“Ideological Birtherism”

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.

—Lee Atwater, Reagan administration official & GOP political consultant, on the Southern Strategy

Is “birth certificate” the new “nigger”? Could be. There are politicians who dabble in outright birtherism, but it’s become something of an embarrassment.

Just as tobacco juice-drooling yahoos once shamed “mainstream” politicians into dealing in dog-whistles rather than serving their racism straight-up, the sheer wackiness of people like Orly Taitz and Tom Tancredo have prompted the mainstream GOP to adopt a more genteel method to “otherize” the president in particular and the Democratic party in general: ideological birtherism.

It’s nothing new. Sarah Palin has been beating the ideological birther drum incessantly for a couple of years now. But whereas Palin winks and simpers about “real America” and the “heartland” vs. “elites” to portray herself as the legitimate guardian of American values, Newt Gingrich framed his attack in unusually stark terms after yesterday’s premiere of his 9/11 death porn film, America at Risk:

“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”

Gingrich bases his portrayal of Obama as a Manchurian foreigner programmed by his Kenyan father to wreak Africa’s revenge for Western colonialism on an article in Forbes by Dinesh D’Souza. D’Souza’s argument was given its proper name—ideological birtherism—and utterly destroyed by Daniel Larison here.

But pointing out that ideological birtherism is wholly based on lies won’t deter its champions from using it as a political strategy. Why? Because that’s all they’ve got.

Aimai over at No More Mr. Nice Blog summarized it perfectly in comments here:

The upper management of the right wing have grasped that they can only stay in power, and loot the treasury and gut regulations, as long as the voters are utterly stupified by rage and depression.  Any honest evaluation of our situation, any honest attempt to dig us out of Bush’s hole, would result in a permanent loss to the Republican party. All that’s left is lies, anger, and destruction. The right isn’t choosing “rule or ruin” because they like it (although they do) but because its the only choice left to them. 

Bingo. The only remaining question is whether or not it will work.

Posted by Betty Cracker on 09/12/10 at 08:39 AM • Permalink

Curse you, Betty—Gingrich and D’Souza had finally incited me to go after the “African Colonial” meme, which has been providing a welcome cover for racism on wingnut forums since it surfaced in June in this American Thinker piece by L. E. Ikenga:

My friends, despite what CNN and the rest are telling you, Barack Obama is nothing more than an old school African Colonial who is on his way to turning this country into one of the developing nations that you learn about on the National Geographic Channel.

Rush and Savage have both floated the concept on their shows, as has arch-radio-bigot Billy Cunningham and Pittsburgh’s C-List Hate-Pixie Jim Quinn.

The “intellectual rationale” that frames Obama’s policies as intentional revenge for his grandfather’s death and the White Rape of Kenya is identical to the cause-effect logic which leads to the conclusion that all Latinos are “hot-blooded” and adult frogs are spontaneously created from mud.

In fact, the entire premise is nothing more than a half-assed, retrofit “academic” justification for bandying the phrase “African Colonial”—which is superficially clinical, yet semantically indistinguishable from “Alien, Socialist, White-Hating Nigger.”

At first, I equated “African Colonial” with the polite bigotry of saying “Nigra” or “Colored” or “Hottentot.” But Gingrich and D’Souza have seized on it as the same sort of scientific, empirical foundation of Niggerism that used to be couched in mathematical tables of comparative racial brain-size and nose-flatness.

We’ll all known when zipperunga’s “africanization of the liberal worker bee” is done when the right stops attacking Alinsky (who worked his way into Newt’s denunciation of Obama) and they start attacking Obama’s real master: Franz Fanon. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon

aimai
(Oh, and thanks for the kind words).

That photo of Newt and - who is that, wife #4? mistress #5? I’ve lost track - makes me uneasy.  It reminds me of this photo, and not in a good way.  That linked photo is a still frame from a funny animation, while that pic of the Stepfordwhatever standing next to Newt makes me reflexively cross my legs and cover my crotch.

Well said. Newt is no historian or he would have know the Luo were not a part of the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya.  That’s why I say Newt - a slimy idiot with a PHD

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