FREAK(S) OF THE WEEK: The anti-Obama Birthers

This past week was so chock full o’ freaks that it was all I could do to keep up with all the freakiness. But by far, the biggest freaks were the so-called Birthers. These are the people on the far right fringe of the Republican Party who believe – despite all evidence to the contrary – that Barack Obama is not an American citizen.

This anti-Obama talk started during last year’s campaign, promoted by the same conservatives who cheered Sarah Palin when she said Obama was “paling around with terrorists.”

Despite making public the documents showing that Obama was indeed born in Hawaii – which, if you recall, is a state – the Birthers roared back with a vengeance at the same time Obama is promoting those “socialist” health care reforms. (Can you say “diversionary tactic”? I knew that you could.)

The rebirth of the Birthers occurred during a recent town hall meeting held by moderate Republican Congressman Mike Castle of Delaware. An angry citizen – reminiscent of the elderly woman who insisted to John McCain that Obama is an Arab – stood up waving around an American flag and her own birth certificate, demanding to see Obama’s.

“He is not an American citizen. He is a citizen of Kenya,” she shrieked, adding that her father fought in World War II (because, you know, that’s relevant). “I don’t want this flag to change. I want my country back,” she added while the audience cheered and whistled in approval. When Castle said that Obama is indeed an American citizen, he was booed. (See for yourself at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwgzYkTDsmQ.)

The movement gained more traction last week when California Congressman John Campbell went on MSNBC’s “Hardball” to promote his bill requiring presidential candidates to show copies of their birth certificates.

This interview didn’t go well for Campbell, with host Chris Matthews pressing him on whether or not he thought Obama was an American citizen. Campbell finally said, “As far as I know, yes.”

Still, the bill feeds the Birthers, whose ranks go as high as CNN’s Lou Dobbs and whose cause has been taken up by Dick Cheney daughter Liz.

What makes absolutely no sense is that the Birthers keep demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate when it’s already out there as part of the public record. So, the conversation goes something like this:

Crazy Birther: I want to see Obama’s birth certificate!

Sane person: OK, here it is.

Crazy Birther: But I want to see Obama’s birth certificate!

Sane person: I just showed it to you.

Crazy Birther: Yeah, but I want to see Obama’s birth certificate!

And on and on.

Funny how these crazy right-wingers never made an issue of any other politician’s status as an American citizen. So what’s going on?

Here it is, and it’s disgusting. There are Americans who just can’t accept, won’t accept, that a black man is president of the United States. Worse than that, he’s a black man with the “un-American” name Barack Hussein Obama. He was born in Hawaii (barely a state, although all of a sudden Alaska is the most American of states), and he lived part of his childhood in Indonesia. Given all that, Obama is seen by some as less than a real, red-blooded American.

During the campaign, Palin talked about how some places in the United States were more American than others. This Birthers movement is part of the fallout from that kind of divisive rhetoric.

It’s racist, it’s ugly, and it’s an evil eating away at the heart of the nation.