The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
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    Ever Notice That The Birthers ...

    By Doctor Cleveland on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 6:37pm | Politics

    never talk about Biden becoming President?

    If you really didn't believe that Barack Obama was Consitutionally eligible for office, wouldn't that make Biden (who shared Obama's fat majority in the Electoral College) President? Yet that never comes up.

    Even if you were magical thinker enough to believe that Biden, by running on an ineligible man's ticket were ALSO somehow disqualified from office, wouldn't that make the Speaker of the House President? I can see how that notion might be unpalatable to Republican activists when Pelosi was Speaker, but now that there's a Republican Speaker you hear exactly the same amount of nothing about it.

    Where's the Birther movement demanding that Boehner be sworn in as President?

    Even the Birthers aren't interested in their own theory as something that might be real. They're interested in it as a tool to reject reality completely.

    Let me translate the demand to "see the birth certificate":

    Obama shouldn't have been President, so none of this should happen! I will not eat my peas! No laws that I don't want can ever ever ever ever pass! And it is NOT bedtime, Mommy! Not not not!



    Birtherism is not an attempt to follow a legal or Constitutional principle. It shows no interest in what the Constitutional ramification of an ineligible POTUS might be. It's simply a way of shutting out cognitive dissonance, and refusing to believe that more than half the country voted for Obama.

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    as a tool to reject reality completely.

    The reality of a globalized world has become too complex, that's the problem. Life is no longer a question of just understanding a small insular village. So conspiracy narratives are made up to deal with things. The irony is that the conspiracies often get more complex than reality in order to maintain the illusions started. They either have to ignore facts (i.e., ignore the Biden thing) which is what birthers of often do, or make up elaborate possibilities to explain away inconvenient facts.

    Wikipedia has a nice applicable entry:

    ....conspiracy theory goes beyond the boundaries of rational criticism when it becomes nonfalsifiable. Such a theory is a closed system of ideas which explains away contradictory evidence by claiming that the conspirators themselves planted it.[1].....

    According to political scientist Michael Barkun, conspiracy theories once limited to fringe audiences have become commonplace in mass media[1] He argues that this has contributed to conspiracism emerging as a cultural phenomenon in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the possible replacement of democracy by conspiracy as the dominant paradigm of political action in the public mind.[1] According to anthropologists Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, "evidence suggests that a broad cross section of Americans today…gives credence to at least some conspiracy theories."[3] Belief in conspiracy theories has therefore become a topic of interest for sociologists, psychologists and experts in folklore....

    And here's an oldie but goodie webiste from an old Favorites list:

    How To Design And Promote A CONSPIRACY THEORY — Resources
    by Ric Carter

    "The essential features of all games: symmetry, arbitrary rules, tedium." —Jorge Luis Borges

    Those dealing with political-military, racial-ethnic, religious-cultic, alien-paranormal, commercial-financial and other complex matters, often find it convenient to structure their ideas about phenomena and behaviour of such organizations in terms of a conspiracy....

    That the child Barack Obama had a global background makes him all the more appealing a target for a conspiracy topic.


    by artappraiser on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 8:49pm

    This whole thing is ridiculous and irrelevant! Even if he was born on Mars, or MECCA, or Kenya or the North Pole, his mother was an American citizen and that makes him a natural born citizen. Too bad that the shitty state of health care prevented her from seeing her son grow up, but it is time to stop responding to doofusses. Can we stop this nonsense? NOW?

    by CVille Dem on Thu, 04/14/2011 - 11:22pm

    Of course Uncle Joe Biden would have to remain awake--at least most of the time!

    http://www.mediaite.com/tv/big-fcking-bore-did-joe-biden-fall-asleep-dur...

     

     

     


    by Richard Day on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 12:13am

    Another thing that Birthers seem to ignore: by his own admission, McCain wasn't born in the United States; he was born in Panama. His parents were American (just like Obama's mother), so he was born a US citizen, but he wasn't born in the United States.


    by Verified Atheist on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 10:27am

    That is so true and the irony here is that McCain never got into that argument at all and would shush people at the town meetings who would refer to Obama as a socialist or Muslim.

    This is a cultural/social/psychological phenomina that just will never go away. It is an US vs. THEM dichotomy.

    We all know that if our President were not Black, there would be no issue but most birthers will not face this fact.


    by Richard Day on Fri, 04/15/2011 - 5:06pm