Obama Conspiracy Theories

Dr. Conspiracy

If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of this page, you’ll see two columns of web sites, one headed “The Good” and one headed “The Bad” and a blank space to the right. That blank space may one day hold the third category of web sites, “The Ugly.”

On a web page, often less is more. Put too much, and the visitor sees nothing. Put a few choice items on the page, and the visitor sees everything. I don’t want to be encyclopedic with these lists, but if I missed something obvious, comment on it. I’m still puzzling what to put in the Ugly column.

I wrote on the topic of Constitutional Fundamentalism a few weeks ago, about how some Tea Party members carry around a pocket copy of the United States Constitution as a sort of talisman. I must confess that until recently it had been a very long time since I read the Constitution all together at one sitting. It’s a rather interesting but quirky document for the lay person.

I don’t know the precise motivation, but the American Civil Liberties Union (ALCU) recently has started mass mailing pocket copies of the Constitution also. (I carry an electronic copy on my iPhone.)

I see “just read the Constitution” often in comments here as a justification for something that is not in the Constitution. I think perhaps some of them should “just read the Constitution.”

Listening to the current argument about the construction of an Islamic community center, and the heat President Obama has taken over it, reminds me that in the popular mind the Constitution says to some folks what they want to hear. It says that speech is free so long as the speech is agreeable. It says that the President must have two citizen parents because they don’t like Obama and Obama doesn’t have two US citizen parents. The birthers, and the Tea Partiers adopt the trappings of patriotism but deny the substance of it as defined in the Constitution.

Liberals are not immune from reading their own prejudices into the Constitution either. Many liberals quit the ACLU in 1978 when it supported a neo-Nazi group’s right to march in a Jewish neighborhood in Skokie, Illinois.

Dr. Conspiracy

This article is in response to an anonymous person claiming to be a veteran and a US citizen, whose comment was published by Armand C. Hale at the RenewAmerica web site. (Readers may want to read the original first.)

I too am an American citizen and the child of natural born American citizens. Like you, I lead an insular early life, never going far outside my home town, remaining largely ignorant of other places, other religions and other cultures. I was taught that black people (and that wasn’t the word I heard) were lazy, stupid and smelled bad. But unlike you, I got over it.

One of the good things I did learn was integrity, and integrity not only involves telling the truth, but doing the diligence necessary to know what the truth is. Sadly you didn’t do that diligence.

You say that you had to show a certified copy of your birth certificate or passport to get a Federal job. Do you really believe that President Obama’s birth certificate wasn’t shown when he got his passport as a child? Do you honestly believe he didn’t have to show proof of  citizenship when he applied for a Social Security card? President Obama even put a copy of his certified birth certificate on the Internet, the first presidential candidate in history to do so, yet you seem offended because you imagine that President Obama got special treatment. But that’s only in your imagination, and I call such a thing “prejudice.”

In your article you list, or suggest a number of patently false things about President Obama. You demand that Obama be the first president in history to “present to the American public, irrefutable proof of [his] citizenship.”

Only someone who is closing his eyes to the evidence would have any doubts, and only someone deeply prejudiced would demand a higher level of proof from President Obama than from his 43 42 white predecessors.

I would say that I honor you for your military service, but I haven’t seen any irrefutable proof that you ever served.

Dr. Conspiracy

Back in January of 2009, when the paint on Obama Conspiracy Theories was barely dry, I wrote an article called “The Audacity of Blog” that explained how I got here. I can condense that experience, and my continuing participation here in one simple idea:

Irrational thinking bugs the hell out of me

The blog remains after all this time

• To entertain a little
• To inform and debunk
• To provide a social network for people interested in the topic
• To provide a crucible where ideas are tested

So that’s why I am here. Why are you here?

I haven’t had time to explore the Veterans Today web site, but on a couple of occasions they have republished articles I found interesting, including one posted yesterday called: The Transformation of the American Conservative Movement into Fascism.

Crusading to restore a holy social order, Tea Partiers have promoted disorder. Claiming to protect democracy, they smashed windows of elected representatives