Over the past week or two I’ve been reading news stories about our
favorite foil hatted sect of far right republicans… birthers. It is mind blowing to me that this particular
conspiracy continues to be given voice by so many high profile republican
pundits.
This issue is as nutjob as it gets,
but it’s worth thinking about why this claim continues to resurface so long
after it should have been laid to rest.
Obviously, there is a faction of people out there who personally hate
the President. When Bush was in the
White House a rather large portion of the electorate hated him too. I count myself among that population and
admit that my dislike went well beyond Bush’s policies. I found him to be personally detestable for
several reasons.
His blatant and unapologetic
religiosity annoyed me. He conflated his
own will and the will of God, and people bought it. I talked to a number of Christians who voted
for Bush solely because he claimed to pray every day. Never mind that Osama Bin Laden also prayed
every day… he did it five times a day… and he prayed to the same God, yet he did terrible things. Bush did too.
Bush was not a smart president in the way
Obama is smart, but that didn’t bother me.
What did bother me was the way he seemed to celebrate his own
ineptitude. He championed his lack of
intelligence as though it were a virtue.
Finally, Bush lied to us over and over and over again. He lied deliberately in order to further his
own agenda. Despite all this, no one on
the left ever claimed that Bush was not an American. No one made up any idiotic conspiracies about
him. We didn’t have to.
His record on Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on
terror, the environment, his pro rich people tax policies, and his blatant
public buffoonery made it unnecessary for us to make up ridiculous lies about
him. The truth was more ridiculous than
anything we could have imagined.
What
the birthers conspiracy tells me is that there is nothing Obama has done that
deserves much criticism. If there was, we'd be talking about it instead of whether he was born in the U.S.
So why do
people hate President Obama? I don’t
have a good answer to that question. Maybe it's because he's African American. Maybe it's because he's well educated. Maybe it's because he's a brilliant public speaker.
Mostly, though, I think it's because they're supposed to hate him. We're all supposed to hate the other side, so we do. Without reason, without reflection, without a second thought...
Maybe it's time to rethink our political system.
