Nutty ‘birthers’ Democrat roots
He’s “a clown,” the New York Times Nicholas Kristoff tells us, speaking of — who else? — Donald Trump, of course.
Clown? Sounds almost reassuring.
According to some of Kristoff’s colleagues at the Times, Trump’s way worse than a clown.
Paul Krugman says Trump’s “a charlatan and a crank.”
No. no, no! Much, much worse than that, other voices at the Times insist. He’s: — “A reckless bully.” — “The ultimate mountebank.”
— “An absurdist candidate.”
— “The darling of the wing nuts.”
— “The candidate of the nativist hallucinators.”
Nope, you Times guys are all wide of the mark, says a Michael Tomasky of the web Daily Beast.
You wanna know what Trump is? He’s the equivalent of “cyanide,” says Tomasky. That’s right, the equivalent of a deadly, poisonous substance.
Well now, if we’re gonna have a mass media freakout, a hysteria fest, a Cry Wolf contest, make way for the gold medalist of alarmism.
The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen says the Trump menace has its roots in the contaminated soil of the Third Reich.
Yes! Third Reich! Hitler, seig heil, death camps, all that.
What we seem to have on our hands in a Donald Trump is nothing less than a wannabe Fuhrer, in Cohen’s view.
If you let your imagination run loose, you can almost hear the goosestepping, jackbooted Tea Party ranks clomp-clompclomping up Pennsylvania Avenue toward Capitol Hill, headed for the inaugural festivities. Singing “Banners High” as they march. Just like the Aryan Ubermenschen flocking to the Berlin Sportspalast to hear der Reichskanzler orate!
Only now at this distant remove does Cohen let us in on his dire insight. Only now, after Trump has secured the GOP nomination and is deep into the general election campaign.
It seems a bit like waiting to tell us that Hitler was a bad guy until after his Lebensraum, after his Kristallnacht, after his Anschlus and Sudetenland and Poland and France and Netherlands.
Now you tell us, Richard — after all these years Trump has been on TV and in the papers, after all his years of being a celebrity. Now you tell us it’s time to go to DEFCON 1 on the guy.
Perhaps it was the way Hillary Clinton suddenly started sinking it the polls — glub, glub, glub — that finally tripped Cohen’s and others’ media alarm systems.
In any event, according to the chill wind of anxiety blowing through the shivering ranks of journalistic orthodoxy, the tipoff to the menacing Trump scourge is now said to have been the “racist Birtherism” episode.
Birtherism, you’ll recall, was the baseless claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore was constitutionally ineligible to be President.
Trump is credited with — not entirely accurately — being the Father of Birtherism. And Birtherism is racist to its rotten, evil core, the alarmists explain.
This, they further explain, points to why Trump yearns to start herding minorities of various faiths and ethnicities in the direction of the boxcars waiting along the rail sidings.
There are some logical gaps in this insight, and a misfiring brain synapse or two may help you bridge them.
First, why is Birtherism racist per se? Goofy, yes. Crackpot, yes. Nutty, yes again. But racist? Reichstyle racist? How, exactly, so?
Despite this complicating question, the highminded progressive community proceeds undeterred. It slaps down the Birther race card with the triumphant glee of a poker player who’s drawn into an ace-high royal flush.
Aha! That ol’ devil racism again.
In time, maybe the high-minded progressive community will further explicate the racism angle, so that even dumb-ass Deplorables can grasp it.
Meanwhile, there are other devils lurking in the Birther details.
Trump certainly became the impresario of Birther silliness. And in doing so he certainly exposed himself as a blustering boob when his quest to expose Obama’s foreign roots proved to be a fool’s errand.
But the Father of Birtherism looniness? Maybe not quite. A stronger paternity case can be lodged against others, starting with one Philip J. Berg.
A Lafayette Hill, Pa., lawyer, Berg filed suit in federal court in 2008, challenging Obama’s eligibility to serve as President owing to his alleged foreign place of birth.
The one interesting fact in this regard about Berg was his political affiliation: DEMOCRAT! And not just any Democrat. Ex-chairman of the Montgomery County,Pa., Democratic Party.
Berg’s Birther case was dismissed at the district court level. But the Democrat barrister tenaciously pursued the case on appeal. He sought a writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court. The high court declined to oblige him and hear his case. (The litigious Berg was later disbarred for reasons not related to his frivolous Birther lawsuit.)
Berg’s story is that he was egged on in the Birther quest by another DEMOCRAT, a Texas precinct captain named Linda Starr, a rabid supporter of Hillary Clinton and an equally rabid foe of Barack Obama.
So, it might be said that Starr is the Mother of Birtherism. It might be said, therefor, that loony anti-Obama Birtherism has a complete, 100 percent DEMOCRATIC lineage.
Nor is this quite the end of the saga of Birtherism’s perhaps not-so-proud, partisan pedigree.
The McClatchy newspaper chain reports that it was urged to take up the Birther case against Obama by Hillary Clinton’s long-time, loyal political pit bull, Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal, back in 2008.
The newspaper chain even sent a reporter to Kenya to sniff around and concluded that Blumenthal’s Birther tip was a crock.
So, then, you could go one step further and venture to say that Sid Blumenthal, Democrat operative, notorious political saboteur for the Clintons, is the Godfather of Birtherism.
Nor is that all. Then there’s the Birther contributions of yet another veteran political operative of the Clintons, Mark Penn.
In a 2007 Clinton campaign strategy memo, Penn declared that Obama is “not, at his center, fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values.” Penn’s recommendation: Target Obama’s “lack of American roots.”
So maybe Penn — a, ahem, DEMOCRAT — could be dubbed the obstetrician who delivered Birtherism.
Perhaps it was a part of the Penn strategy that a photo was circulated showing Obama all decked out in native Kenyan garb during a trip to Africa. A resentful Obama blamed the Clinton campaign for circulating the photo as a “smear.”
Now, summoning a level of sanctimony that you might say — if not for gender — speaks of brass-balls chutzpah, Hillary Clinton is demanding that Trump apologize to Obama for his racist Birther dissing of our first African-American President.
To which Trump could reply with a polite, deferential bow: “After you, Madam Secretary.”