Eric Boehlert, writing for MediaMatters.org, captured the essence of what the “Birther” controversy was really all about:

Viewed in a vacuum, the movement seems like the nutty fringe. But viewed in a larger historical context, birthers share obvious ties to traditional right-wing assaults on previous Democrats, and birthers have all the marks of a GOP Noise Machine creation. The movement is about a larger, more sinister attempt to paint Obama as illegitimate, foreign, and suspect (i.e. not like you and me). To portray him as “a gratuitous interloper,” as radio host G. Gordon Liddy put it. As someone who isn’t who he says he is. As-- let’s face it-- the Manchurian Candidate, with all the evil connotations that come with it...



And it’s about the disturbing role media figures like Dobbs play when they act as the bridge-- as the transmitter-- between the radical and the mainstream. When they legitimize the craziness, if only in the eyes of the crazies themselves. As MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow noted this week, “The home run for conspiracists of any stripe is when their ideas can leave the lunatic fringe and enter the mainstream.”

In that respect, the explosion of right-wing conspiracism and McCarthyite smears that followed Obama’s election was remarkably similar to the events that followed Bill Clinton’s election in 1993-- the onslaught was predicated on a series of viral memes whose purpose was to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. In the case of Clinton, the conspiracy theories created a narrative depicting the president as an amoral, womanizing conniver who was plotting to hand the national sovereignty over to a cabal of New World Order conspirators. For Obama, the meme evolved into a depiction of the president as a radical communist (or socialist or even fascist) who “hates America,” a man with Muslim sympathies similarly plotting to resign our national sovereignty.



The groundwork for this meme, as we’ve seen, was laid during the 2008 campaign. But it took on a life of its own after the election.



Even before the inauguration, Sean Hannity went on his nationally syndicated radio show and announced he was organizing a would-be force to attempt to stop Obama from enacting “radical” policies, calling his show the outpost of “the conservative underground.” Fellow radio host Mike Gallagher similarly promoted an effort by a far-right online group called Grassfire to present a petition announcing that signers were joining “the resistance” to Obama’s presidency.

I hope you watched the George Carlin American Dream video yesterday (or will click the link and watch it now). It's a classic critique of how wrong "the American experiment" has gone. Several people asked me why I didn't use it as a jumping off point to attack Obama's corporatism and toadyism. Aside from being a clear if-the-shoe-fits kind of statement, there's something else that keeps us from piling on to Obama as fully as we probably will eventually. John Amato and David Neiwert hit on it very powerfully in their must-read new book, Over The Cliff-- How Obama's Election Drove The American Right Insane . It comes down the same tribal reasons I found myself holding my nose and rallying around Clinton, another conservative Democrat who served the ruling elites as well as most mainstream Republicans would. Who really wants to be in the same "tribe," even tangentially, as these folks?You can expect us to watch Obama and his team closely, report the crap and not go nuclear until he actually does something that will fundamentally cripple whatever there is of a progressive movement, like his Social Security scheme.

Labels: crazy extremists, Over The Cliff