For obvious SXSW-related reasons, blogging might be patchy this week from me. But I have a couple of items that are seemingly unrelated, but I suspect point to a common theme, which is the central nature of wingnuttery to the Republican party, and probably why it means we can’t write them off forever.
Rep. Bill Posey, a freshman Republican from Florida, is now putting forward a bill that should be good news for a particular demographic that cares a whole lot about their issue: Those folks out there who insist that President Obama hasn’t offered a birth certificate to prove he’s a natural-born U.S. citizen.
CNN reports that Posey has submitted a bill to require all presidential candidates to submit a birth certificate—which Posey says is needed in order to remove this issue as a reason to question any president’s legitimacy.
Naturally, he’s not saying that Obama wasn’t born in the U.S.. Oh no! Concern troll is concerned.
“Opponents of President Bush used the 2000 election results and the court decisions to question the legitimacy of President Bush to serve as President,” Posey said in a statement. “Opponents of President Obama are raising the birth certificate issue as a means of questioning his eligibility to serve as president. Neither of these situations are healthy for our Republic.”
Pitch perfect wingnuttery—-false equivalences, lying about your intentions, fantasist leanings, and no doubt a silly belief that he’s clever to think of this, because government isn’t for governing, it’s for waging scorched earth political warfare. If all Congress ever did was impeach Bill Clinton, for instance, that would be ideal. And we all know that if it wasn’t the birth certificate thing, it would just be something else.
It would be easy to laugh this stuff off, but the problem is that Congress did impeach Bill Clinton for getting a blow job. It’s not impossible for Republicans to use their sexual and racial obsessions—-as petty and stupid as they absolutely are—-to cause massive damage to the country.
Steve Waldman is one of those religious types that’s always concern trolling the Democrats about how we need to embrace right wing pro-patriarchal nuttery, because of course right wing nuts have a concern for “life that has absolutely nothing to do with misogyny or a love of male dominance. Which is totally why he wrote this about Bristol Palin (hat tip):
1) What is the obligation of a couple to try to make a marriage or a relationship work? I’m dying to know: did Sarah Palin require that they get marriage counseling before breaking up?
2) If a mother chooses to carry a baby to term, under what circumstances should she consider putting him up for adoption?
Gotta love the insinuation that women cannot be trusted to raise children without male supervision. But this sort of sentiment is exactly why we have zombie Republicanism.* Right now, the country is having a moment of sanity brought on by a severe economic crisis. But the insecurities that lay under these racist and sexist prejudices are merely napping and will come roaring out to the front again. Because while this stuff about Bristol Palin and Obama’s birth certificate is silly stuff, it’s all symbolic of issues that cut close to home about identity and power, and that stuff is far from dead, but only napping.
*Calm yourselves. I know Waldman isn’t a Republican, but he is one of those who finds the patriarchal religious bloviating of the Republicans to be compelling.