The perpetual foreigner

It's funny how the people who spend their lives trying to destroy democracy in America insist that everyone who stands in their way hates democracy in America. Barak Obama, regardless of what kind of a president he will turn out to be in the long run, certainly is an obstacle to the far right and their dubious objectives and of course, to the racists. Someone who doesn't give a damn about the country might find some humor in the myth making and the rebarbate logical fugues that characterize the believers and the creators and the marketers of Obamahate, but I'm not one of them. Unfortunately however, I seem to be on their mailing lists.

I wrote the other day about one US Army Major Stefan Cook who volunteered for duty in Afghanistan in order to generate enough publicity so that his claim that Barak Obama was foreign born would make the papers and boost publicity for the fabricated myth. His case was thrown out of court as expected, but the crusade wears on and it may soon be that you will receive another e-mail diatribe attempting to prove with every fallacy in the book that Obama's three week trip to visit a college friend in Pakistan proves he was travelling under a foreign passport, never had or had renounced his US citizenship, was born in Africa and must have received foreign funding of his education and travels -- which in turn proves a conspiracy to make him president a quarter century later: the same conspiracy begun 50 years ago with the intent of taking an African, Muslim baby and making him the president of the US sometime in the next millennium. It's the same conspiracy that involves the Honolulu newspapers and the Hawaii bureau of vital records.

The serial fallacy proceeds from a false premise: that it was illegal for a US citizen to travel to Pakistan in 1981. It wasn't. Supporting false premises are that it was part of a round the world cruise, which it wasn't and that it would cost a fortune to crash with a college buddy for three weeks, which it doesn't. It's worth reading the screed at Snopes.com simply as an example of poorly crafted, disjointed and clumsy fallacy and a lesson in the power of bigotry to overcome one's ability to spot it.

I should point out that Snopes has debunked so many of the products of the hateful underground that it itself was recently the subject of an e-mail and blog assault attempting to "prove" that it's owned by Liberals and so it's facts weren't facts even if independently verifiable.

I've made it my practice to denounce these never-ending viral e-mails and to hit reply all when doing it. I've irritated people, I've infuriated people, I've lost friends, I've made enemies -- but I've kept some sense of self-respect because I've not let lies and slander and subversive plots pass me by unhindered. Whoever it really was who told us that all evil needs to prosper is that good people look the other way was absolutely right. I hope you'll throw these things back at the perpetrators and the traitors as well.