On to The Next One…

Barack Obama finally took the completely unnecessary and pointless step of releasing his birth certificate.  It’s now proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that President Obama is, in fact, a US citizen.  Yep, cancel the impeachment hearings, he’s really our president.  The next step is to find out what the next rationale the lunatic fringe will use to try to delegitimize the president.

The uproar over the president’s citizenship raged on for more than two years with little sign of it ending.  First, Orly Taitz, a woman who herself is not a natural born citizen, led the battle.  For some reason the national media insisted on giving this woman a forum to rant about the president.  After some wiser voices spoke out against questioning Obama’s citizenship the birther talk quieted somewhat.  (How crazily anti-Obama do you have to be for Michele Bachmann to disagree with you?) 

But the issue never really went away.  It just stayed just below the media radar and bubbled up when the talking heads go bored thereby giving the issue continued life.  Then Donald Trump threatened to run for president (why I didn’t include him in Running of the Elephants I’ll never understand.  Talk about comedy!  Run, Donald, run!)

Trump, in his ever expanding efforts to get even more attention, built his campaign on questioning Obama’s citizenship and the suddenly birthers had a new champion, an even more powerful champion.  Even as other Republicans tried to pull the issue of Obama’s birth certificate off the table, Trump marched on trumpeting his efforts to find the truth of Obama’s birth record; sort of like O.J. Simpson finding the “real” killers.

But this is not about Donald Trump.  It’s really about people who will find any way to attempt to prove that our rightfully and legally elected president is somehow not one of us.  Those who are honest with themselves know what this was really all about.  Gasp!  The president is a black man!  What else could explain the level and persistence of the attacks he faces?

I’m guessing ever since George Washington took the oath of office every president has dealt with fringe groups that have tried to discredit the president somehow.  The attacks on Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were often so personal that I cringed.  But those attacks were largely by agenda driven fringe groups.  There’s something more insidious and mainstream about the attacks Obama has faced in comparison to his predecessors.  President Obama has been called a socialist, pictured as the Joker from Batman, depicted as Hitler, called a monkey and so much more.  Obama gets verbally assaulted more times before 9 am then most presidents do all day. 

By advancing the idea that Obama is different and not one of us and therefore not worthy to be president the lunatic fringe has exposed their true racist nature.  They’re not racist because they disagree with the president politically; by all means feel free to challenge his ideas and political positions.  That’s the point of a democracy.  Their obvious racism comes into play when you realize the main reasons they challenge Obama’s right to be president is because they view him as different and somehow un-American.

Releasing his birth certificate has certainly removed one issue from the lunatic fringe’s arsenal, but that doesn’t mean they’re going away.  There’ll just be some new oddball issue that, in their minds, is a perfectly reasonable excuse for questioning the president’s legitimacy.  Truthfully the lunatic fringe and their mainstream supporters are the ones who are different and not like us.