Marc Ambinder has kind of an interesting post title:
Should The GOP Take The Birther Threat Seriously? Rush Does....
By "the birther threat" he means stuff like this, a video of an insane woman and an insane audience expressing their outrage that GOP Representative Michael "Mike" Castle of Delaware thinks Barack Obama is an American citizen.
I cannot for the life of me fathom why the bonkers birther stuff is any sort of a "threat" to the Republicans. Why? This class of stuff has been the meat and potatoes for large chunks of the GOP base forever; indeed, these people are the most reliable GOP voters. Have the 1990s vanished so quickly from memory? Has Hillary Clinton's murder of Vince Foster, shooting him in the head with a lesbian bullet, been so completely forgotten?
The birther stuff is extreme, sure, and is extremely easy to refute. But then let's run down the GOP dogma, the things no Republican politician could ever say in public without getting lynched, perhaps even just metaphorically: (1) global climate change is a serious crisis caused by human activity; (2) the mainstream media is not committed to electing Democrats; (3) a spending freeze in a severe recession is insane; (4) Rush Limbaugh is rather a blowhard (to quote Rush's latest, from Armbinder, "Rush Limbaugh claimed today that Obama "has yet to prove that he's a citizen"); (5) Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were never remotely in cahoots; (6) Barack Obama is not, in point of fact, a "socialist"; (7) the government is not about to send agents into your house to take your guns; (8) gay marriage is no big whoop... need I go on?
The birther madness is a minor, entirely predictable symptom of what the GOP is. Indeed, compared to the climate change guff, the birther mania is downright benign.
Bluntly. The GOP lets James Inhofe talk about science. In public. And the "MSM" is cool with that. And so is the rest of the Republican party.
What's a little birth certificate tomfoolery next to that? You know?
The only thing keeping Serious Journalists from worshiping the "birther" garbage as the Legitimate Wisdom of Heartland Voters is that it's déclassé. That it's, empirically speaking, bullshit, has no bearing.