Is Donald Trump a racist?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

He claims not. Actually, and amazingly, he claims he's the least racist person around. The proof he gives is that a black man, one Randal Pinkett, won The Apprentice a few years ago.

Once the guffaws subside, I'll leave you to judge that claim, and the proof, for yourselves.

If Trump wants to cite the Mr. Pinkett's success, however, we may respond by citing the lack of success of one Kevin Allen, another black man who was a contestant on that detestable show:

Apparently he doesn't like educated African-Americans very much,

said Mr. Allen, a highly-educated African-American who made it all the way to Week 14, just a week prior to the finale.

Sour grapes? Maybe, though Trump's condescending treatment of Mr. Allen was certainly inappropriate, if not outright racist.

But these are anecdotes from a reality TV show. More telling is Trump's enthusiastic embrace of Birtherism, which to a great extent is a mask for anti-Obama racism, as well as, more explicitly, his ridiculous assertion that Obama needed affirmative action to get into the Ivy League.

Again, I'll leave you to make up your own minds.

(And to help you do that, allow me to recommend Joe Gandelman, Melissa McEwan, and Kaili Joy Gray.)

What will become of the Birthers?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The Death of a Dream - watch more funny videos

Obama conspires against conspirators in Osama conspiracy

By Nicholas Wilbur

The right-wing radicals and conspiracy theorists of the Tea Party fringe revolution didn't embrace reality when President Obama released his long-form birth certificate last week, a move that, by all legitimate accounts, was a redundant nail in the coffin on the "birther" issue. As we saw with the immediate demands for the president's college records, the duplicitous truth did little to convince the boisterous bigots in this great nation that a man with a name like Barack Hussein Obama could ever be a legitimate leader of the free world.

And so it is without surprise that America is forced to accept the emergence of another great conspiracy movement: the Deathers.

This is not a joke. No, the paranoid skeptics of all things Obama are not demanding a long-form death certificate – yet – but they are doling out conspiracy after conspiracy as evidence that the president's announcement of the assassination of Osama bin Laden was a hoax at best and a bald-faced lie at worst.

Surprisingly, the explanations for how and why, though exhaustive, are quite compelling.

The timing is too coincidental to go unnoticed, and the sharp minds of our deep-thinking conspirators didn't miss a beat when it was pointed out that President Obama announced bin Laden's assassination eight years to the day from when President Bush infamously declared the end of combat operations in Iraq under the banner "Mission Accomplished."

If that's not enough, the announcement also "happened" to interrupt the Sunday night episode of Donald Trump's reality TV show Celebrity Apprentice, which some cognitively elevated theorists interpreted as the president's way of getting even with Trump for escalating the controversy over Obama's birth certificate in recent weeks.

Of course, Obama already landed quite a few heavy blows against Trump at the Saturday evening White House correspondents' dinner, but that too is now up for debate as a possible reason for the timely announcement of bin Laden's death. The president is consistently harassed by the right-wing media every time he steps out for a round of golf or a few laps up and down the basketball court – because obviously more pressing matters are being ignored if the president has time for leisure – and so it is possible too that Obama was preempting the expected criticisms of his "night of laughs" by delivering bin Laden's head on a platter the very next night.

Except bin Laden's head wasn’t delivered on a platter, which brings us to the other conspiracies.

His body was dumped in the ocean out of respect for Islamic burial customs, which the government conveniently cited as its reason for getting rid of the body within 24 hours. The alleged DNA testing and facial recognition scans that allegedly confirmed the alleged identity of the alleged 9/11 mastermind are all that America has to go on as proof that bin Laden didn't die seven years ago – as some claim; or that he never existed at all; or that he was a fake enemy created to justify the government's own role in hijacking planes on 9/11 and crashing them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon; or that he was frozen several years ago and kept in a secret (probably underground and heavily-guarded) location until the political atmosphere in the United States demanded a public announcement of his death.

And where are the photographs of bin Laden's dead corpse? And where is the video footage of the raid on his compound? And how could the Pakistani government somehow not know that he was holed up in a million-dollar fortress in a city full of retired and active-duty military officers? And isn't it interesting that the announcement coincided with the kickoff of Zombie Awareness Month?

In all seriousness, the conspiracy theorists may not be far off the mark when they question the truth and timing of Obama's announcement.

Capturing and killing the most loathed and feared terrorist on the planet provides an embattled president with a much-needed boost in the popularity polls. It buries the argument, prominent among the right-wing punditry, that Obama is weak and inexperienced not only as a commander of the military but as a diplomat of a mostly undefined foreign policy doctrine. Killing the mastermind behind 9/11 will not only boost the popularity of the president himself; it will also bolster the president's foreign policy agenda, which most recently added Libya to the list of Middle Eastern interventions.

Most importantly, it's approaching an election year, and as we all know, politicians will do anything to maintain power. That is the real conspiracy.

Obama isn't lying. He didn't thaw bin Laden's frozen zombie corpse only to throw it in the ocean after an alleged DNA test in order to get a boost in the polls. Obama's more complex than that. He, too, is a big-picture kind of guy – a long-term thinker. He ordered the raid and killed the terrorist and announced the assassination and dumped the body all in one day because it's too coincidental not to conjure conspiracy theories. It was conspiracy theories he wanted. He held onto the photos and the videos not because he hoped to thwart a backlash from al Qaeda radicals – who would surely try to avenge bin Laden's murder if images of their bloodied leader were published around the globe – but because doing so would encourage the already hyper-active, dot-connecting, big-picture puzzling lunatics of the extreme right to continue chasing invisible fairies on the South Lawn as the news cameras document the revolution.

In that sense, it is a conspiracy. It's a conspiracy to induce conspiracies so that sane Americans will identify the Republican Party as the responsible guardian of these idiots – first "birthers," now "deathers" – in the upcoming election.

The Democratic Party's bumper stickers are being shipped out of the press shop now: "Vote Sanity in 2012."

This isn't a conspiracy to trump Trump or get a bump in the polls. It's a conspiracy to get the conspirators conspiring.

Or it's not...

Chew on that a while.

 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Whither Birtherism?

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Conservative renegade David Frum may describe Birtherism as a "disgrace" and a "phony controversy," as an issue that effectively ended with yesterday's release of President Obama's long-form birth certificate, and I credit Frum for asking how "this poisonous and not very subtly racist allegation [got] such a grip on our conservative movement and our Republican party" (that would be, his movement and his party) and for denouncing "these racialized attacks on Obama" (not just the Birther allegation but the new allegation, via Donald Trump, that Obama is basically a product of affirmative action, undeserving of his Ivy League education), but actually Birtherism and its various offshoots, however convincingly refuted, aren't going anywhere.

James Fallows explains why: "[Tuesday], about half of all Republicans thought Obama was foreign born, and therefore an illegal occupant of the White House. How many Republicans will think the same thing one week from now? My guess is: about half. We've reached that stage on just about everything. It's probably been true of human beings throughout time, but is more obviously significant in politics now, that generally people don't act like scientific investigators, or judges in moot-court competitions, when parsing the logic and evidence behind competing arguments to come up with political views. They go on loyalty, and tradition, and hope, and fear, and self-interest, and generosity, and all the rest."

Quite true, but I think Fallows is too generous, and too universal in applying his theory. While I acknowledge that ignorance, willful or otherwise, has been a facet of the human condition forever, or almost forever, this isn't so much about "human beings throughout time" as it is about the current state of one of America's two dominant political parties, a party that to a great extent has rejected science in favour of a far-right ideology, mixed with a similarly far-right theology, that wants nothing to do with "logic and evidence" and everything to do with trickle-down economics and "Intelligent Design." Yes, much of this has to do with loyalty, tradition, fear, self-interest, etc., but a lot of it has to do with sheer madness -- and, as I have remarked a number of times, what I find to be one of the defining aspects of our time, politically speaking, is the Republican Party's descent into madness, or rather its ongoing descent into ever deeper levels of madness.

Many Republicans, needless to say, still aren't convinced. Some of them are crazies like Leo Berman, but the issue, in one form or another, will be kept alive by more mainstream Republicans like Trump, Newt Gingrich, and everyone else who, sincerely or not, is trying to appeal to the grassroots base of the party. And of course it will be kept alive on Fox News, on talk radio, and throughout Frum's "conservative movement."

It's ignorance, it's racism, it's madness. And the facts don't matter one bit.

The truth shall set you free, unless you prefer to remain a prisoner of right-wing fear and paranoia

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Here it is:

President Obama's Long Form Birth Certificate

View more documents from White House

So fuck you, Donald Trump, and the rest of you ignorant, racist Birthers.

It never ends: Racism, Birtherism, and Barack Obama

By Mustang Bobby 

It doesn't matter if it's Winston from Alabama or Donald Trump or Pat Buchanan, there is always going to be a segment of America that will never accept the fact that Barack Obama was born in the United States, grew up and went to college, including Harvard, and then was elected president. They will continue to say that all he has to do is produce the evidence, and they'll be quiet, but the truth is that no amount of facts or proof will satisfy them, and every time more evidence is produced, they'll say it isn't good enough.

There's a very simple reason for this, and we all know what it is, even if Chris Matthews or Mike Signorile is too polite to say it: it's because Barack Obama is black.

That's it. Nothing else. Period. The End. I really don't understand why we keep dancing around it, and although I know that folks like Mr. Trump and Mr. Buchanan have a reputation for, as Howard Cosell use to say, "telling it like it is," they seem reticent to come out and say that they just don't believe that a black man is capable of being admitted to Ivy League colleges or elected to office without some kind of special treatment or affirmative action. They believe so strongly that the system in America is geared towards the white straight man that it is clearly impossible for anyone else to achieve success on their own.

There really isn't any point in arguing with them or trying to prove them wrong. Like Winston from Alabama, nothing you say will convince them. Chris Matthews and all the rest of the pundits are too polite -- and too much entrenched -- to call out Mr. Trump or Mr. Buchanan for their racism, and so they just leave it out there for the rest of us to ponder. And it will never end. If it wasn't Barack Obama, it would be Hillary Clinton, or Colin Powell or even Michael Steele who got where they did by means other than the usual route of working hard and getting into college and getting a job just like the white kid from Westchester.

So clearly Barack Obama had help, either by violating the Temporal Prime Directive and going back to August 1961 and planting false records in the Honolulu newspapers to say he was born there, and then jumping ahead to get him into Columbia and Harvard without anyone knowing him at those schools -- the subtext there is that those places are so lily-white that a black student would garner attention -- or that he brilliantly bought off everyone ever connected with any of those places to plant him in the right place at the right time.

But if he's so smart and rich, there has to be someone else pulling the strings; no black man could come up with such a plan on his own. So who's really in charge? Ah, that's the conspiracy...

(Cross-posted from Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Donald Trump attacks Obama with the affirmative action card

By R.K. Barry

Donald Trump has added yet another unsubstantiated claim to his list of attacks on President Obama. Now he is saying, without a bit of evidence, that Obama was not qualified to attend either of the Ivy League schools, Columbia or Harvard, that he in fact attended. As per normal, the Trump burden of proof is based on the "fact" that he "heard" that Obama was a poor student.

The reality, as is well known, is quite different. Obama graduated from Columbia University in New York in 1983 with a degree in political science after transferring from Occidental College in California. He then went to Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1991. He was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review.

Okay, those are facts, but Trump wouldn't recognize a fact if it bit him on the ass (as they say).

So, again, as with the Birther nonsense, this is not about facts. This is racism plain and simple. This is intended to appeal to those who can be easily manipulated to froth at the suggestion that certain individuals (African-Americans, women, etc.) are given all the breaks because of unfair government intervention. You know, the usual right-wing knock on affirmative action. On this logic, when an African-American succeeds in such a grand way, there must be something wrong.

Trump is always indignant at the suggestion that he is a racist. But to modify only slightly the words of that great American philosopher Forrest Gump, "racism is as racism does."

Trump knows what he is doing. He understands his audience. He knows that there are components of the conservative base that will follow him to hell and back as long as he continues to attack the president through whatever means required. He knows it won't get him as far as the White House, but this carnival con man also knows that this will keep him on the front pages of newspapers and on the talk-show and news-panel circuit.

Yes, Trump craves fame above all else, especially as a means to further augment his wealth, and he will crawl through the most disgusting muck to get it. Truly despicable.

(Cross-posted to Lippmann's Ghost.)

CNN investigation finds that, yes, Obama was in fact born in the U.S.

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Did we really need a CNN investigation to tell us what we already knew, what the facts told us, namely, that President Obama was in fact born in the U.S., more specifically in Hawaii on August 4, 1961?

No.

But we got one nonetheless and if nothing else it provides additional confirmation.

And what we can also confirm is that Birtherism is not just a delusional conspiracy theory but a blatant lie and complete disregard for the truth.

But will this finally silence the Birthers? Will it put an end to Donald Trump's self-aggrandizing ravings? No, of course not. The facts mean nothing to the Birthers, including Trump, who will no doubt continue to talk up his own secret investigation. Think Progress:

CNN researchers decided to save Trump the trouble and actually investigate. First, they spoke with Dr. Chiyome Fukino, former Hawaii Department of Health Director and a Republican, who took advantage of a state law allowing her to see President Obama's birth certificate stored in a vault. Fukino declared the certificate "absolutely authentic." She even put disputed Trump's suggestion that Obama is hiding that he's a Muslim to rest, pointing out that no birth certificate from that time mentions faith.

Aware of Trump's concern that no one remembers baby Obama, CNN went ahead and found them too. Not only did Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie (D) reiterate his memory of celebrating the birth with Obama's mother, but so did Dunham's college adviser and another mother giving birth in the hospital when Obama was born. She remembered because "in those days, there were hardly any other black babies."

The repeated debunking of the birther conspiracy has convinced numerous Republicans that Trump offers nothing but a "joke" candidacy. Last night, Gov. Jan Brewer (R-AZ) told CNN's John King that this issue "is leading our country down a path of destruction." Americans agree, with 64 percent saying "they would definitely not vote for Trump in 2012" and half of all Americans believing he'd be a "poor" or "terrible" leader. This, however, seems to be another fact Trump will entirely ignore. 

Republicans embrace Birtherism at their peril -- and yet that is precisely what they're doing. Yes, there are some in the "establishment," including Brewer, who are worried about it, but Birtherism is rampant among the base, which explains why so many establishment figures, whatever their own views, are careful not to dismiss it (by insinuating that it might be true or by making it a matter of belief instead of fact) and which helps explain Trump's significant popularity even as a "joke" candidate.

Trump has other things going for him (e.g., broad name-recognition, ubiquitous media presence, myth as self-made Super CEO who possesses astounding business acumen, and lots of money, always popular with Republicans), but his current standing has a lot to do with the fact that he's tapping into the deep reservoir of grassroots Republican paranoia and fear. It's not an accident that he's embraced Birtherism. It's his key to Republican success, should he seek it, and he's not about to drop it just because a CNN investigation says he's crazy.

The facts haven't stopped Republicans before. They won't stop them now either.

President Obama will never be American enough for Trump and the Birthers

By R.K. Barry

Andrew Sullivan wrote recently about a new CBS/NYT poll which found that 47% of Republicans think Obama wasn't born in the U.S and that another 22% aren't sure. He cited Steve Kornacki, who said that this "doesn't mean they've thought things through and believe an elaborate plot has been carried out, and it doesn't mean that being told actual facts about Obama's birth will sway them."

[Donald] Trump's message may be resonating with so many Republican voters simply because it represents the most blunt and unrelenting attack on Obama's "American-ness" that they have heard from a major Republican. In other words, it may not be the specifics of Obama's birth certificate and hospital records that excite them, it's the idea that someone so prominent is willing to stand up and take so much heat for saying, essentially, "Barack Obama is not one of us."

As a non-white president with ties to places like Kenya and Indonesia, he represents, for many, the fact that the American Century is over -- finally and completely. Because even if these people believe in their heart of hearts that they are not racist, or sexist, or homophobic, or xenophobic, they have decided that a country that embraced these sentiments was at the top of its game in parts of the 20th Century and that this is the country they want back -- a country where a non-white person with a non-traditional life story could not be president, a country in which only those who can "prove" they are "like us" are allowed to be hold the highest office in the land.

When reporters hold up copies of Obama's birth certificate only to be met by non-specific counterarguments from Trump and other Birthers, it is clear that the interlocutors are arguing past each other. Needless to say, when you are having an argument with someone, it's always useful to make sure you are actually in the same discussion.

The good news is that the bigots amongst us know they cannot directly argue their case and so they need devices like the birth certificate issue to give them credibility. The bad news is that when people won't say what they mean it confuses things significantly.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)

Birtherism, bullshit, and Donald Trump

By Michael J.W. Stickings

The leader of the Birthers, judging simply by celebrity status and media attention, isn't Jerome Corsi or Orly Taitz but rather, as you probably know, Donald Trump, who in his quest for ever more self-aggrandizing publicity, if not for the Republican presidential nomination, has been pushing the Birther lie with extreme prejudice in recent weeks.

In a way, it's become his political claim to fame, or rather his claim to political credibility on the right and with the Republican base, and with the 45 percent of Republicans who don't think Obama was born in the U.S. despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Needless to say, Trump doesn't have any evidence, but he's nonetheless continuing to tantalize not just Republicans but the media with his assertions of some terribly sinister conspiracy. He was at it again on Thursday:

Possibly-serious Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is giving few details about the investigation he claims to have launched in Hawaii to get to the bottom of where President Obama was born, but the business mogul told CNN Thursday Americans will be "very surprised" by what he has found.

"We're looking into it very, very strongly. At a certain point in time I'll be revealing some interesting things," Trump said on CNN's American Morning.

Trump first claimed earlier this month he had sent investigators to Obama's home state in an effort to find out if the president was indeed born there, as he says he was and several media organization's independent investigations have confirmed.

"I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they're finding," Trump told NBC then.

But Trump has since offered few details about the on-the-ground investigation and, in the interview with CNN Thursday, wouldn't specifically say if it had uncovered new details.

"You'll be very surprised," he said when asked by CNN's Ali Velshi if his investigators have found anything.

It's rather amusing that CNN describes him as "possibly-serious." I think that's actually giving him too much credibility, and too much legitimacy. But what's key here is that Trump isn't providing any details because there just aren't any details to provide. Saying he has investigators on the job is like O.J. saying he's trying to find the "real" killers. Sure, Trump may come up with something, something to advance a Birther conspiracy theory or another, but the way to keep the story going, the way to bring himself even more publicity and to please/appease the GOP's Birther base, is not to provide any new facts, let alone to bring closure to the story, but to keep the media guessing. Whatever you think of Trump, he's a savvy guy and he knows how to play the media. And that's just what he's doing.

At No More Mister Nice Blog, Steve M. explains what's going on:

This is what's going to happen to birtherism, I think: It's going to mutate. It's going to stop being just about whether the birth story is accurate; it's going to morph into a narrative in which an inaccessible document or two in Hawaii get lumped together with (I assume) a larger number of inaccessible documents in Indonesia and Kenya to create an impression (at least to wingnuts) of a president hiding secrets that are too horrible and evil to comprehend.

*****

Trump says, "I'll be revealing some interesting things." Drudge's "source close to the publisher" says, "Obama may learn things he didn't even know about himself!" I'll say it again: the plan is to turn this into A Conspiracy So Vast, an attempt to hide aspects of Obama's youth, in which the birth certificate plays a relatively small part. I'm not saying it'll work -- I'm just saying that's the scheme to keep this fresh and continue gulling the rubes (and, if they play it flawlessly, the mainstream media).

It's not really clear to me what Trump's endgame is. He surely isn't running, and wouldn't win if he did. Is he stupid enough to believe otherwise? And would he really want to open himself up to such scrutiny? Is is just about publicity? Maybe, but how is it beneficial to him as a celebrity businessman to be so blatantly partisan, not to mention to embrace the conspiracy theories of the crazy wing of the GOP?

I'm just not sure, but there seems to be little doubt that his massive ego is driving him, and something else he said on CNN reveals a lot about how he views himself in relation to everyone else. Discussing his net worth, and refuting Forbes magazine's claim that it's $2.7 billion, Trump said this:

I can tell you that's a very low number," Trump said of the Forbes estimate. "It's much more than that. And if I decide to run, which I very well may surprise people, but if I decide to run, I will give a net worth statement essentially. As you know, we have to fill out very detailed forms for the federal government. And I think people will be extremely impressed."

Yes, it's the money, stupid. Trump thinks that it's his wealth that impresses people, that what truly sets him apart from most everyone else is his money. It's like he thinks he can do no wrong because he has so much money. Forget how many times he's been bailed out, or how many of his enterprises have failed. He's a rich man, a richer man than you think, and that, he thinks, makes him better than you -- and it's what apparently gives him automatic political credibility and a shot at the presidency. In other words, he apparently thinks he's invulnerable, that nothing can bring him down, that anything he touches, including crazy conspiracy theories, turns to gold.

In this respect, he's like any of those disgraced CEOs who stole from shareholders and destroyed their companies, except that he's got a lust for the spotlight that far surpasses most and that the media, and especially the right-leaning business media, think he can do no wrong.

I'm not sure even this explains pushing Birtherism, but obviously Trump has made some sort of calculation that being, or at least presenting himself as, the driving force behind a lie advances his personal agenda. I'm sure his "investigation" will continue to excite the rubes in the GOP and the gullible fools in the media, but anything he says, like everything he has said so far, will be thick with bullshit.

Gai kakhen afenyam

By Distributorcap

It is bad enough my peeps have to deal with complete and total douchebags like Eric Cantor and Bill Kristol, but now...

Miss Blood Libel herself -- donning a very prominent Star of David.  Doesn't it look like she is completely stoned on LSD-laced matzoh balls or Xanax-filled haroses. 

On the Sarahnews Network, Miss Blood Libel rushed to the defense of the Trumptaur himself today:

"Well, I appreciate that the Donald wants to spend his resources in getting to the bottom of something that so interests him and many Americans, you know, more power to him," she said presumably referring to an indication by Trump last week that he has investigators on the ground in Hawaii searching for information on the president's birthplace.

Maybe Donald can investigate whether Sarah had a mikvah. Or if she eats cheeseburgers.

Cherem (חרם), is the highest censure in the Jewish community. It is the total exclusion of a person from the Jewish community. It is a form of shunning, and is similar to excommunication in the Catholic Church.

Sarah -- have a glass of Cherem on humanity.