Birthers and the UW

[randy_byers]

I hadn't known until last week that Obama's mother once took classes at the University of Washington. I didn't know until today that the fucking Birthers have been clamoring for her UW transcript, because she started taking classes a month after Obama was born. Googling the current Registrar's name takes you to this pathetic piece of "research" parsing an e-mail exchange with the Registrar that decisively proves that Obama's mother started classes at the UW in September 1961, not, as has widely been reported elsewhere, in August 1961. This is very important, because Obama was born in August 1961. I made the mistake of clicking through to the home page of this site, which is a sea of Birther sewage. "Live free or die," my fucking ass.

What's amazing about the paranoid mindset is how the profusion of "facts" just manages to confuse it even more, because the facts don't comport with the paranoia. So we must have more facts! Surely if we have more facts the truth we desire will emerge! The earnest attempts to piece together "what really happened" is almost heart-breaking in its intentional blindness.

Ultimately I think Birtherism is a distraction. They're not going to change anything with their beliefs. They're not going to force Obama out of office. They're not going to cause anybody who might vote for him to not vote for him. They will only appeal to the committed minority of True Believers. And yet it still infuriates me. And I think that might be my problem, not theirs. Let the nuts be nuts. They only do damage to their own ability to shape events.

Comments

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Wtf is a Birther - and why????

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Birthers are people who believe that Obama was not born in the U.S. and therefore shouldn't be allowed to be president. They typically believe either that he was born in Kenya or in Indonesia. All evidence that he was born in Hawai'i is ignored or dismissed. Although then there's also the faction of them that believes he was born in Hawai'i, but don't believe Hawai'i is a state.

I think it was on crowleycrow's LJ where we determined that the same percentage of Americans believes this as believes that UFOs are alien spaceships, so we decided they must be the same people.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

More importantly by chasing after such absurd hares with so much sound and fury the birthers alienate a large number of people who sit to the left of them. Not only do they thus manage to marginalise themselves but they do no favours to the wider conservative community by tainting it with absurdity.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I sure hope so. It's amazing to watch the Republican leadership try to walk the line between alienating the Birthers and alienating everybody else.

[kim-huett.livejournal.com]

Now admittedly my experience is Australian and compulsory voting probably makes some difference to the equation but I think my theory is still relevant to circumstances in the US. The problem the birthers have is actually less about left and right and more about priorities. When the majority of voters choose who to support they focus on a limited number of topics that they see as affecting them directly, health, education, economy, infastructure etc. They may have opinions on other matters, and indeed might feel quite strongly about them but ultimately they don't base their votes on morals but the hip pocket. So when a group pushes something other than a hip pocket issue the amount of approval this generates bears little relation to the votes it garners amongst hip pocket voters. In the matter of the birthers they keep receiving enough approval to keep making noise but there's no reason to believe this will directly affect voting patterns. Indeed, the longer they keep up the noise the more hip pocket voters will tune them out. The hip pocket voters will still tell pollsters they have doubts about Obama's nationality but that's mainly because it isn't a topic important enough for them to go back and reconsider. In short the birthers are now well past the point where time and energy could be usefully channeled into this debate. There's an ancient military saying the birthers would do well to heed: 'Reinforce success, abandon failure'.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I agree with this analysis. In the end I doubt that Birthers will have much effect on the vote one way or the other. I'd like to think that their craziness will alienate some of the electorate, but as you say the hip pocket is more important than this kind of ideological nonsense. I'm reminded of the quite possibly apocryphal story from the 2008 election in which some white residents of West Virginia were asked who they were going to vote for, and the wife yelled to her husband in the back of the house, "Who are we going to vote for?" The husbands voice was heard to yell back, "The nigger." "We're voting for the nigger," says the wife to the campaigner.