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.

Hell no, he won't go!

Quite frankly the idea that our military has become an evangelical camp-meeting scares me more that the Obama presidency scares the people who think he's a Muslim secret agent or that the Hawaii Bureau of Vital Statistics cooked up a fake birth certificate and the Honolulu newspapers recorded his birth forty some odd years ago as part of a plot to make Baby Obama the future president. It's not just theBiblically deluded nature of such people but also the uncontrollable urges they have to believe things for reasons hard for others to understand.

It's hard to know whether U.S. Army Maj. Stefan Frederick Cook really believes the fantasy or whether he simply doesn't want to go to Afghanistan and couldn't bring himself to wear a dress. I would have to assume that he does believe. He claims that he has tremendous support from fellow soldiers -- 90% is his frightening claim.

He would get on the next plane says he if only it could be proved that his birth certificate was real. That's a remarkable statement and if birth certificates needed to be proved beyond establishing that the birth was properly registered, we could easily disallow every president. Quite a can of worms, this is and perhaps it's better to ask for some evidence that, like John McCain, he wasn't born in the USA. Of course there isn't any evidence beyond that malignant viral meme that seems to spread from loony to loony like lice in a flop house.

Of course it isn't just the loons and psychos keeping the idea alive. one of the favorite tricks of our scandal addicted media is to presentnasty, stale old memes in new bottles and so we often have Fox hinting that "people are saying" when they aren't and we have Lou Dobbs, fresh out of stories about the Mexican Menace saying "new questions are being raised." No they're not, Lou, it's the same insane calumny coming from yet another psycho. and shame on you for trying to keep the meme alive for fame and profit.

Of course and as we expected, a Federal judge threw the case out this morning and the Federal dumpster already contains the smelly remnants of other similar suits, but thanks to Lou and Fox and the Army of Believers the idea will survive and perhaps longer than our republic. It's not completely new of course, Clinton faced opposition from some in the military based on some some notion that he wasn't really the President. What does it tell us, I have to ask, that the notion that the SCOTUS decision to stop counting ballots in Florida and the serious evidence of voting machine fraud made W's presidency illegitimate has faded away? Maybe it tells us that the great ship of insanity lists heavily to the right. New questions are being raised, you know -- and people are saying.