The Obama Haters' Next Move - Democratic Underground

babylonsister

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Mon Jul-20-09 09:52 AM
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The Obama Haters' Next Move

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-07-20/the-obama-haters-next-move/full/

The Obama Haters' Next Move

by John Avlon

Crackpot anti-Obama conspiracy theorists now include congressmen, a former GOP presidential candidate and an Army major. John Avlon on the "Birthers" attempts to pass federal legislation, and their new claims 170 soldiers will refuse to serve the president.

Last week, a U.S. Army major named Stefan Frederick Cook made news when he refused deployment to Afghanistan on the grounds that President Barack Obama might not be a natural-born citizen and therefore is constitutionally ineligible to give orders as commander in chief. Now Cook’s lawyer says she has 170 more soldiers willing to file similar protests against the president.

Welcome to the world of the “Birthers”—right-wing conspiracy theorists committed to undoing the 2008 presidential election by trying to prove that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. The movement is evidence that Obama Derangement Syndrome is going viral from the far right, proliferating beyond fringe-festival Internet sites. It’s in danger of a quiet mainstreaming along partisan lines—reaching into talk radio, cable news, the armed services, and even the halls of Congress.

The 170 number thrown out by Cook’s lawyer has the feel of Joe McCarthy’s claim that he had a list of 205 communists working in Harry Truman’s State Department—i.e. pseudo-specific, intentionally inflammatory, and ultimately bogus. But what’s not in question is the nine Republican congressmen who have co-sponsored a bill that, in response to this much-debunked conspiracy theory, would require presidential campaigns to provide “a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate.”

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It’s the “usurper” line that ties the whole deranged tale together. Since the 2008 campaign, the far right has ginned up a steady stream of Internet rumors and rhetoric that are variations on the idea that Obama is fundamentally un-American. These range from “Obama is the Antichrist” emails passed on by people, including a South Carolina mayor, to the “Obama is a Manchurian candidate” theories posited by WorldNet Daily, among others. The underlying theme is not just paranoid politics, where a center-left president is called a socialist and then communist, but also discomfort with the idea of an African-American president—especially one who emerged from obscurity so quickly that there must be a sinister conspiracy at work.

All this might be laughable, if there weren’t deadly serious hyper-partisan hatred behind it all. There is plenty to debate over the administration’s policies, but Obama Derangement Syndrome is not healthy for our democracy—it is pathological hatred of the president posing as patriotism.