Blue Eyed Blog
Posts tagged birthers
Take the Zero Tolerance Pledge
Apr 28th
I posted the following on my Facebook Wall recently:
NOTICE: I’m done playing nice with this birther BS. There are no “legitimate questions,” and there never were, about his citizenship. It’s racism. Don’t like it? I. DON’T. CARE. I won’t be nice about it any longer. I WILL call you out on it. Clear enough? Good.
Also, I don’t care if you’re offended by this. I’m deeply offended by the whole racist idiocy, so I’m offended first and I am not interested in your feelings on the matter. Not even a little bit.
Finally, he was an Illinois State senator. He was a United States Senator. He IS the duly elected President of the United States of America. He has earned, and deserves, respect. If you cannot properly respect him and the office of the President, then just shut your pie hole. But post your racist, disrespectful malarky on my wall and you WILL feel the burn.
And I mean it. I’m done with this disrespectful treatment of our President. You may not like him. You may not agree with him. That’s fine. This is America, and you are free to do that. I’ll be the first to admit that I disliked and disagreed with President Bush (both of them) and President Reagan. But no one ever asked to see their birth certificates. If Barack Hussein Obama’s name were Barry Smith, and he were white, no one would ask to see his birth certificate.
Let me say this again, as clearly as I can: There never were any legitimate questions about Barack Obama’s citizenship status. There still aren’t.
And I refuse to tolerate any more of this racist idiocy. I will call it out whenever and wherever I see it. I will not listen to it. I will not allow you to justify it with whatever clever rationalization you come up with today. I simply will not tolerate it any longer. Period. I will have a zero-tolerance policy for it. I will not support any politician that makes any of these coded statements about Barack Obama’s citizenship. I will not purchase goods or services from businesses that advertise on programs like “The Apprentice” by the new Prince of the Birthers McDonald Trump. I will contact those advertisers and tell them I am boycotting them, and why.
It must end. This is the 21st Century. There is no place in this country any longer for racism — either overt or covert. It must end.
I encourage you all to “sign” this zero tolerance by either leaving a comment or posting the link to this post to your Facebook page or tweeting this post. Any or all of those things. And then follow through. Don’t stand for it. Yes, you may alienate family or friends. You may have angry arguments with people. But unless we each stand up to stop this, the festering cancer of racism will continue to live on. It only lives because it is allowed to live. Because somewhere someone does not speak up against it. No, I am not going to end racism. Neither are you. Not by myself. Not by yourself. But together we can. Yes we can.
What’s a Long-Form Birth Certificate? Who Cares!
Mar 11th
Ok, so this would be even funnier if it weren’t so pathetic. Ok, so that’s not true. It’s hard to imagine how this could be much funnier. Seriously.
Last month, Tennessee state Sen. Mae Beavers introduced SB 1091, a bill that would require presidential candidates to present a long-form birth certificate in order to qualify for the ballot in the Volunteer State.
…
It’s a far-fetched goal, and it turns out that Beavers, who recently discussed her bill on Reality Check, a radio show devoted to debunking birther legislation, still has some research to do. From the transcript:
RC: What are the specific requirements in the bill?
MB: That they have to have the long form birth certificate.
RC: What is the long form birth certificate?
MB: Now, you’re asking me to get into a lot of things that I haven’t really looked into yet.
The host then asked the obvious follow-up: why put a term into the bill, if you don’t know what it means? Beavers responded, “Well, we are following some of the bills that have been filed in lots of other states, and you know how it is, you file your bill and, you know, you prepare before you go to committee.”
File first, understand later?
You see what they did there? This poor Ms. Beaver — I suspect an actual beaver would make a better State Senator, but without meeting the specific beaver, it’s hard to say just how much better — proposes requiring something be produced when she doesn’t even know what that thing is. Seriously. Why not require all candidates for President to present a valid flibgibberty? Just because you don’t know what it is isn’t really a reason not to require one, is it? Or maybe it is.
Beavers went on to state more clearly, “I’m not entirely sure what long form means.” She seemed genuinely surprised by the news that not all states even print long-form birth certificates anymore. “I only know about Tennessee,” she explained.
So she only knows about Tennessee. But does she know what kind of Birth Certificate Tennessee prints out for you? I hope that my readers know that, for the most part, these birthers don’t really know what they mean by a “long form” birth certificate. I think what they really mean is one that either says “Kenya” on it somewhere, or doesn’t say “Barack Hussein Obama” on it. Other than that, they all seem pretty clueless about what they are actually looking for.
Alabama state Sen. Gerald Allen borrowed his own anti-Sharia bill from Wikipedia, and when asked by a reporter what Sharia actually is, said, “I don’t have my file in front of me.” Texas state Rep. Leo Berman, who introduced both an anti-Sharia bill and a birther bill, recently explained that he got most of his political information on YouTube because “YouTubes are infallible.”
(Via Birther Bill Author: What’s a Long-Form Birth Certificate? | Mother Jones.)
Well, at least the Beav isn’t alone in proposing outrageously silly and ill-thought-out and really dumb legislation that they don’t understand.
You Tubes are infallible. And all this time we thought that was the Pope. Silly us. Who votes for these people?
UPDATE: Found this posted on Facebook and thought (so I’m already pretty far ahead of the Beav there) that the states might as well go all-out and require one of these too:
I mean, why not, right?
