ran into at Safeway a few months ago, who saw Obama’s picture on the news crawler, and said to me “The whole world is just niggers now.”
These people have always been around, and they are around now, and being a little vocal. But who pays any attention to them?
Screw ’em. And let them keep acting out. It just makes their side look ridiculous.
I assume that the guy at Safeway was Brick Oven Bill, but I didn’t verify that.
DougJ
There’s a Samuel Jackson quote from Pulp Fiction that’s appropriate here.
Lay it on me.
LD50
@DougJ:
I’m saddened that you couldn’t guess.
“What’s a nigger gonna do if he’s Samoan?”
lawnorder
Don’t think it is only racism. Sure the reich winger hate “da niggers” but I think their hate for Hillary and Bill showed that they can hate whites too.
I think at the core of the birther madness is the conviction that the US can not have repudiated their party and sided with Lib’ruls without any kind of shenanigans. Hence for them, the current Democratic President is illegitimate. Has to be. And any theory that says that is embraced as Gospel They have to believe that. Or their painfully built castle of lies and self delusion collapses and they have to face the facts that the majority of voters despises their ideas and their party.
El Cid
@lawnorder: This is it. For 40 years they have been told that they and only they are the TruAmerica and their values (that of Southern right wing white reactionaries) were every TruAmerican’s values and that all America, if only given the chance, would side with them.
America cannot have chosen against them, America cannot have en masse really, really voted — and not just Clinton plurality of a 3 way election, but really smashingly voted — with The Enemy, the liberal Democrats.
It must have been a trick. It must have been betrayal. George W. Bush was a liberal. ACORN manipulated the elections in invisible ways. And Obama is a Kenyan.
Nellcote
@jenniebee:
>Tweety is asking why there’s a benefit for counseling every five years on living wills.
Yes, that was even stupider than than his abortion obsession. I was disappointed no one mentioned Terry Schiavo.
demimondian
@Paul L.: Yeah, and 85% of the time, it’ll be the truth.
Ash Can
@Paul L.:
LOL! That statement alone is priceless.
Rey
@#30 Cos
ding, ding, ding. You are correct. I truly believe that’s what all of this hoopla is about. The USA will finally have a national healthcare plan/option or whatever the hell it will be. And the President that got this plan through will be a Democrat, oh and a half-black one at that.
DougJ
“What’s a nigger gonna do if he’s Samoan?”
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the brother fat. He has a weight problem.
ChristianPinko
Hey Doug, I think John already established that Obama is not, in fact, an American citizen: balloon-juice.com/?p=11047
Stabby
Please ignore my test post – site looks crazy, trying the reset.
matoko_chan
Its Son of the Southern Strategy.
Malkin: Obama is a racial opportunist. That means he is using gatesgates to misdirect you so he can sneak healthcare reform thru congress, and tax you to give all your stuff to blackfolk.
Beck: Obama hates white people and hes going to put you in FEMA camps and give all your stuff to blackfolk.
Eric Cantor: This is a white judeoxian country and you blackbrownyellow people that are atheists or have funky little religions (ie, unamericans) better stfu or gtfo.
Also, War in MENA FTW!!!!!
Who gives a sh*t about unamericans, n/e ways?
Diagoras
@tgs: It’s not your dna/ancestry man, it’s your melanin levels… that, and you’re stealin’ one of our women…
Nanotyrannus
@DougJ:
Please. And Mary M. also pointed in the documentary “It Came From Under a Rock Because Even the Other Slimy Creatures Couldn’t Stand Him: The Lee Atwater Story”out that the Bible he’d bought that he was telling everyone he was reading was found still in the plastic shrink-wrap it was purchased in.
What was really amazing about that documentary was that even people he had shanked in his rise to as much power as the rich white folk would let the little creep ascend to were still impressed by him and had wonderful things to say about him. It was like watching people have respect for the bear that ate and killed a guy because, hey, it won and all.
Paul L.
Looks like Doug J wants a job with Media Matters and is taking the Atwater quote out of context.
The Deceptive Side of Bob Herbert