May, 2011 archive

He’s quite wrong you know.

Republican lies never die.

Video via Bob Cesca.

Afterthought:

For that matter, they don’t even fade away.

This week, Bob Garfield of On the Media inteviews James Fallows regarding President Obama’s release of his birth certificate, focusing on the role of the media in birtherism. In the process, they look back on the history of the American press, from the time of Andrew Jackson forward.

Then Bob Garfield adds a comment:

So why do the mainstream media take the bait from the Donald Trumps of the world? Why do they add oxygen to the fires of political cynicism and stupidity? If they simply ignored this nonsense, wouldn’t the story just flicker out, once and for all?

Well, first of all, no, it wouldn’t. In the Internet world, and the FOX News Channel world, the mainstream media aren’t the arbiters of what stories live or die.

But beyond that, notwithstanding the President’s digs at the press corps, the media have nothing here to be ashamed of. They didn’t seize on the birther story because they regarded it as unsettled. They did so mainly to foster evaluation of supposed presidential hopeful Donald Trump, and of elected officials who keep doubt alive by framing the President’s birth as a matter of belief, not of fact.

When Speaker of the House John Boehner says, “I take the President at his word,” that slyly leaves open the possibility that the President is lying.

So Obama shouldn’t be ridiculing the messenger here. If anything, the President owes the press a debt of gratitude. If he wants the public to distinguish a responsible leader from a carnival barker, someone has to document the barking.

I often hear and see some of my fellow lefties complain that the media should just not cover the birthers and their fantastickal and fantastically stupid, bigoted claims, since there is no news, only falsehood, there.

As much as I wish the whole birther nonsense would go away, I find these complaints disquieting, not just on abstract First Amendment grounds (and, as my two or three regular readers know, I am a First Amendment purist), but also from the knowledge that censoring them can’t stop them. If this hokum came only from a few cranks at the barbershop, it would be unreported hokum.

Instead, persons who are, by virtue (that may be the wrong word, but oh, well) of their positions are newsworthy promote the lies, both implicitly and explicitly.

Attempting to censor the lie would not make it disappear.

Rather, it would goad the rightwing lie machine into higher gear.

Follow the link to read the rest of the transcript and listen to the entire segment or listen here:

James Carroll, writing at the Boston Globe, examines the DNA in the birth of birthers. A nugget:

The issue has been his character as — well, as the issue of a Caucasian mother and an African father. An inch below the surface of this discussion is the perceived offense not just of blackness, but of miscegenation, that peculiarly demonic legacy of a slave system which took for granted the white owners’ sexual exploitation of slaves, while outlawing interracial sex. The biological fact of Obama’s existence, not the bureaucratic fact of government records, is what generates the lunatic rage.