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

[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.