Barack Obama waggled his birth certificate in our faces 10 days ago to prove he is a United States citizen. Then, just to underline the point, he sent troops to kill Osama bin Laden last Sunday, bagging a trophy that had eluded George W. “Bring It On” Bush for more than seven years.
On Monday, a sizable number of Americans still said they believe the birth certificate is a fake, and added that bin Laden’s death is a hoax.
All of this raises a few questions.
First: Just how bleeping dumb are we, anyway?
Second: When will the mainstream news media do its job and stop enabling these crackpots?
The questions may be more closely linked than you think.
I watched aghast April 27 as the president of the United States went on television to persuade his fellow countrymen that he is indeed a fellow countryman.
It was mortifying. No other president has had to do such an abasing thing.
It was also racist to the core.
A prim story in the paper last week allowed as how “some” African-Americans considered Obama’s ignominious proof-of-citizenship moment racist. I’ve got news for that oh-so-cautious reporter: you are unlikely to find an African-American who doesn’t see racism in Obama’s announcement.
“Some” Caucasian-Americans, like me, feel the same way.
And yet Obama felt he had to show us the birth certificate. And now he’s being accused of faking bin Laden’s death.
It’s a swell pair of notions from the fringe about what they see as our conniving president and his sinister machinations.
Conspiracy theories always slither around the edges of public discourse: Lyndon B. Johnson was behind John F. Kennedy’s assassination; Dick Cheney brought down the World Trade Towers; the moon landing never really happened.
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