Lou Dobbs: Birther
By Hey, all he wants are some answers.
This is essentially the same thing as if in 2002 a top CNN anchor had demanded that the Bush administration prove it didn’t demolish the WTC.
I don’t think that guy would have kept his job though.
Also, I was glancing yesterday at a couple of websites dedicated to proving that the moon landings were faked, and was struck by how the (il)logical structure and rhetoric of these types of sites are always the same, whether they involve moon landings or birth certificates or controlled demolitions or the Illuminati.
On the general topic, Hofstadter’s essay remains required reading.
Update: In the comments Warren Terra brings up something I’ve been wondering about as well:
“The Birfer theory really boggles me: I can’t even understand the thought process involved. Obama’s been a (very minor, initially) public figure since at least his time as editor of the Harvard Law Review, and at the very least since then there’s never been any change in his biography, in which he was born to Stanley Ann Dunham in the state of Hawai’i, a birth that was announced in the local paper. What exactly do these nutcases surmise – that he wasn’t born to Dunham, but instead was born to some other woman overseas and smuggled as a newborn to Dunham’s hospital? What possible reason could a newlywed college student have for doing such a thing? How would it make any sense? Even in their most unhinged fantasies, why would Obama’s family have plotted from his infancy to fake the location of his birth and the identity of his mother? After all, anyone born to Dunham or anyone born in Hawai’i would be a natural-born US citizen even if they’d been the hideously malformed extraterrestrial lovechild of Ming The Merciless and Josef Stalin.
I mean, with the Moon Landing, JFK, 9/11 Truther, Illuminati, etcetera conspiracy theories the facts don’t fit and the evidence isn’t there but at least there are plausible motivations being alleged. Even the various UFO theories involve human (or alien!) actors doing things secretly for erasons I can understand, such that a rational person in similar circumstances might well perpetrate such a conspiracy for personal gain or for their version of the greater good. But I just can’t comprehend what the Birfers think the Dunhams could posibly have in mind. Maybe it’s because they really think he’s the Antichrist, so no logical thought process need be involved.”
Has anybody looked at their various arguments closely enough to answer this?